The adventure of a name called 'Vaibhav Karve'

When Vaibhav Karve entered IISER K campus, his name had no indication that it was going to suffer any assault. During the very first lecture of Life Science on the first day, the instructor asked his name. He stood (at that very moment, Cupid got his first victim) and said, “Vaibhav Karve”. The instuctor said, “Oh! Baibhab Karbe! What is life?” He thought that this would be the first and the last mistake regarding saying his name. But he was wrong.

 Throughout the first semester, during LS lectures, whenever sir called 'Baibhab', it took some moments for dozing Vaibhav to realise sir is calling him. But, no probs. Sir was considerate. But he always blamed sir's wrong pronunciation for his getting caught dozing often. He waited patiently for the semester to end. Then he started looking out into this issue during vacations. Ah! he found out. In Bengali script, there is a letter which looks like Devangiri script 'v' but sadly for him, it is pronounced as 'b'. So,in bangla, you can find stalls selling 'vada pav' exclaiming 'bada pab' in bold letters on their respective banners. On some cases, Bengalis become sentimental on their inability to use v. So, they use 'v' unnecessarily. For example, welcome has been noticed to be written as 'velcome’.

In the next semester, all Profs including LS Prof got replaced. Thank God! Now no, Baibhab Karbe because new LS instructor didn't prefer to call students' name (He didn’t do this to save effort in remembering 90 students’ name. On the contrary, it would have been easier for him to do so because merely a score of them attended his classes. For he had droning voice that was almost guaranteed to cause severe drowsiness within ten minutes, five in AC switch-on mode. Most of them couldn’t resist the soporific power of his voice. ) The new Maths Prof was a young IITian who was the head of movie club. During roll-calls when he came to Vaibhav’s same, he called “Vaibhav Garve” taking inspiration from Bollywood style Mumbai Police constables.

On his birthday, he got a cake from an acquaintance living in Kolkata ‘city’. On seeing his cake, his friends started taking photo not of the cake, but of what was written on it-

“Happy Birthday to Bhaibav!”

But that is not end of the story. One abnormal day when Animesh Biswas was not at his home, Vaibhav took his mobile and was scanning his phonebook for Bengali females no.s. If it hadn’t been Bengal, he would have passed that particular name without much ado. But surely he was not expecting his name to be written as such that too by his own roommate (defining roommate as one whose belongings is kept in the same room) –

“Bhaebab Karbe”

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