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What is your name?

Simple?  Basic?  Easily answered?

Depends.

On what you ask?

Well for starters what should seemingly be a way to identify you as an individual has become a freaking nightmare.   Bureaucracies have been designed just based on this innocuous of inquiries.  Do not believe it?  Ask the passport office or in case of immigrants like me the tedium of going through related paperwork, Social Security Administration and Driver Licenses issued by multiple state motor bureaus.

For starters Indians do not have any idea what a middle name is.  They probably get the middle finger sooner than they figure out this conundrum called the middle name.  Whose middle?  And then there are Americans who go overboard with the freedoms bestowed unto them and assign multiple names between the given or first name and last name thereby viewing them as multiple middle names.

Mathematically wrong unless they happen to ensure that there are an odd number of middle names - otherwise the premise is faulty.

Then flip over to the legacy of the idiotic British aka Indian naming convention.  Well convention is an optimistic way to phrase it given the name of an individual varies depending on which state they were born and the family tradition to go with it.

By and large the father as the 50 % birth giver contributes his cred to the name of the one that sprung.  Offspring that is.   So desis come to their local passport office with Name, Father's Name and Surname to be penned into the boxes on the form.

Very patriarchal in our view of the world as many a society is it is a big pain in the ass when switching to using American standards.  Father suddenly appears to the untrained American as the middle name equivalent.  What a riot that is.  Esp with the female gender.  Annapurna Arjuna Mallikesham.

Arjuna or Arjun was an archer.  A he archer.  But his name was bestowed on Annapurna's  (a girl) father by his father.  Now all of a sudden that is her middle name.  What a hoot.

Then there are crazy variants where the town of their birth is the last name or middle name.  Fancy boys and girls have also gone the way of pooh poohing this crazy long winded naming and chosen a single name like - Madonna, Sting, Beyonce or Amma.

I wonder if their passports allow that?

What if we could switch to a 16 digit unique identifier?  Guess it would be a mouthful to say each time we wanted to ask our grand kid to grab us some water.  On the flip side people might stop gossiping about others - what a drag that would be to remember 1000,2344,6566,7890 did some monkey business with 3456,7898,0099,4553 and caused an uproar. 

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