Name & what it means to you

"A person's name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language”  said Dale Carnegie who was an American writer and author of many self development books. He explains the importance of a person's name in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People. He explains that a person's name is the sweetest sound they can hear. In other words, people love to hear their own name.

My name is Madhva muni and I am named after my maternal grandfather, Sri Madhvachar who while being very orthodox, was a highly successful lawyer of his time. I always felt proud of my name since it also is associated with one among the trinity of great Indian philosopher theologians, Sankara Ramanuja & Madhva, the chief proponent of the Dvaita school of Vedanta. Since the time I can remember, I have been facing a peculiar problem with my uncommon name. 

When someone has to write or make a data entry of my name, invariably  made it as MADHAVA MUNI by inserting an A after Madh or make it as MADHAV MUNI by interchanging positions of a and v after my first 4 letters.  Many times such mistakes remain unknown to me until it becomes a serious one for my comfort. For example, wrong entry in the railway ticket is not noticed by me until the Travelling Ticket Examiner calls out my name on the train while verifying the passenger identity since the ticket issued to me while booking does not display the name. You know, my job involved very frequent travels. 

I had to be doubly sure when name had to be on an important document. I am used to cautioning the data entry person about the correct way to spell my name even when i give him an an application or a piece of paper with my name on it. In spite of all my care, my name was spelt wrongly in my School Leaving Certificate (a very important document that has bearing on my identity itself) On a number of occasions, I had to correspond with issuers of documents to effect correction of the name on them (invariably they would have appeared wrongly as Madhava muni or Madhav muni) But I have never been tired of correcting people since I loved my name immensely. I have smilingly bore all inconveniences all my life.

At the other end of the spectrum, I had a colleague whose name was Apparao Sreepada in which Apparao was his given name and surname (family name) was Sreepada.

Apparao is Telugu name. The name is derived from the presiding deity of Simhachalam, Simhadri Appanna, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Based on astro-numerological value of 5, Apparao is growth oriented, strong, visionary, adventurous, spendthrift, freedom loving, restless, spiritual, adventurous, energetic, curious, visionary, magnetic, expansive. 

A namesake and a very famous Apparao was Gurajada Apparao, a noted Indian playwright, dramatist, poet, and writer known for his works in Telugu theatre. Gurajada Apparao authored a play titled Kanyasulkam in 1892, which is considered as the greatest play in the Telugu language. In spite of a very favourable neurology and sharing the name with most famous person, my colleague did not like Apparao part of his name and never liked to be called by that name. Addressing him as Apparao will sound as jar on his ears and set his teeth on edge. He called himself Sreepada. That much for Dale Carnegie's view that sweetest sound for anyone would flow from the utterance of one's given name!