All my life, I constantly met people who asked me this same question: Are you a Mongolian? That is because my name has Khan in it.

Their wonder most probably came from the story of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, and I dunno what other Khans there were in Mongolia.

Today, I had a meeting with a client who is a real, true-blue Mongolian! He asked me what my name was. I told him Anees Khan. I felt weird telling a Mongolian this. I was half-expecting him to ask me, oh, are you a Mongolian too. But, surprisingly, he just wrote down the name, and moved on to other topics.

Then, later on, since my head will explode if I don’t ask him, I decided to query him about my name and why he never asks me that common question, since he himself is a Mongolian. Then he dropped a very revealing bombshell: Nobody in Mongolia is named Khan!

He said Khan means emperor or king. No one will name their kids that. What an eye-opener. Now, I got something to tell the next person who comes around and ask me that same old question: Are you a Mongolian?