Wrong Pronounciation or Difficult name

I have received several compliments for having a short, and therefore sweet name; Manu Khanna. manu and Khanna, easy to spell, pronounce and memorize. in the past, many acquaintances have suggested that i change my name for two reasons. First, it sounded famine, and second, it sounded unofficial. As you can see, I’ve never paid any heed to any of this and have the same name my grand-father gave me when I was born., Other than these two comments, I’ve never had to correct people if they pronounced my name incorrectly.

But since moving to Hyderabad in 2005, that seems to be the first remark I make when I receive phone calls. I’ve been addressed as munna khan, munan khan, minu khan, mannu khannan and God knows what else. Not a day goes by when I haven’t had t0 tell someone or the other how to pronounce my name. Believe me it’s quite annoying when the locals tell me that my name is a tongue-twister hence they have problems while saying it!

Can you believe it; most Hyderabadis think that “Manu Khanna” is a tongue-twister. If my name is a tongue-twister, what would you term the name Elankulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad as. I don’t know about you but I would have to twist not only my tongue, but every other muscle in my body just to say it aloud. I don’t even want to think of the consequences if I tried spelling it out. Thank God for Ctrl +C and Ctrl+V, else I wouldn’t have been able to type out this body twister with you.

Here are a few more names that will have you wriggling like a snake:

• Velikkakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan
• Kuppalli Venkatappa Puttappa
• Abul Pakir Jainulbadeen Abdul Kalam

Surely, by now you would be curious why have such difficult names> After all, names should be easy to remember, then why have names that have upwards of 30 alphabets in them? Check out the article on Indian Names over at Wikipedia.