Identity Crisis

Anglicizing Indian names in the US is quite common these days. Let’s face it, some names are hard to pronounce. When I was in the US eight years ago I remember mine getting butchered in as many ways as one can count. A few people who knew they had to stay abroad for a longer time did not want to have to spell out their name or correct pronunciation every time they met someone new.

For example, my friend and mentor, Vikram Dendi, who was in the US from his undergraduate times claimed to have shortened it to “Vik” every once in a while when I met him in Bangalore.

Over the past eight years, somehow, people started calling me “Andy”, and it’s stuck surprisingly well. It’s rare to find anyone call me by my given name in college, not for any cultural significance but rather for the sake of convenience. You can’t beat a one syllable name.

I’ve been talking on mailing lists and on IRC more these days and am starting to wonder if I need to regularly use my anglicized name in my online collaborations. The short answer is yes, and the long answer is too boring to put down here.

So I decided I’ll just use my utterly cool domain name which is lying around stale for email. I will be using andy@ninjagod . com for my purposes. So if you can’t remember my name or email address(why would one even need to?), you’ve got somewhere new to fire it off to.