What’s in a name?

Why do we name people? I tried to search around on the internet to find the history of humans using names, but i couldn’t find anything conclusive. According to one website

The history of names is so ancient that no one knows the beginning of the story. Since written history began, and as far back as oral history reaches, people have had names. It is therefore impossible to do more than guess at how the earliest given names were chosen.

Since everyone else before me had done it, i too had to do it. I too had to find a name for my daughter. As i had written before, choosing a baby name is not the easiest of things to do. i didn’t want my daughter to blame me later on for choosing whatever name i had chosen. We didn’t spend a lot of time on online resources or books, as we felt that they only add to the confusion. We were just randomly guessing out names and tried to store in memory the ones which were to our liking.

Two names which stayed until the very end were Akshara and Maya. i don’t remember how i got to Akshara, but we both seemed to like it. Maya was attractive considering the fact that it had some meaning or the other in almost all languages and it was easy to pronounce/spell. i had a fancy for Mayya (meaning water in Turkish) after hearing the song (Mayya Mayya) from the movie Guru. Experts might argue that even the words “Koyya Koyya” instead of “Mayya Mayya” in that song would have been appealing because it was Mallika Sherawat singing that song, but i tend to think otherwise. Anyway, mayya was soon thrown out of the window and maya too failed in comparison to Akshara.

When we came back home from the hospital, part of the decorations included a Kesari made by Murugesan & Bhuvana. When they came to know of our choice of the name, they probably made the assumption that we would spell the name based on pure tamil alphabets and not include letters for “sh” which have been imported into Tamil. That might be the reason that the cashewnuts on the Kesari spelt Aksara and not Akshara. Nevertheless, the kesari was tasty and some quick photoshop work fixed the issue.

Yesterday was the 11th day after Akshara was born and we had a small function. I didn’t quite understand the purpose of the function as all we did was keep Akshara in the center of the room and have dinner!

But, it seems that this was kind of the unofficial naming ceremony for Akshara. This function also included putting on many jewels on Akshara including something called a “Kaappu”. After a lot of fist-fighting, we managed to put on all the stuff on Akshara. She seemed to enjoy the attention, though.