Hey Rockstars,

So lately, I’ve been back in my Bollywood renaissance, along with Hollywood portrayals of South Asians like Never Have I Ever and Best of the Best. And while I do love the annual June Scripps National Spelling Bee when I’m sitting on my couch thinking, hell yeah, these are my people, I’ve also been thinking about one of the smallest ways representation shows up in ordinary life: Names. Or, more specifically, whether people bother to learn them.

There is a particular kind of email that makes me stare at my computer for a few seconds longer than necessary. And no, it’s not “I hope this finds you well,” because let’s be real, it never does. Instead, it usually begins with:

Hi [my last name],

And every time, I have the same thought: My name is literally in the email.

In fact, usually these emails are replies to emails I’ve sent where I’ve signed my name, so it’s not like people need to go digging for it in an attachment or conduct a deep and careful investigation of my LinkedIn profile. (But you know what’s funny? If I don’t know if someone’s first name is their last name, then I will actually complete a deep and careful investigation of their LinkedIn profile…)

Alas, whatever. Like I said, my name is right there: Sandhya.

I have developed a theory about why this happens. Microsoft Teams, for reasons known only to Microsoft, likes to display names as LastName, FirstName. Perhaps someone sees the first word, assumes it is my first name, and moves on with their day. But come on, the comma is doing a job here, people?! Pay attention to the punctuation!

And maybe you’re thinking: “in the grand scheme of human inconveniences, being called by your last name in an email ranks fairly low” and I’m glad that you have the positive experiences in life (dare I say privilege, oops, who said that, not me) that you are not called by your last name or your first name isn’t misspelled. 

Shivani and I have had entire snapchat threads going where we snapchat people misspelling our names when it’s RIGHT. THERE. Like what are you even doing??

My name is Sandhya. It’s on all my degrees, on the nameplate in my office window facing two busy streets in Washington, D.C., it’s how I introduce myself and the name my friends call when they have something urgent, ridiculous, exciting, or completely inconsequential to tell me.

Sandhya, oh my god, this thing reminded me of you.

Oh my god, Sandhya, the funniest thing happened.

SANDHYAAAA, WE HAVEN’T TALKED IN FOREVER.

Last week, I went to a panel moderated by my favorite professor from law school. In fact, he was the main reason I was going. During the fifteen-minute break halfway through the panel, I walked over to say hi. He was kind of third-wheeling another conversation and easily could have kept talking, but the second he saw me, he stood up from his chair and beamed: “Sandhya!! It’s so good to see you!”

There is something strangely intimate about hearing your own name from someone who knows you. It means, for one tiny second, that their attention is pointed specifically at you. Of all the people they could be talking to, they are talking to you. Your name becomes a tiny acknowledgment: I remember you.

And I haven’t always made people do the work of learning mine. For a long time, I Americanized the pronunciation of Sandhya when I introduced myself. It was easier. I could offer people a version that fit more naturally into sounds they already knew how to make and save both of us the awkward little exchange that sometimes follows an unfamiliar name. Only recently did I stop doing that. I started introducing myself the way my name is actually pronounced. And you know what happened? People learned it.

Sometimes it took them some time, but the reality is, I don’t care if you pronounce my name perfectly the first time, I care whether you try. There’s a partner I work with often, and when we first met 4 years ago, I introduced myself once on the phone and he immediately got my name right. You know why? It matters and he cared. 

There is a difference between finding someone’s name unfamiliar and treating its unfamiliarity as their problem. A name can be difficult for you without being too difficult to learn.

Which brings me back to Best of the Best, because it made me think about familiarity itself. One of the things I loved about it was hearing names that might once have been treated as unfamiliar in mainstream American pop culture simply exist on screen as people’s names. Nobody needed to stop and explain them, they just belonged to people. And it also didn’t become an entire 5-minute back-and-forth on what their name is or “that’s too hard” or “do you go by a nickname?”

For years, I kept hoping that someone named Sandhya would become famous so that people would learn how to pronounce her name and then could pronounce mine.

And then I could spend the rest of my life benefiting from her work. Honestly, it seemed like an excellent arrangement for me. Unfortunately, most of the famous Sandhyas I encountered seemed to go by Sandy (my coffee-shop name and a nickname reserved for a very select few special people), so this was not advancing my cause.

So now, instead of waiting for some other Sandhya to become famous, I’ve decided: Well, damn. I can be that person.

Now I just need to develop a five-year plan for global celebrity; let me know if you have any ideas! And if someone meets me, learns how to say Sandhya, then the next time they meet my namesake, they already know how to pronounce it. Maybe that’s why Hi [my last name] irritates me more than it reasonably should. It isn’t that I’m deeply wounded by someone calling me by my last name. I actually like my last name. I obviously know who they mean. It’s that names are one of the simplest opportunities we get to show another person that we’re paying attention.

When someone takes a second to learn yours—to ask how you say it, to listen to the answer, to correct themselves the next time—the thing they are communicating is very small and very important: I see you.

I don’t need you to already know my name. I need you to care enough to learn it. And yes, if we collectively figured out Fyodor Dostoevsky, I have faith that we can figure out Sandhya. I’m not asking for perfection. I’m asking for the attempt, because my name doesn’t need to be familiar to you before it becomes worth saying correctly.

And, respectfully, my name is literally in the email.

Until next time!

xo

Sandhya

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