Kovid Kapoor, an Indian entrepreneur known thanks to the crisis

“My name is Kovid, and I am not a virus”. This is the first sentence of Indian entrepreneur Kovid Kapoor’s Twitter profile, which is causing a stir on social media. In a message “liked” 40,000 times and retweeted by 4,000 people, this boss of a 31-year-old travel start-up explains that he had traveled abroad this week for the first time since the start of the pandemic, and that his first name had “amused a lot of people.”

Went outside India for the first time since COVID and got a bunch of people amused by my name. ????

Future foreign trips are going to be fun!

— Kovid Kapoor (@kovidkapoor) January 4, 2022

A name that breaks the ice

“My future trips abroad are going to be fun! He says. His comment sparked an avalanche of jokes, “memes”, messages and even interview requests, introducing a bit of levity into a distressing subject, as the number of Omicron variant infections increases in India. Kovid admits that he hopes that all this publicity will reflect on his business, which is in difficulty like all those in the sector. And adds that if his first name helped him break the ice in the meetings, he asked that his first name not be announced in the cantonade when he goes to order a coffee.

Kovid, which means, in Hindi and Sanskrit, a scholar or an educated individual, is a first name that is not widely used in India. His mother, he explained, had chosen his first name long before he was born. “It’s a memorable name with a beautiful meaning,” he said. “He makes an impression when I introduce myself. I wouldn’t change it for the world ”.