# What's in the name > I have been called four different names in my life. Only one of them stuck. The story of the other three is the story of how my family raised me. Source: https://waqaspitafi.com/writings/whats-in-the-name/ --- Published May 11, 2026 Reading 3 min Pillar Faith and family Share [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwaqaspitafi.com%2Fwritings%2Fwhats-in-the-name%2F) [X](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwaqaspitafi.com%2Fwritings%2Fwhats-in-the-name%2F&text=What's%20in%20the%20name) [Essay](https://waqaspitafi.com/writings) # What's in the name I have been called four different names in my life. Only one of them stuck. The story of the other three is the story of how my family raised me. I have been called four different names in my life. I was born and named Kashaan Ahmed. I was a sick infant. By the time I was three or four, I was renamed Zeeshan Ahmed. Things were not really going better. By the time I was six or seven, I was renamed again, this time to Waqas Ahmed. The third one stayed. The fourth, Waqas Khan Pitafi, came later when family naming convention caught up with me. The names were not chosen casually. In my family, the name carried weight. When the first name was not producing a healthy child, the elders decided the name itself was the problem. So they changed it. When the second name was not bringing a path, they changed it again. None of this was a Western-style decision tree. It was a family doing what its tradition told it to do, hoping that one of these names would land right. My family was confused too. They gave me an interim nickname during the renaming years. The nickname was Shani. My cousin sisters called me Bhayya, which means brother. Some of them combined the two and called me Shani Bhayya. When my wife and I were married, she had been calling me Bhayya for years before that, and she kept calling me Bhayya afterwards. The bigger problem was that she had also been calling my mother Bhayya Di Ami, which means Bhayya’s mom. You can call your husband almost anything. You cannot easily change the name your wife uses for her mother-in-law. So a household with one name in it has many names in it. That is not a Pakistani thing. That is a family thing. I am writing this down because I am older now, and the older I get the more I understand what my parents were trying to do. They were not trying to pick the right magic name. They were trying to give me something to hold onto when nothing else was working. The names were a kind of prayer. The first one did not produce health, so they tried again. The second did not produce a path, so they tried again. The third was just the one that happened to be there when the path showed up. The path itself had nothing to do with the name. The path showed up in 1994, in a newspaper advertisement my parents put in front of me. The advertisement was for a computer science admissions opening. I went, took the admission, and fell in love with the lab. None of that was caused by being named Waqas instead of Kashaan. But I do not think any of it would have happened if my parents had not been the kind of people who renamed their child three times trying to make sure he had a chance. My father, Shafiq Khan Pitafi, was the one who finally made the decision that worked, and the decision had nothing to do with my name. He decided not to give up on me when I was sixteen and going nowhere. The slap I got from him during that period was the only one of my life. It was the smallest physical event with the largest aftereffect of anything that has ever happened to me. I started thinking about the wrongs. I conceded. What is in a name. None of mine brought any special luck. Having a good and meaningful name is necessary, but more important is what values the people around you are spending their effort to give you. Whether they are making you God-fearing. Whether they are making you forward-thinking. Whether they are imparting in you the love of humanity and the patience to be wrong about your child’s name three times in a row, and to keep trying. If they are doing that, the kid will find luck. The name will sort itself out. #identity#family#pakistan#faith Waqas Khan Pitafi Founder and CEO of DevBatch since 2010. Sixteen years building one engineering services firm, from Pakistan, now in Dallas. [Follow on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pitaficodes) Next step ## If this was worth your time, there is more of it I read every message that comes through the form. Specific asks get faster replies than open-ended ones. [Start a conversation](https://waqaspitafi.com/connect) [Read more writing](https://waqaspitafi.com/writings) Keep reading 1. [ July 6, 2026 · 3 min ## What four thousand monthly salaries actually mean I am not an inventor. I am not building something the world has never seen. 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