I received a call on my mobile. “May I speak to Mr Jagdish Kumar Mathur?” asked the caller. I was about to say it was a wrong number when I remembered that this was indeed my full name, which was not used except while opening bank accounts, buying shares or applying for a passport or driving licence. My close friends and relatives call me ‘JK’, which is fine by me. My mother used to call me Jagdish and sometimes Jaggu, when she felt a little extra affectionate; my father always said Jagdish, in his stentorian voice. Nobody, in fact, called me Jagish Kumar Mathur, except in jest. My bosses and superiors, as also my colleagues, use my surname ‘Mathur’ to invite attention, prefixing a ‘Mr’ before it when they felt a little generous.

Things are not much different with the letters received in junk mail. Such mail is generated in very large volumes on computers by a technique known as ‘mail merging’. Whenever I receive a neatly word-processed letter, addressing me by my full name, I hasten to consign it to the trash can.

Then there is the noteworthy new trend of making a minor change in the spelling of one’s name for good luck. You may call it the Ektaa Kapoor syndrome. This name-game has caught the imagination of those who are upwardly mobile and want to succeed in the rat race of out-smarting each other. They consult the soothsayers and crystal-gazers, mind readers and palm-perusers who claim to dabble in predictions and various tricks to bolster the fortunes of the ‘believers’. Most of them are in the ‘I told you so’ category.

Newspapers and magazines have reported that prominent persons who wanted to excel even more, preferred more preposterous changes in the spellings of their names. I, too, once fell into the trap of this shortcut to success and made some quick calculations with the help of books on numerology.

Accordingly, I changed the spelling of my name to Jugdish. The results, however, were not palatable. First, my family members and friends started deriding me by giving an added emphasis to the syllable ‘ju’. Then when I went to get my new visiting cards printed, the printer pointed out the ‘mistake’ and had to be convinced that everything was fine with the new-fangled spelling. My bank manager, too, grew suspicious of my intentions when he saw my new name card and carefully noted ‘caution’ on my account. My friends wanted clarification on my latest ‘goof-up’ and had to be told the logic behind the change. They just nodded their heads, however, and thought I needed help of a different kind.

What was worse, the tide in my affairs which was expected to be ‘taken at the flood leading me to fortune’ never materialised. I have, therefore, reverted to the original spelling of my name, which I now realise has served me very well all these years.