What's in a name?
Abhishek Singh, definitely not the first of my name
As I transition from a 20s kid into my 30s, my social media feed has changed a lot.
Earlier it used to be about how to get things done, being carefree and how the world is an oyster. Now it is about people my age getting a back pain because they slept in the wrong posture. Even the finance ones I get are about getting the retirement corpus in place before it is too late.
I’m okay with all this. I’m good with not letting social media content affect me like it does to some folks. I’ve learnt to use caffeine to balance out such activities. Nothing really affects me except - the posts where the new parents do a double PhD just to name their kids.
I get that new parents are very involved with their kids. They take everything very seriously. From researching every ingredient in the baby’s talcum powder to tracing the farm from which the milk has been procured. And that is nice.
I see kids around me whose names are so intricate - Anaya, Ahana, Hridaan, Ayaan and likewise. These unique names got me thinking how naming the kids has changed over time.
When my parents were thinking of a name for me, my elder brother suggested a name that is now engraved in my government records. This name was the same as one of the kids in his class. This is a cute little story. Though I was not prepared for the fun that was about to unfold in front of me.
Full disclaimer - I absolutely love my name. However, the interesting part about this name ‘Abhishek’ is its commonality.
I’m calling it interesting and not good or bad at this point. You decide and let me know once you’ve read the whole thing.
Boy O boy, I’m 30 now and I’ve so many stories around this. I feel I can do a refresher on this topic every year.
I’ve never been the only Abhishek in my class. Though I’ve seen single Pooja, Shubham and even Rahul in a class / group. Up until my graduation I was never the only Abhishek in the class. Forget class, my friend’s circle in my undergrad had 2 Abhisheks in a group of 8.
I thought let’s go for masters. Maybe there I’ll be the only one. I got into a college which had a batch of only 35 students from roughly 11 states in India. Great diversity right? Except there was again one more person with my name.
I do not like humans whose email ID is firstname.lastname@gmail.com! This is an out worldly privilege no one is aware of.
I once couldn’t create an account on a coding platform because my creativity ran out before I could find a sane username which was not already taken.
On the second day of my undergrad, one of my batchmate (who I hadn’t met before) called me with my name. I was surprised about him knowing my name on the second day itself! Was I that popular?
Before I could ride on this imaginary high of being famous, he threw a statistic at me which still lives rent free in my head.
Nah, I don’t know you. I just randomly call out Abhishek and it works 1 out of 3 times.
When my therapist told me that I’ve ‘Identity crises’ I initially thought about this multiverse of madness my name has. But that wasn’t true.
This name saga continued when I entered the corporate world as well. In my first company I was the 49th Abhishek when I joined. When I exited, total number of Abhishek had risen to 71. A growth of ~45% over a period of roughly 5 years.
(Yes, every year I tracked the total number of Abhisheks in the company. Weird. I know!)
Had this been a financial product it would’ve outpaced many fixed deposit schemes. Pretty sure Moody’s or CRISIL would give this a AAA stable rating as well.
This story however has a happy ending. The current organization that I work with gave me this outstanding and rare opportunity of being the only person with my name. I was so happy with this that I mentioned this stat in the introduction during my first All Hands meeting. Some laughed, a few understood, many couldn’t relate but only I could appreciate the feeling of having an email ID without any nuclear passcodes or cryptic symbols to make it unique.
There are still a lot of anecdotes left which can support my argument. But let’s just keep them for another time. I believe now you probably know that there’s a lot in a name and maybe Shakespeare wasn’t that wise after all.
Now that you know my story, please help me validate my point with this small survey xD
Hahaha, I have 7 Abhisheks in my contact. And the way people are naming their kids, I guess in future, Karan and Adityas would be next Abhishek :D
Haha, as a fellow Abhishek, I totally get it! I couldn't use my name as a username on almost all sites/games so I eventually just gave up and accepted my fate, loved reading it and will definitely share with other Abhsihek's in my friend circle since we all suffer together in this struggle.