What's in a name??

I recently chanced upon the famous hip-hop-sob story director Karan Johar staring at me through one of the ad laden pages of India Today magazine.The guy was peddling some kinda watch .The punch line of the ad made me smile though .Mr Johar apparently was stating …and I quote “It doesn’t matter what your second name is…what’s important is what you do with your first”
Cool.The problem with me is though….officially my name goes as ‘Kaliyadan Feroze’.The ‘Kaliyadan’ bit ,which is the family name on my dad’s side ,was prefixed instead of being suffixed by my Father dearest when he admitted me to school (One of the many parental conspiracies I’m yet to unravel).So now I have half a dozen scraps of calligraphed papers ,ranging from my school leaving certificate to my hallowed MD degree proclaiming yours truly to be ‘Kaliyadan Feroze’.Some of my amusingly pricking memories are of teachers in medical college fumbling with my name during roll calls.It is true though that there were some other equally serious victims of parental abuse in my class…..Bejoy Chandepillai ,Qurrathul-ain-Farhana…..names,tongue twisters all rolled into one.The worse part was nobody could proxy for me during roll calls coz unlike the more common names the teacher invariably looked up to quench their curiosity regarding this creature having a strange nomenclature.My wonderful friends found it as amusing as I found it irritating……my nicknames ranging from Kali , Kaliya…and some unmentionable variants.
But then ,every stupid name like a coin has two sides.I mean just google ‘Kaliyadan Feroze ‘ on the web…you wont find much ..but whatever you will is only me!Also I happened to marry a classmate of mine….a certain Ms Kaberi Biswas with whom I had to spend virtually every clinical posting during my medical college days,primarily because both our ‘first’ names started with the same couple of letters…Now whether THAT turned out to be good or bad is of course another question!!!!

So borrowing from Shakespeare … what is in a name?A ‘feroze’ would be just as crazy by any other name…