What's in a name?

My friend Sandeep was on phone today evening informing me that he has named his newly born baby girl as Rwidhi. Rwidhi in Sanskrit means Wealth, Good Fortune and Prosperity. A good selection for a girl name, unique and unheard. Infact he wanted a very rare and unique name to his daughter and the name was rare enough that it returned only 8 results in Google search!

Finding names for babies are often an exciting, yet cumbersome process. It is hard to choose good and suiting names for babies when there are thousands of names, which includes Indian names, Foreign names, Sanskrit names, and lot more.

Gone are those days of children who were called Babumon, Krishnankutty, Ajith/Anil/Rajesh/Suresh Kumar(s). Now unique names are becoming popular.

Few years ago there was a craze in selecting names starting with the letter 'A'. If you go to a Kindergarten now, you will find 75% of the children having names like Abhishek, Ajit, Abhay, Abhilash, Amal, Anoop, Ashok, Anjali, Amrita, Akhila and so on

The newest trend is to find Mythological names with specified meaning mostly from Sanskrit. Parents compete to name their child with unique names which are not heard anywhere. These often results in children having unusual names and uncommon spelling combinations when written in English (Sanskrit is not the primary or secondary language of instruction in India).

I remember watching a popular reality show in television last month. While introducing a participant, I heard the honourable judges who are music maestros failing to pronounce the name of her. She had a rather unique name 'Sapjnadevi' (സംജ്ഞാദേവി)* . MG Sreekumar called her സപ്നജ, Shareth called her സപ്ന, Chitra called her ദേവി. The celebrity judge Swetha Menon, was the only one who could pronounce the name correctly (eventhough she speaks Manglish) . The girl who was horrified hearing variants of her own names then had to tell them the etymology of the name - 'Samjna (സംജ്ഞ) is the name of the wife of Soorya deva as per Hindu mythology'. The letter 'P' caused problem here. If you want your child to become a 'Star Singer 2029 or 2030' or so, drop the 'Idea' now itself.

Rare and unique names are good to recognize and to remember. They are wonderful when chosing an username on the internet. But living with a name which is rare and unique will not be always comfortable. Being the holder of a uncommon foreign name "Godwin", I had to atleast tell and spell my name twice to the people I met for the first time. If my name was something like Raj or Rahul it would have been easy for me to avoid those weird expressions in the name-seekers I met.

Let it be modern or traditional, sanskrit or bengali, a child should be "named with a name" which should not invoke a second query like (ങേ) from a stranger.

*( It took 20 minutes for me to type this name in Malayalam using Keyman software)