Wednesday, May 27, 2009

I'll have a western-world boy's names with an East Indian twist please!

Hi there,

I came across your blog and thought it was terrific. I did a few searches on your blog but could not find this topic.

My wife Pooja and I are about to have our first child. We chose not to find out the gender. I am Indian Catholic and she is Indian Hindu. In my family, we have always had Christian names and vice versa for Pooja. Choosing a name that is appealing to both of our sides is proving to be a tough compromise.

Our ideal is a name that is not too Indian for our western world, yet not too western for her East Indian culture. We were able to get a handful of girl’s names that made us happy, however, we are severely stuck on the boy’s names and there’s less than 3 weeks to go!

HELP!!! Thanks in advance for any advice,

Ian & Pooja


The title of your email made me laugh out loud. Since you are due to meet your little person so soon, I bumped you up in queue. Since you already have some girl names picked out (which I'd love to hear, if you didn't mind sharing), I focused only on boy names. I used a plain old 60,000 baby names book and went through it alphabetically, looking for names that worked phonetically for westerners but also had a neat east Indian meaning. The names are Sanskrit (S), Hindi (H), Indian (I) and Punjabi (P). I'm also including their homophones or not quite homophones for your reading pleasure. Here we go.

Alok (S) victorious cry; Alec
Ashwin (H) first; Asher, Ashton
Brahm (H) creator; Bram
Dandin (H) holy man; Daniel
Deven (H) for god; Devin, Devan
Kavi (H) poet; Kavin
Kiran (S) beam of light
Malik (P) lord; Malachi
Rohan (H) sandalwood; Ronan
Sam (short for Sameen, Sambha, Samuel)
Sandeep (P) enlightened; Sander
Shyam (I) dark; Shia
Sunder (I) handsom;, Xander, Sander
Tanvir (I) strong; Tanner
Valin (H) from Balin/mighty soldier

Of these names, my favorites are Ashwin, Deven and Rohan. I think they are easily pronouncable but unique and ethnic. We have a friend named Vijay but my son writes his name as "VJ" and I can't convince him otherwise. I've always loved the name Sachin (Sach) since college when I had a good friend by that name. Good luck choosing the perfect name for your babe. Please keep me updated!

1 comment:

Brooke said...

Excellent post! I thought the names in this were great and very fitting! I hope they like one!!!