Since the time I found my bearings , I have always had people calling me Aprov, Apurvahh, Apurva and other innovatively pronounced combinations of my "god given parents chosen" name - Apurva. Very seldom have people stumbled upon the intentioned pronunciation – Apurv. Well, the issues that arose out of that are:
- Apurva has no meaning in English while "अपुर्व" with a silent "a" means Singular; the supreme soul in Sanskrit.
- It is often confused with a girl's name - which is not bad until you have weirdoes sending you e-mails wanting to be "your frand"
- People assume that I'm a Bengali bhadralok and are shocked when they see no signs of bhadrataa in me
- Bengali’s straight away launch into bong speak “ aami tumake bhalo baachi” – since that’s all I know in bong I don’t end up remembering /understanding their monologue – in these cases I don’t speak other than giving guttural grunts – ‘huh’ ‘haan’ ‘oho’ – so very often people don’t realize at all that I can’t understand them..and end up confusing my incomprehension with profound understanding or worse still empathy.
Now dear reader you would be wondering:
- Aren't people supposed to call Apurva, Apurva?
- Why did my parents give me such a name?
Let me try to answer both your questions –
- It is very hard to find a phonetically similar sounding English spelling for the
Another story I heard on my name was that my parents wanted to keep my name starting with “a” so that I would be amongst the first in any line which starts alphabetically. Well, I’m sure they didn’t realize the agony which I would have to go through in my child hood as teachers always called out to me to answer the toughest questions or to do a recap of the previous sessions.
