Living with a Looooong Name

Being born into a Bengali family you'd expect your parents to name you something common like "Sujon" or "Protik" or something Arabic like "Omar", but rarely something like "Jishad". A name many of you have probably never heard of. In addition, it is then followed by four other names to wrap it all together.

What's wrong with having a long name? Well, having such a long name means you reach a character limit on many platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. Not only that, growing up Bengali in an Arab country meant I stood out at school, and having an oddly long name was the cherry on top. A typical attendance call for me was: "Jeshad? Did I say that right? Jeshad… Bin… Seraj Al Hameed? That's a long name."

Yes, I'm aware, and I'm also aware of the fact that you just mispronounced and figuratively massacred my name.

Moving back to Bangladesh and enrolling in a new school also meant having to adjust to a new environment, and that followed with my name saw a bombardment of questions from the teachers. The obvious one was, "What's the meaning behind your name?" To which I would reply,  did not know, and neither did my parents. I suppose they grabbed a name out of thin air and felt it had a nice ring to it, so just went with it. There were more questions like "Why is your name so long?" the answer to which included my family history and I had to explain that "Jishad" is my name, "Shiraj" is my father and "Hamid" was my grandfather. A look of amusement and slight confusion could be seen on the teachers' faces.

Enough about attendance and school, let's jump to the real deal—exams. That's right, exam sheets have only so much space to write your name in, and my name being 22 characters long consisting eight syllables and five words, you could say it's a challenging fit. I found a solution; I write my name on a microscopic level and pray the examiner has good enough vision to make sense out of my ant-sized writing. My methods have proven successful so far, except for that one time it didn't, and I don't like to talk about that one time. 

When my family members and friends ask if I ever do a PhD would my name then be "Dr. Jishad Bin Shiraj Al Hamid", I say, "Absolutely. Absolutely it would."

William Shakespeare wrote, "What's in a name?" True, especially in one that is peculiar and unusually longer than it needs to be.