A Farewell to Individuality

There's a significant amount of people on campus with whom I have never had an actual conversation yet who know my name. Part of the reason is that my name seems to be so distinctive. There's not many Rahul's over here, so people remember us well.

This is definitely not the case globally. Both my first and last names are actually quite generic in India, so there's actually a very large amount of people with my name.

I was recently reminded of this fact when I created an email account with UC Berkeley. I didn't have this account for long when I received an email informing me that I would be taking the final exam for a political science class this May.

For a brief moment I was concerned about having to take another large cumulative test in May, until I realized what had occurred. Someone at Berkeley has my name, and a professor accidentally typed in my email instead of his. 

This will be interesting. For one thing, I wonder how people will pronounce my name. When people over here see my name, they ask how it's pronounced, and I'll tell them "Rah-hool", which is how I usually introduce myself. That is not the way my parents intended it to be pronounced - the "correct" pronunciation is a set of syllables that I have empirically determined to be impossible to be handled by most non-Indian tongues (although I did know someone with an Indonesian accent who somehow pronounced it right).

In Berkeley, though, there will likely be a large amount of people who will know the original pronunciation of my name, leading me to a conundrum - do I continue introducing myself as "Rah-hool", and better, do I correct people who try to use the Indian pronunciation? I know I will definitely be doing the former, but the latter occupies some rather dicey territory.

Ah, the wonders of my life...