What's in a name?

Written as a part of writing prompt given at https://blr.indiewebclub.org/prompts/#october-19-2026

What’s the story behind your domain name? (Or your government name, or your online handle.)

So I own this domain name, hemish.net, and it’s surprisingly good that I have it: a regular-sounding ".net" domain name, and I pay pretty cheap for it. There is a reason it’s a single name domain name, which is my first name, my legal first name (which would get clearer later in this blog). Some people do include last names in their domain names, but I don’t have one.

My first name is Hemish. The story I have been told how this name got into the picture, is that Hemish Marshall is a former cricketer from New Zealand. My father, was a good player in his time as a young person. So, for the love of cricket, he named me "Hemish".

Even my sister, who is Chelsi, has gotten an English name like me. Coming from the background my father isfrom, it was very forward of my father to give his children English names in such a setting, which is very great, I would say.

Mononym

From my childhood, my father has put only my first name in all of my legal documents, starting from the birth certificate and then the later aadhar card. So when I grew up, naturally I only had my first name in everything, and wherever I need to put my name, I put it as-it-is. Even my passport has just my first name and the last name field is just blank.

Because of this, I do run into various issues a lot of times. Some of the websites don’t accept an empty last name, and I have to do a lot of workarounds. Sometimes, I put empty unicode characters there. Sometimes, I put a dot or underscore there. Sometimes, I duplicate my first name into the last name. But there is not a single standard which works everywhere, so I have to keep fiddling around with all of these options. So yeah, that’s how life is.

People say that I am going to have issues if I visit a foreign country. Yes, I would, but isn’t that my purpose, like I have to circumvent around these issues? So yeah, I prefer to stay mononymous.

I remember, in my childhood, I had this great nationalistic feeling for mononyms, but I did not have a name for it back then. So finding out about this word, mononymous, on the web, was a blast for me. There are people who are also mononymous, and I vaguely remember searching out popular people in India, including celebrities, who are legally mononymous. One of the examples is Kajol, that was pretty interesting for me at that time.

There are various advantages to being mononymous. First of all, in an academic setting, like a school or college, an examiner or a person taking a viva or your oral examination cannot judge you by just your surname. I don’t have a surname legally, so they cannot have, you know, a casteist judging of me and give me (or not give me) preference based on that. Similarly, it works in jobs as well. You don’t offer people a thing to discriminate you from other people just by looking at your name. So, that is pretty awesome.

My name is also unique in itself. I have found people who have the name Hemish within India, but the count is very low. Even just by searching my first name, a lot of things about me show up on a web search. So yeah, I don’t require a last name for my name to be unique.

It works the same way for usernames. On a lot of websites, I get my username "hemish". On the websites where I do not get it, I just use "imhemish", where "im" stands for "I am".

This is also why I’m a believer that people should abolish last names. What purpose do last names provide other than just discrimination? One of the purposes is just to identify you from a pool of people who have the same name as you, that’s it really. I know that people would say, yeah, there are other purposes.

I had considered in my childhood to get a last name added to my documents, but that’s a lot of hassle. Every document I’ve possessed since childhood needs to be changed, and that’s a lot of hassle I don’t want to go through. And I like my name like this. So yeah, thans to my dad for giving me this banger name.

Pronunciation

My name "Hemish" is spoken like how you would speak it in Spanish (Spanish doesn't have differing pronunciations for vowels like English). Indic writings of my name are हेमिश and ਹੇਮਿਸ਼. Although interestingly, my birth certificate still names me as "हेमीश", but that is fine.

I’ve run into issues with it too, because a lot of people can't pronounce it. I’ve heard various variations, including Himesh, the most popular one, credit goes to Himesh Reshamiya. Then there is Hamish, and there is a “Himanish” I have heard. A lot of them exist, and I’m now used to not correcting people about my name. If people ask me how they should pronounce it, then I’m very happy to guide them through the pronunciation. But by default, I do not explain the pronunciation at all, and that is fine with me.

I’m not a big celebrity or a person to even guide people on how my name is spelled or pronounced. So I mean that people cannot pronounce my name; that’s a big feeling in itself. Those people are not worthy of pronouncing my name if they cannot.

So this was my name, and this forms my identity on the web also.