We all have some "primary keys" associated with ourselves commonly known as IDs. Be it any part of our lives, we are almost always identified by some notation other than our "officially announced" name. Right at the time of birth, a nurse comes and assign us a special "hospital record number" even before parents assign a name to our identity. The government offices recognize us by our birth certificate number and parents call us by nickname apart from the name they would like to release for 'public'. Soon, other funny names start getting added to our existence. Enter a nursery/kindergarten school, the school would assign us a school ID and in every grade, a roll number would identify us during attendance, examinations and what not. These roll numbers would get reshuffled based on the insertion and deletions from the previous grade's attendance list. Our friends tease us by a different name and the board examination "hall ticket" gives us another "number" identity. Get a telephone connection, another 10 digit number gets added to our list of IDs by which the world know us. Get admission in a college, seniors assign you a new name and you have another identification associated with you. College administration accounts know you by a college ID and your friends tease you by a different "key". Make an email account, a login ID has to be chosen adding up to the long list that we would have maintained till now ..... and the list goes on .....
This is the story with all of us, and of course with me too. Everywhere I go, I get a new identification, in some form or the other. Although I do not remember all the weird identifications I have been assigned but I surely want to mention all the ones which I remember. My mom tells me that I was so small in size at my birth that they started calling me by the name "chotu" even before I was "officially" assigned a name to be used in my transcripts. The first "to be official" name my father gave me was "Amit" but due to some family controversies, they had to change it to "Sachin" which was the 2nd and final assignment from their side. Poeple kept calling me "chotu" till I was in 6th grade after which my mother insisted that nobody should call me by that name otherwise it would be difficult to get rid of the habit if people kept calling me by the same name beyond a certain "soft threshold" ( in terms of years) in my age. She didn't want people to call me "chotu" in front of everybody around, outside the family circle. Slowly the sound of "chotu" went on becoming more and more unfamiliar to my ears. Surprisingly my "shop tauji" (a really sweet person who works at our shop right from his childhood and we all call him tauji out of respect) still calls me by that name and I really like to hear it from his mouth. Sometimes these things make you remember of the sweet moments in your life which tend to diminish in mind with time.
I grew up in age and proceeded in school grades appending to the list of my friends and hence, to a certain extent, the names by which I was known among them. Out of all of those names, the most popular I remember is "Sachu", a modification of my real name. I don't know how people came out with this name but it became popular very quickly among most of my schoolmates (including girls :D) who started calling me (and still they do) by this name. I made my first email account when I was in grade 11 and that was the first time when I had to search for an identification for my own self. I really found it very hard and it was the first time I appreciated the effort people put in when they came out with something to associate me with. My first email ID was on hotmail.com and tried hell lot of different ids, but most of them either didn't pleased my mind or the ones which pleased, unfortunately, were not available. I finally managed to find an id for myself "sachin_ag25", sachin came from my first name, "ag" came from the first two characters of my last name and 25 came from my birthdate 25 May, a nice potpourri of my various other identities merged into one. I don't know why I liked the combination so much that today I have a yahoo account by the same ID and "25" in all my unofficial email IDs.
My undergrad life (at IIIT) gave me many weird identifications. The first of them was "sagarwal1_02". Lets see how this weird combination of letters, numbers and symbol was assigned to my name in official documents. 's' came from the first character of my first name, 'agarwal' came in from my last name as a whole, '1' was assigned to me using the fact that there were 3 "s. agarwals" in my batch and all of them had to be assigned different IDS, so they decided to number them which I still find nasty to be dome to someone's name. Finally '_02' came from my college entrance year 2002. Days passed and I made many new friends. One of them, who also came out to be my gf in later years, gave me the name "Sachi" but it was only among two of us, although I really later put it as my nickname in my undergrad webpage as I (and I believe she too) liked it. I re-heard the name "Sachu" during my college years but that was only for a short while. Recently I came to know that I was also known as "lalaji" in my undergrad and it was surprising to me because I myself never heard that name when I was there in college. God alone knows how did people came out with that name for me.
