We have a new postdoc who started this week in the nuclear theory group at Surrey. His name is Abhishek, and that's him in the picture. It is his given name, and he has no surname, a practice I did not realise was common in India. He says that there are possible neutral surnames (like Kumar) that sometimes get used by people with no surname for the purposes of filling out forms, but in India it is not usually necessary as e.g. one can have an Indian passport with a single given name as one's full name.
That he has a single name is no problem in publishing scientific papers, where you can call youself what you like (see his latest preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08757). It can make it hard to search for his papers, though, with Abhishek being a reasonably common Indian name.
It is more problematic with University systems which require a first name and surname to exist. It seems that the University has made up an initial for him and used Abhishek as a surname. What a shame the system cannot cope with other cultural norms.
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