Parents (and elder family members in erstwhile joint families) put in lot of efforts to find suitable, apt names for their newly born in conformity with religious, cultural and auspicious traditions. Ceremonial ‘naam-karan’ functions are held with much fanfare in households to give official sanctity to chosen name. As son of Bengali parents, I’m told there’s family history attached to the name (derived from Lord Shiva) given to me.
The trends moved with times from the traditional ‘Devi-Devtas’, ‘Literary Figures’ and Freedom Fighters’to other options -those inspired by role models from various fields speciallyiconic ones. As the famous story goes, ‘God of Cricket’ got his name ‘Sachin’ since his Dad was a huge fan of the legendary composer ‘Sachin Dev Burman’.The, young Kiwi cricket icon ‘Rachin Ravindra’ of Indian origin got his name as a combo of two batting greats Sachin and Rahul Dravid. In many KBC episodes besotted with their idol Big B in front, some contestants claim they got their identity from his name or his son, Abhishek’s. There are similar stories abounding in the social media of other stars.
We’ve thus far spoken of strong male names our boys are bestowed with and that’s so chauvinistic. In reality the names given to our girls have a much more ethereal, lyrical, musical note to them, borrowed as they also are from domains of art, drama, literature, music, dance. Yet the modern parent looks for the more exotic& ethnic. As a Senior citizen with grown up progeny, advent of grand-daughters is much welcome and since yesterday I suddenly discovered a dozen names that our children could put into use !
There’s a lot of preference for the names with letter ‘S’ (it’s seems auspicious) – we have ‘Smriti’, ‘Shefali’, ‘Sneh’& ‘Sree Charani’ ! Looking for the name that begins early in alphabets, we have ‘Amanjot ‘ & ‘Deepti’ and the reliable sounding ‘Harman’ to begin with ! If you preferpetite short names, we have ‘Richa’, ‘Radha’ & ‘Pratika’ but if you’re looking for something jewel-like, we have ‘Jem’ (short for Jemimah !). How did we so quickly get so many wonderful names for girls. These are the ‘World Champions’ of Women’s Cricket, who at stroke of 2ndNov midnight created history in and for India !
Finally as we now say ‘Behind Every Great Woman is a Manstanding there to Support’ Let’s not forget a redoubtable, soft spoken Coach who’s name begins with ‘A’ – Amol !
Working on Living 