We did the naming ceremony of neha & nidhi on June 7th 2004 (their 3rd month in this world)
Life was hectic as hell since they were born. a few hours of continuous sleep was a dream, kids waking up at every hour of the day & night, me balancing work & life on a tight rope, doctor visits to get the vaccine shots...
In midst of all this was arranging the logistics for the naming ceremony function & more importantly spending time to choose the names. I did spend considerable time on the web searching for names.
I've seen people people spending lot of time picking name for one kid. We had a little bigger problem than that. We had to shortlist names in pairs, & chose two names that we like, that seem linked in some manner & then decide whom to give which name :-)
Apart from web, i referred to maneka gandhi's book on Indian names (borrowed from agarwal)
We ended up with a bunch of names & name pairs that we considered for a while. Here are some of them:
aadhya, ananya
ananya, anagha
siya
shravanthi
shraddha
chaitra
siri, nidhi
neha, nidhi
snigdha
neethi, nidhi
neethi, niyathi
these are the ones that I remember now. I'll add more if they pop up in my mind later or veena remembers more names that we considered.
there were suggestions & influences from everyone in the family but I & veena were the deciding authority. it is a fun exercise to find names for kids.
aadhya, ananya was the closest competitor to the final winner - neha, nidhi
ananya was a favourite name with everyone but the name was already too common by then. We had heard of too many ananyas' by then. it fell off the list for that reason & the fact that it had 3 syllables in it. We were avoiding names with more than 2 syllables cos people invariably create a 2 syllable nick name for such a name. I liked aadhya for a while but others felt it was too new & so revolutionary.
siya was deepa's suggestion. i thought it was a cute name but veena did not like it much and also we could not find another name to go with it.
shravanti was my favourite though it was breaking the syllable rule. i found it mystic & cool. it was probably the name princesses used to have. the other reason i liked it was cos it was associated with my hunch that we'll have two girls. We got to know that we'll have twins in the second month of veena's pregnancy. I still remember the grin on veena's face coming out of the scanning room and she was fluttering her index & middle fingers to tell me from far that we'll have twins. I of course did not understand her sign till she came near me and exploded "we'll have twins". Since that day i had a hunch that it'll be two girls. the hunch was more a hope also as I could not fathom dealing with twin boys. That was based on the assumption that as kids, girls are more manageable than boys. nidhi has of course disproved that assumption convincingly now. anyway that is a different story.
So i had a strong feeling that it is two girls and hence used to talk to them & refer to them as "ananya & shravanti". i used to call nidhi as ananya & neha as shravanti. As we had rejected ananya & i did not find a nice pair for shravanti & veena did not like that name as much as I did, we dropped shravanti.
shraddha is a nice name and the biggest problem with that is it sounds very similar to a bad or depressing word in Kannada (& probably Sanskrit) "shraaddha" which means death ceremony.
I don't know why languages can be so cruel.
chaitra did not gather enough momentum & did not get a pair to be a serious contender.
siri was amma's choice. I liked it cos it obeyed the syllable rule. I did not like to pair siri & nidhi though cos both mean the same thing (treasure) & the names somehow did not sound similar or connected (apart from meaning). By this time nidhi was a clear favourite & we were looking at names to pair with nidhi.
snigdha sounded cool one day & seemed like a tongue twister from second day onwards.
neethi was the pair proposed by veena for nidhi but i did not like it much. no apparent reason but just didn't like.
niyathi was a nice name & was dropped cos neethi did not make it to the shortlist.
we finally zeroed in upon neha & nidhi. neha means love & nidhi means treasure. these two names passed all our criteria.
# they passed the syllable rule,
# they have nice meanings,
# the kids were born on a Friday & my mom wanted some linkage to Lakshmi's name - nidhi met that criteria,
# they go well together,
# neha was veena's choice & nidhi was mine so each of us were feeling good about the names
And how did we decide to give the names to the two kids - good old alphabetical rule.
first kid got neha & second one got nidhi.
Life was hectic as hell since they were born. a few hours of continuous sleep was a dream, kids waking up at every hour of the day & night, me balancing work & life on a tight rope, doctor visits to get the vaccine shots...
