What's in a name??

Mummy , the first word i ever uttered and the only name i associated with my mom for the first four years of my life.. at the tender age of four and a half ,reality shattered through my bubble when i found out mommy wasn t her name .... it was falguni.I remember telling my grandma she was mistaken and chastised her for not knowing better. For two days i was in denial and then came the stage of acceptance.. followed by a few more shocks when i found out papa was actually surinder and nani was not naani... oh the horrors a four year old s tender feelings endured ....who would ve thought ???

QWERTY the first six letters on the keyboard....... i remember using a typing program in high school called qwerty, for me, it was just an odd name .. i never did realise its significane till 8 months ago, and then my world changed...Nowadays, i feel we often think too much about names and their meanings... the significance atttached to them rather than about the person being addressed... I ve heard names dating back to the ancient times of mahabharata and the ramayana... krishna , arjuna, ram , most of them are very poppular today.... My own name for instance, Tanvi, was at the height of its poppularity in 1985, the year of my birth, when the actress tanvi azmi had just made her mark on the indian cinema..i guess my parents were not very original, either that or as my grandmother puts it they lacked imagination... a few months ago when i asked them, “why tanvi???”, my dad told me, “ it was either that or saraswati???” i mean, no offense to anyone, but,I dfinitely don t look like a sarawati?? and from then on i decided i liked my name , but it also fuelled an obsession in me to find the most different and exotic names, i guess i too had became a slave to the norms and mores of society.

For most of us names are an identity, a dimension of our personality, that defines us and gives our character a strength.. who would take a teacher called chaman or a super hero called fish seriously....?
from chat id s on the internet to names of babies ... evryone is on a quest to find the best and .the most striking names ever. Online, you are overwhelmed by a barrage of requests from vampire_slayer 49
and hercules246 only to find out that their real names are actually gopal and raju...
parents are calling their babies, Barbie and romeo .... and yes i too fully intend to name my children something exotic ... but all the near normal names i could think of are taken
and as of now my top choices for a boy would be Ischial tuberosity and Patella and for a baby girl scapula and acromion... limited as my choices are, i feel these anatomical terms would figure perfectly in todays world .... where kids are named Rain,brooklyn (bridge) , london, paris, apple , sky and even ryce ( thats pronounced rice as in the white stuff you eat with rasam). So, i don t think scapula and patella would be ridiculed in 6th period biology where everyone would be discussing bone markings...
Even dogs these days have human sounding names , an uncle of mine kept complainin about Saiba not being toilet trained.... Saiba as it turned out was a 4 month old labrador pup.
Sadly,Till now the most exotic near normal name , my overactive but little used imagination could muster up was Raina, and even that is not striking , just less common than geeta, vinita and rita.

Since all the celibrities are naming their kids cool sounding names like maddox and pelican i don t think i d be considered crazy to name my child after bones, for i fear that day is not far when we would have people called table and chair for the lack of more creative names.
Do you think I would get away with calling my kids Udupi and endpoint?? coming to think about it i remember my sisters birth, i remember a barrage of aunties claiming to have the perfect name for her, and i also remember how i added my two cents also to their discussion....... seeing how people were called sita and ram... i had decided to champion the cause of the underdogs, to my mothers horror i had chosen the name hanuman for my baby sister, for the first few months i called her hanuman, hanu for short and would happily inform any visitor with a smile to call her justthat. Eventually i conceded to call her alisha after my mom reasoned that hanuman was a boy name not a girley one. But nowadays names transcend even gender... there are girls called mike and boys called mike.. just by adding an e or a y ...robin can become a feminine robyn, and daniel can be danielle.. could it get any more confusing???

Even naming our magazine was a herculean task , all the good names were taken and the rest were well... not good enough. There had to be an easier way i thought....And these were the times i wishes we were all Red indians, who named the babies due to their qualities (red face , white dove) not expected their children to grow into the names. There had to be someway of finding a name that was different yet not bizzarre enough to draw snickers from the sidelines.. i even came across a website called namesforall.com which advertised four guaranteed good names for any category you chose ( baby girl, boy, softwares, events dogs ,.....) all at only rs.599... Now, why would i want to waste 600 rs on an unborn child or an unpublished magazine????
and after all this madnes and rut I think it was much better when i did not care about names and when i was too young to notice mommy was falguni and falguni means spring ( the season Spring..... not the coiled metal wire ) As shakespeare said ... whats in a name?
But i am still looking... any suggestions??