Sam: The story behind my nickname

Many years later, as he sat down to create his email address, Sam was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover computers.

People ask me the story behind my nickname, “Sam”, because my given name Saurabh has no “M” in it. There’s a fun little story behind this which I always imagined in the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez1.

A PC from the 90s

In the late 90s one enterprising gentleman bought few computers and setup a training center in my dusty rural town. My father being a man-about-town, understood that computers are going to be the future and promptly enrolled me in the class. I was the only student of my age, the rest were late teens and aspiring stenographers who saw computer as the new typewriter. On the first day the instructor showed us a few tricks in DOS, although I only remember being mesmerised by Prince of Persia2. At the end of the demo, he launched a DOS program that required me to input my details and create a daily journal to practice typing. As I sat down and examined the keyboard, I quickly realized that the keys were jumbled, and I had no idea that QWERTY existed. I painstakingly searched for the characters, starting with “S,” then “A.” By mistake, I pressed “M” and the space bar with my right hand. I looked up to see the mistake I made.

“SAM▐” : The cursor on the CRT screen blinked at me. Something clicked. I loved this nickname, as if it were a ticket to new world that was opening up.

It was the late 90s, a period at the end of tumultuous decade. India’s liberalisation hadn’t borne any fruits yet, political instability was rampant, governments fell rapidly in succession and people waited for the new millenium with bated breath. It was also a time when Indians shook off Nehruvian socialism, laying the seeds of a new India. Indians like Sachin, Vishy Anand and Leander Paes were showing they can be amongst the best. India was opening up to the world, films like Jurassic Park, Titanic were household names, Backstreet boys and Ricky Martin played on the radios, making us dream of a new world where we could be anything. The nickname “Sam” symbolised that zeitgeist for me3.

Few years later when Yahoo! Mail came, I already knew what my handle would be: “sam_khawase”. During college, I proudly wrote ‘Sam Khawase’ on my PC. When my American and German colleagues4 struggled with my Bengali-inspired name, ‘Sam’ came to the rescue. This name has opened up avenues for me and let me forge my own identity.

After all, what’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet. 🌹


  1. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/prose/ ↩︎

  2. I didn’t learn much in the class because the focus was on stenography. Playing outside was more interesting. ↩︎

  3. It’s funny in retrospective, no one usually called me by my first name. Friends usually called me by my last name, as is the fashion in Vidarbha and family called me “Chittu”. ↩︎

  4. Yes, Sam was more palatable to the Westen ears, but that’s not the only reason I chose it. ↩︎