“Future foreign trips are going to be fun!” he said in a tweet that had been liked 40,000 times and received 4,000 retweets by Friday.

The comment triggered a barrage of jokes, memes, messages and interview requests, in a moment of light relief as the highly contagious Omicron variant sees case numbers surge in India.

Kapoor has joined in himself, declaring that he was been “Kovid positive since 1990” and posting a picture holding a bottle of Corona beer.

“I am Kovid that wants more travel,” the co-founder of Holidify quipped.

The sudden spurt of attention was “totally unexpected” but he hoped it would bring some publicity to his business during a “very difficult time” for the sector, he said.

Kovid is a highly unusual name in India but means a scholar or a learned individual in Hindi and Sanskrit, with the ‘d’ pronounced with a very soft emphasis.

Kapoor’s mother picked the name well before his birth.

During the coronavirus pandemic, he’s met with some unique issues, as have his friends.

While ordering him a birthday cake, the workers at the bakery assumed Kapoor’s friends had misspelled “Covid” and corrected the spelling to read “Happy birthday #Covid”.

Kapoor has never had a shortage of icebreakers at business meetings since the start of the pandemic, but has told coffee shops not to announce his name when handing him a drink. To be safe, “I mostly use a fake name now”, he said on Twitter.

He’s also had to whip out an identity card when introducing himself to disbelievers, “just to prove that it REALLY is my name”.

Despite the challenges, Kapoor says he is thankful for his name.

“It’s a memorable name with a beautiful meaning,” he said. “It makes for a striking introduction with anyone. I’d never change it.”