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Baby names - trials and tribulations ...

A certain world traveling friend of mine requested my thoughts on pre and post fatherhood. Since I am still in the pre-fatherhood phase, I shall enlighten my friend with some words of wisdom as someone who is actively making all the wrong choices and the right mistakes :)

Choosing baby names can be an interesting experience. First time parents-to-be like yours truly and the wonderfully rotund mrs are often perplexed with the myriad choices for baby names. Now throw in the rigors of Indian names and you are looking at several zillion permutations and combinations that is likely to cause the parents-to-be run screaming for the exits. Thanks to my mother, I am blessed with a _long_ name. While it does inconvenience me from time to time, I have always looked upon my long name as a blessing since it pretty much guaranteed that I will never suffer from identity theft or fraud. One look at my name and most people just give up :).
So given that the baby will have at least one long name (the father's name), the mrs and I are currently sifting through several thousand names to find that perfect (and short) first name for our baby.

Do we pick a Sanskrit name which seems to be the current fashion trend? Or do we pick a traditional south indian name like Balamuralikrishna? Okay - two south indian names is probably a punishment for the little one especially in the US of A. I am guessing that we will still be looking at names when the time arrives to deliver the baby and we will end up picking something convenient like "Bob".

Comments

josephkam said…
Please not Bob. It would be too weird! You could go the Mallu way if you'd like and use a combination of two or three names. :). That would be hilarious! Anyways, here's a nice article by Tunku Varadarajan that you'll definitely enjoy on this topic.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE1D7103EF935A15754C0A96F958260
Ramanan said…
Thanks for that nice article. It echoes our sentiments to the "T". Yes of course, I was only being facetious when I mentioned "Bob" as a choice and besides, do you really think the mrs would allow me to name our child "Bob" ? Hrithik or Abhishek perhaps but not Bob :).
josephkam said…
I was pretty sure you were kidding. Bob R. Does sounds pretty interesting, actually. :)

Glad you liked the article.

We went to Cologne yesterday and today we're headed to Heidelberg. Not much time for a trip to Berlin or the Bavarian Alps. We'll do that for her next visit in December.
Swati said…
Good luck with name seraching. Luckily we hardly had any problems with choosing names :-).

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