I was christened Anand Srinivasan. Anand means happiness:
Anandhayathi iti Anandhaha - he makes others happy - hence he is Anand. The Srinivasan's because I was born at Tirupati whose temple deity is known by the same name. And I was born on a saturday, which makes it all the more special.
My official name at school was Anand Subramanian, the latter being my father's name. I was known to most of the teachers and friends as S.Anand, and that's the way I'd rather stay. In my third standard, we had to write a Hindi essay on the Moghul poet
Birbal, whose name I misspelt as
Birbaal (the long 'A' instead of the short 'a'). Kiran Miss declared that I would thereafter be referred to as
Bal, and the name stuck. It went to a point where most people did not know that it was my nickname - including at least one teacher.
At IIT Madras, I was named Bhalla Nonsense (to be spelt and pronounced "Bhbhallla Naaansense") by extremely bored seniors during my first ragging session. (One was Prasanna, who played the famous guitar interlude of
July mAdham in the movie
Pudhiya mugam). I was spared the surname, but Bhalla stuck.
Since the official records list me as Anand Subramanian, people have a habit of calling me Mr.Subramanian. That's my father! I'm just Anand. I had a lot of trouble with my passport too, since they insisted on my filling out my first, middle and last name. I told them my name was S.Anand and they could decide which was which. (Of course it didn't work. They made me stand in a queue for a couple of hours and told me my passport application was invalid.) So my passport actually refers to me as Subramanian Anand.
While working at IBM, this was almost rectified, until we moved our mail system to Lotus Notes, which does not permit the first name to be the single character 'S'. Hence, thanks to the IT revolution, I was known as "Anand Subramanian" again.
It was only at IIM Bangalore that this fault was fully rectified. So successfully, in fact, that people wondered what the 'S' stood for, and settled at "Stud".
But if I thought that was the end of things, I was mistaken. At BCG, trouble began again, with the head of IT calling me up to confirm if I really was called "S Anand". I know all about mailing systems by now, and how to get around software. So I tell him, yes. My name is "S" Anand. No, I won't expand "S". No, I don't mind causing too much confusion. Then comes the problem -- is "S" my first name or last name? I figured people may as well call me Anand and Mr. S rather than Mr. Anand and S. So my e-mail ID became s.anand@bcg.com.
That was just the start. Once I joined, everyone got visiting cards. Except me. My visiting cards were delayed because the printer refused to believe my last name was "S". So I had to confirm that yes, my last name is "S", and I really wanted my cards.
When I joined Infosys, I managed to convince them to call me just "S Anand". But sanand@infosys.com, s_anand@infosys.com, anand_s@infosys.com and all other such variants were taken. I positively HATED IDs with numbers in them (like sanand1974), so I ended up with subramanian_anand@infosys.com.
Yet another source of confusion is my e-mail ID, which is "root dot node at gmail.com". But that's a long story.