Then came my graduate life. I came to US for Masters at CMU. By this time I already knew what CMU would do first, assign me a new primary key. My id here is "sachina". If we keep the normal syllables of a word in mind and from the world knowledge we have about names, this id could easily be interpreted as a girl's id and its no surprise that many people have actually confused my gender (they were not acquainted with the Indian style names and so didn't know that "sachin" is actually a guy's name). My dear roommates make fun by calling me "IGSA president".
Although this paragraph is not "actually" related to this post but I would like to throw light on my blog link. You might have noticed "palsa" in http://palsa.blogspot.com. This was also the name of the first project I did with my sweety in undergrad. The first three letters come from her first name and the last two words from my first name and the wikipedia entry for this word is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palsa.
This is the story with all of us, and of course with me too. Everywhere I go, I get a new identification, in some form or the other. Although I do not remember all the weird identifications I have been assigned but I surely want to mention all the ones which I remember. My mom tells me that I was so small in size at my birth that they started calling me by the name "chotu" even before I was "officially" assigned a name to be used in my transcripts. The first "to be official" name my father gave me was "Amit" but due to some family controversies, they had to change it to "Sachin" which was the 2nd and final assignment from their side. Poeple kept calling me "chotu" till I was in 6th grade after which my mother insisted that nobody should call me by that name otherwise it would be difficult to get rid of the habit if people kept calling me by the same name beyond a certain "soft threshold" ( in terms of years) in my age. She didn't want people to call me "chotu" in front of everybody around, outside the family circle. Slowly the sound of "chotu" went on becoming more and more unfamiliar to my ears. Surprisingly my "shop tauji" (a really sweet person who works at our shop right from his childhood and we all call him tauji out of respect) still calls me by that name and I really like to hear it from his mouth. Sometimes these things make you remember of the sweet moments in your life which tend to diminish in mind with time.
I grew up in age and proceeded in school grades appending to the list of my friends and hence, to a certain extent, the names by which I was known among them. Out of all of those names, the most popular I remember is "Sachu", a modification of my real name. I don't know how people came out with this name but it became popular very quickly among most of my schoolmates (including girls :D) who started calling me (and still they do) by this name. I made my first email account when I was in grade 11 and that was the first time when I had to search for an identification for my own self. I really found it very hard and it was the first time I appreciated the effort people put in when they came out with something to associate me with. My first email ID was on hotmail.com and tried hell lot of different ids, but most of them either didn't pleased my mind or the ones which pleased, unfortunately, were not available. I finally managed to find an id for myself "sachin_ag25", sachin came from my first name, "ag" came from the first two characters of my last name and 25 came from my birthdate 25 May, a nice potpourri of my various other identities merged into one. I don't know why I liked the combination so much that today I have a yahoo account by the same ID and "25" in all my unofficial email IDs.
My undergrad life (at IIIT) gave me many weird identifications. The first of them was "sagarwal1_02". Lets see how this weird combination of letters, numbers and symbol was assigned to my name in official documents. 's' came from the first character of my first name, 'agarwal' came in from my last name as a whole, '1' was assigned to me using the fact that there were 3 "s. agarwals" in my batch and all of them had to be assigned different IDS, so they decided to number them which I still find nasty to be dome to someone's name. Finally '_02' came from my college entrance year 2002. Days passed and I made many new friends. One of them, who also came out to be my gf in later years, gave me the name "Sachi" but it was only among two of us, although I really later put it as my nickname in my undergrad webpage as I (and I believe she too) liked it. I re-heard the name "Sachu" during my college years but that was only for a short while. Recently I came to know that I was also known as "lalaji" in my undergrad and it was surprising to me because I myself never heard that name when I was there in college. God alone knows how did people came out with that name for me.
Then came my graduate life. I came to US for Masters at CMU. By this time I already knew what CMU would do first, assign me a new primary key. My id here is "sachina". If we keep the normal syllables of a word in mind and from the world knowledge we have about names, this id could easily be interpreted as a girl's id and its no surprise that many people have actually confused my gender (they were not acquainted with the Indian style names and so didn't know that "sachin" is actually a guy's name). My dear roommates make fun by calling me "IGSA president".
Although this paragraph is not "actually" related to this post but I would like to throw light on my blog link. You might have noticed "palsa" in http://palsa.blogspot.com. This was also the name of the first project I did with my sweety in undergrad. The first three letters come from her first name and the last two words from my first name and the wikipedia entry for this word is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palsa.
