Life post #3

Now I realize this is getting to be more than you bargained for. But am going to make you sorry you asked about my personal life and swear to let me be.

Nyways, another one of the anxieties of parenthood (or hopefully soon to be parenthood, but not too son that its before the expected date) is that it makes you superstitious and anal. Even a super logical guy like me makes sure that everything he says (or blogs apparently) is safe. I have found myself correcting my sentences, and adding an ‘*’ with conditions apply followed by a long annexure of ‘subject to’ clauses.

Anyway, today’s post is about the bigger anxiety. That of having to think of a name for your kid. As I had said earlier, gender determination is illegal, so we have to shortlist a boy name *and* a girl name…. (we aren’t too big on gender neutral names… like Kiran for example)

Deciding on the girl name was not a decision at all. I had decided the name as long ago as 2003. What’s the name? Many of you reading the blog, would already know. And the others, maybe you will find out real soon.

And since I got to decide the girl name, Sandhya got to the power of veto for the boy name. A fair bargain I guess. So she made a list of names which were :

* Modern

* Uncommon

* Region Neutral

And I added the following conditions

1.  Should go well with his last name

2.  Cannot be easily ‘manipulated’ into an insulting nickname

3.  Sound ‘good looking’

Now, (1) can be easily explained. In my jaat, we do not have a last name. We use our dad’s name as our  last name. My name is Vikram Mohan. My dad’s Mohan Seshadri. My neice is called Samiksha Vijay. So logically my kid’s last name would be Vikram…. a really sucky last name to have admittedly. But more on this later. The girl name, btw, so totally goes with her last name.

As for (2), allow me to give you an anecdote. I had a classmate called S Prem, he would spend most of his school life as ‘sperm’. I think I made my point here.

Condition (3) is a tough one. What’s a ‘good looking’ name?. Some names conjure up a decent looking face in your imagination while some are better left alone.

So how do I come up with a ‘good looking’ name? Ideally a nationwide survey would be nice. But I took the easy way out. I put up each name proposed by Sandhya on google images and saw the mugs that it spat out. Once I showed her the faces of the possible namesakes, she vetoed it herself. (smart eh?)

We have more or less decided on the guy name too. I have run it through my family and though the results are not highly encouraging, we might stick with it. You would have guessed by now that I am not going to tell you the name (its supposed to be bad luck). But I will let you have a look at the mug shots of the namesakes from google images. Who knows, maybe you might actually know (or be)one of them and guess the name yourself.

Girl namesake faces:

 

 

 

Boy namesake faces:

 

 

 P.S. If you are indeed one of the people featured above, sorry for picking up your photo from the web. If its any consolation, both me and the wifey think you look decent enough to want to name our kid after you. :-)