Most non-Indians have the same habit! It's called a dysfluency because for a moment your speech stops flowing (fluent literally means "flowing freely"). And Codeswitcher's answer is correct; these are often referred to as filler.
Of course, we don't usually write this sound down, but when we do we usually spell it uh, not a. Even though it sounds like the indefinite article, we don't spell it like that because it's not being used as an article. Some speakers of non-rhotic dialects spell the same sound er—since they don't pronounce /r/ in this position, er and uh describe the same sound.
You can find it in a few dictionaries under uh. They typically list it as an exclamation or an interjection, and from time to time you'll find people saying uh on purpose to indicate that they're at a loss for words (even if they aren't really):
Alice: How do you like my new hat?
Bob: It's, well, uh, er, um . . .
Bob is indicating that he can't think of anything nice to say. Poor Alice!
Preface ADDED 14 Jan/Jan 14, 00:11 GMT/UTC: This answer, as the OP Lucian Sava is well aware, has been written from an AmE perspective. Actually, it is written from the perspective of the variety of AmE that I speak. I think Lucian gets by now that English usage is not universal, as I had already indicted in my anwer. Let the conversation continue, by all means!
Serpentine is fine, but in English I am pretty sure we would use it as an adjective describing the road. Such a road is also called, in familiar terms, a curvy mountain road. More technically, it is any road that contains many switchbacks or hairpin curves
Switchback can refer to entirety of such a road. But this may not reflect universal usage.
I think serpentine (adjective) would be the more universally recognized word.
You can do an image search for both "switchback road" and "serpentine road" and get many of the same images.
Thus saith the snake:
![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/T1sne.jpg)
![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wbec8.jpg)
![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RWyU9.jpg)
Best Answer
The image depicts a "height ruler." To be more precise, it is a wall-mounted height ruler. Friendly decoration on a height ruler is common in a pediatric (kids) doctor's office. The photo shows a person taking the height measurement of a child.
A "height chart" is group of data points (height) taken over time and plotted on a chart or graph. Many families will make a chart of their children's growth by marking a door frame with a pencil and making note of the individual child's initials and the date.
Of course there is no reason that a person cannot use the depicted ruler as a chart as well by recording the height on the ruler. There is no way to tell if this is happening in the photo, but I don't see a writing implement in the man's hand.