In midst of all this was arranging the logistics for the naming ceremony function & more importantly spending time to choose the names. I did spend considerable time on the web searching for names.
I've seen people people spending lot of time picking name for one kid. We had a little bigger problem than that. We had to shortlist names in pairs, & chose two names that we like, that seem linked in some manner & then decide whom to give which name :-)
Apart from web, i referred to maneka gandhi's book on Indian names (borrowed from agarwal)
We ended up with a bunch of names & name pairs that we considered for a while. Here are some of them:
aadhya, ananya
ananya, anagha
siya
shravanthi
shraddha
chaitra
siri, nidhi
neha, nidhi
snigdha
neethi, nidhi
neethi, niyathi
these are the ones that I remember now. I'll add more if they pop up in my mind later or veena remembers more names that we considered.
there were suggestions & influences from everyone in the family but I & veena were the deciding authority. it is a fun exercise to find names for kids.
aadhya, ananya was the closest competitor to the final winner - neha, nidhi
ananya was a favourite name with everyone but the name was already too common by then. We had heard of too many ananyas' by then. it fell off the list for that reason & the fact that it had 3 syllables in it. We were avoiding names with more than 2 syllables cos people invariably create a 2 syllable nick name for such a name. I liked aadhya for a while but others felt it was too new & so revolutionary.
siya was deepa's suggestion. i thought it was a cute name but veena did not like it much and also we could not find another name to go with it.
shravanti was my favourite though it was breaking the syllable rule. i found it mystic & cool. it was probably the name princesses used to have. the other reason i liked it was cos it was associated with my hunch that we'll have two girls. We got to know that we'll have twins in the second month of veena's pregnancy. I still remember the grin on veena's face coming out of the scanning room and she was fluttering her index & middle fingers to tell me from far that we'll have twins. I of course did not understand her sign till she came near me and exploded "we'll have twins". Since that day i had a hunch that it'll be two girls. the hunch was more a hope also as I could not fathom dealing with twin boys. That was based on the assumption that as kids, girls are more manageable than boys. nidhi has of course disproved that assumption convincingly now. anyway that is a different story.
So i had a strong feeling that it is two girls and hence used to talk to them & refer to them as "ananya & shravanti". i used to call nidhi as ananya & neha as shravanti. As we had rejected ananya & i did not find a nice pair for shravanti & veena did not like that name as much as I did, we dropped shravanti.
shraddha is a nice name and the biggest problem with that is it sounds very similar to a bad or depressing word in Kannada (& probably Sanskrit) "shraaddha" which means death ceremony.
I don't know why languages can be so cruel.
chaitra did not gather enough momentum & did not get a pair to be a serious contender.
siri was amma's choice. I liked it cos it obeyed the syllable rule. I did not like to pair siri & nidhi though cos both mean the same thing (treasure) & the names somehow did not sound similar or connected (apart from meaning). By this time nidhi was a clear favourite & we were looking at names to pair with nidhi.
snigdha sounded cool one day & seemed like a tongue twister from second day onwards.
neethi was the pair proposed by veena for nidhi but i did not like it much. no apparent reason but just didn't like.
niyathi was a nice name & was dropped cos neethi did not make it to the shortlist.
we finally zeroed in upon neha & nidhi. neha means love & nidhi means treasure. these two names passed all our criteria.
# they passed the syllable rule,
# they have nice meanings,
# the kids were born on a Friday & my mom wanted some linkage to Lakshmi's name - nidhi met that criteria,
# they go well together,
# neha was veena's choice & nidhi was mine so each of us were feeling good about the names
And how did we decide to give the names to the two kids - good old alphabetical rule.
first kid got neha & second one got nidhi.
4 comments:
He he, this was a fun update.
My aunt's brother (Chikammana Thamma) has named his kids - Ananya, Arpitha
Hmm.. Shradha means dedication. I dont know why Shraadha acquires a totally different meaning.
Nice blog Srik. Keep updating.
Hmm.. nice blog.. me in front of comp today after 2 months searching thru websites for a nice name though we already have a few short listed...
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