Hassles of an uncommon surname

I was born one fine day right in the middle of the year on the 30th of June when Calcutta was sweating profusely thanks to a power cut that had continued to linger and plunge the city into perennial darkness for some obnoxious hours at a row. As if to commemorate that auspicious ocassion of a baby who was so fair that you could not notice its existence in a powercut, my maternal grandpa christened me as "Alas". And from then on I have been christened over and over again the way proxies to access orkut get blocked over and over again at my workplace.

After a lot of factional civil wars at home that saw allies turning into enemies, I finally got a twin set of name. One was Tukai which obviously meant to have found someone (which further made me beleive that I was definitely swapped with some other kid of some other parents in the power cut that haunted Calcutta on the auspicious ocassion of my birth) and the second was Indranil. Though there were factions in the family who wanted to name me Subhojit which reminds me of a professor of the same name who taught us things as distant and horrendous as parallel shift of IS-LM curves and deficit financing. After attending the first class of his in the second trimester of my PGDBM I thanked God that I was not named Subhojit.

As a legacy I got the surname attached to me the same way Himesh has his cap attached to his head. For a successful marketing company like Pidilite known to produce enticing advertisements, Himesh can work wonders being the brand personality of Pidilite. I mean have you ever seen him without his signature cap since his heydays. So it does stick on to his head the way any of Pidilite's adhesives stick on to stuffs of everyday use. So there I was branded as an Ain, carrying the legacy of a surname that was as common as eskimos in the South Pole.

The disasters of having an uncommon surname started soon in life. The first time I went to a drawing class the teacher thought and interpreted the Ain as a misspelt Ayan and went on calling me the same till my mom heard of it and gave me a serious thrashing about the same. Actually the hassles of making her understand the intricacies of my surname was too much of a pain for a feeble soul like me and hence I was Ayan for a year or so.

At school teachers and students alike came up with innovative ways of spelling Ain and I saw the brand name getting diluted and felt sad the same way the Levers and the Palmolives feel when they see cheap alternatives of their products with names like "Kolgate instead of Colgate". So there I was being misspelt as "ANN, INN, IN, AIR" etc. Whenever I complained, they said it was a proper noun and they had every right to spell it they way they wanted. Beyond a certain point I gave up protesting, the way Mamta Banerjee gave up on her hunger strike for Shingur and accepted fate. I realised the best way to tackle this kind of a situation was to just leave my name and dare not mention the surname. So from then on I have used only my name and only given out my surname whenever prodded for it. At IMT people went one step ahead and named me Ainstein. Incidentally I had nothing in common with the great man except for the unmanageable hair. I guess the departed soul must have felt very insulted with me being christened Ainstein considering my scientific capabilites. I flunked in physics in my pre boards and almost was on the verge of flunking chemistry thanks to a very well set question paper by a man who looked and acted more mean than Professor Snape in any Harry Potter book. Then there was the great MPD who tried to prove in one of his brain numbing finance classes that I came from a family of law breakers thanks to an assignment I hadnt done.( For the lesser informed Ain means LAW in bengali). I gave solace to my hurt soul by assuring myself that Stuart Law(the Australian Cricketer) had immigrated to Australia from Bengal and anglicized his surname and was actually related to me.

The common thing about an uncommon name like Indranil Ain is that you beleive you are the only one in the world with that name. You feel like a rare specied red panda walking on the face of the planet till you realise that you have been drastically wrong in your presumptions and find someone with the same name exists and is very much walking around on the face of the planet the way you have been doing. So the uniqueness associated with the name disappears in a smoke. So one fine day I got this mail on my Gmail account from another Indranil Ain who had done some kind of a wildcard search and found me out. Initially he thought that it was a prank that his girlfriend was playing on him and caught me online and started coochie cooing with me. Later on realising his follies Mr. Indranil Ain(not my alter ego or split personality) asked for due apologies and revealed his part of the story. Having saved myself from the irreristible temptations of turning gay I was a bit sad realising that I was not the unique that I thought myself to be. Last heard about Mr. Indranil Ain, he had got married to the girl friend he thought me to be on the net one day and is leading a happy life.

Last week another Ain having found a channel in Orkut to connect to his long lost brethren who shared common ancestry, scrapped me giving me full details about his father, uncles and long list of relatives and asked me to identify any one of them. As usual I was completely clueless and I doubted his intentions. The guy seemed gay from the very look on his face. His profile pic showed him wearing a bright red shirt and black pants that made him look like a freshly painted post box. And he was standing right in the middle of a nursery with dalia flowers all around him. I guess another bout of coochie cooing is coming my way pretty soon. And I hope against hope that the next Ain who scraps me be a female so that the coochie cooing that seems so nauseating at present feels better with the female touch. Finally I have realised that life is not that smooth for an Ain. Would I have been better off being a Chatterjee or a Mukherjee, a Sengupta or a Dasgupta, a Dutta or a Guha?