What’s in a name??....

The day I signed up for my blog, I was in a deep dilemma : What was to be the title of my blog? And what was to be my display name? The first one was a bit challenging but not difficult. It was fun to sit during a class and brainstorm over various names with my friend who was sitting next to me. We tried everything from the simple “Surobhi’s” to wackier ones like “Random Thoughts”, “Something fishy”, “Sleepy Surobhi”, “Stars and Fishes”, “Grey Scale Fish”, “Miski’s thoughts” and even “Miski’s fish bowl”. For the uninitiated, MiSKi is my dorm name (a nick name given to every student in WIMWI; will post about it in detail some other day). And my friend, who was sitting next to me, has (for some reason unknown to me) started calling me ‘Fishy’. Hence, so many combinations with “Miski’ and ‘Fishy’ in them.

But obviously, these didn’t sound very convincing to me. I wanted something which explained something about me, or the way I am. Or maybe, something which I believed in. And that’s when this name came up, “Nothing Grey About It”. It was perfect, coz that’s just the way I am; no greys, its either black or white, a person who sees the world in extremes. Donno if that is a good thing or a bad thing, or if it is neither, but that’s just the way I have been.

So now that the first problem was over, I had another bigger dilemma: my display name. There’s something I had never realized/accepted before: that I don’t like my name so much. ‘Surobhi’ is an ok name, but not very nice, or atleast that’s what I felt. Nicknames were used, though didn’t like them as much. I have always felt that it is of utmost importance to have a good name, and there are times when the first impression I have of a person is through his/her name. It isn’t a judgmental impression though. But yes, the name is important.

Miski ain’t a very bad name, in fact, I quite like it. I guess that’s also one reason why it got stuck. Indeed, almost everyone on campus calls me that. But I never wanted to have my display name as Miski, the reason being simple enough: Miski is just what I have been known as for the last one year or so. And this blog was about me, not just the past one year of my life.

So that was when I eventually decided that the display name had to be ‘Surobhi’. It was time I started liking my name. Infact, I quite like my name when it is spoken with a Bengali accent, ‘Shu-ro-bhi’. :)