What's in a name?

What’s in a name?

It depends
– if you are someone who convults parent given names to weird unpronounceable spellings that should change the life of the so named for a charge it is your bread and butter
-if you are a superstar who’s claim to fame is not just good acting and histrionics but a cult name like Rajinikanth it can be your calling card
-if you are a believer of misspelling or respelling the name will bring an riches and what not, it can be the passport to something else
-if you are sufferer when people who cannot for the world of it pronounce it with the same good meaning given by your parents and end up murdering it to new levels, it can be a cross for a life time
-if you want an extra term of endearment to your loved ones and end up with an official name and a pet name so even at your wedding you may have a card that read XXX a.k.a YYY it can be an often unwanted excess baggage
-if you want to be relatively anonymous or a change of image for professional reasons like a nom de plume then it can be a mask
-if for want of remembering a major part of the family tree you end up with the names of the dearest grand parents and grand folks ending up with a first name, middle name, surname and some next to middle names in between it can be a head ache
-if you are a celebrity then it means endorsements
-if you are a felon then it is something to be hidden
-if you end up with a name that can confuse your religious antecedents like mine, it can be the start of many curious conversations


The list goes on but none of this came to mind when D and me were name hunting for our to-be born baby. We had two lists and after much deliberation I let D have the final say. We found to our chagrin that what is sounding good to us will sound good to others too and found that we were beaten to the race to name by kids born before September 16th. September 16th narrowed the list to the girl baby list only and we had decided that we will have two names only a Baptism name and the other a Tamil name. Trinity was a no brainer as it was a favourite of D and she blogs under the same name as well. And it was a rather uncommon name except for the fact that D’s friend by the same name has a girl called exactly that a year ago so we were actually beaten but we refused to throw in the towel. WE said that the second name will be equally unique and I wished to include the letter “ZH” in it and we wanted our daughter to be musically inclined so Yazhini it was. To those not in the know Tamizh has the “L”, “LL”, “ZH” three distinct sounds that usually get massacred and misused by people of poor instruction. To a non Tamizhian it can be a tongue twister and I heard that M.K. Azhagiri made the supreme sacrifice recently and converted to MK Alagiri after his name sounded out like a Soviet name in the mouths of fellow Parliamentarians. But I digress here, the point is our daughter is Trinity Yazhini and mum will take it upon herself to help anyone finding her second name difficult to pronounce with language classes.
As early as 4 months Trinity Yazhini responded to both names so it was worth the effort.

What’s in a name the bard said, a rose by any other name… I disagree.