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Showing posts from July, 2014

What's in a name?

Having recently been through the experience of choosing a name for my daughter, my thoughts went to the identity formed by a name. There have been careers built around the spelling to be used in name - ask the numerologists. In the traditional South Indian tradition, the sound or the syllable that the new born baby's name should start with, is decided by the way the stars align at the time of birth. It is not uncommon for parents in this part of the world to look for names that begin with "Re", "La", "Shi" or "Tha"after a baby is born. The English translation of some of these syllables is intriguing. As made popular in the movie "Chupke Chupke" about 30 years back, why are "go" and "to" pronounced so differently in English? An exact pronunciation of a Sanskrit word in English is not easy. Nowadays, more visible than ever before is the change in the spelling of the name that ostensibly makes a difference to the...