08. Name Game!

One of my friends once asked me if I want a boy or a girl. 

I said, “A girl.”

She inquired, “Why?” 

Obviously, I had a selfish reason, “Girls are daddy’s girls!” 

But over time that feeling changed. Many people came and blessed my wife saying that she is going to have a boy. Some even went to the extent of predicting a boy from the shape of her tummy. As if pregnancy was an exam and its success and failure depend on the sex of the newborn. 

It made rebel in both of us feel like we desperately need a girl. We realized that we were making a mistake, but it was a feeling that we could not get rid of. We were lucky that we had a little princess as we desired, but what if it was a boy? In our stupid desire to prove the society wrong, could we have given him justice? Our prejudice against a boy was no different from the one society, in general, has against a girl.

Lesson learnt: never try to predict the sex of the baby, you are lucky either way.

Our prejudice was so strong that we had chosen only one name, and that was a name of a girl. Considering the long list of criteria’s we had, it wasn’t an easy task. We made a list of our criteria’s and then goggled. From Indian to Egyptian, we searched all possible names and ended up with one – Hridhima.

Here goes our long list of criteria.

-        The name should start with ‘H’. All the names of babies in our family starts with ‘S’, my moms initial. It was as per my father’s wish. So, my wife wanted our child’s name to start with my dad’s initial instead.

-         We wanted it to be something that is not Bong-ish, we wanted our baby to have a name that is more Indian than a name that is state specific.

-         We wanted the name to be secular, not associated with any particular religion, like a god’s name.

-         We did not want it to be anything that is materialistic, like money, wealth, power, etc.

-         We did not want it to be a name that is easily mispronounced.

-         Obviously, we wanted it to sound good.

-         We preferred something related to happiness, smile, love or peace.

Well, never told you that it's an easy job.

After a lot of search and research we finally came up with Hridhima. ‘Hridhaya’ means heart and ‘ma’ means loving. It may not be an exact word in Sanskrit, but Hridhima, to us, meant a loving heart. And that’s what our sweetheart is called.