naming rights

Congrats to Seshu and Sangeeta on the arrival of their little bundle! Mom and baby look extremely good and we wish them the absolute best! Funnily, they gave their new baby boy the same name that is atop our short list.

As we worked through trying to find the perfect name, we explored a number of sources: baby name books, friends, obscure maps, fruits, plant types, etc. Clearly there are more options for creative girl names than boys. Actually research shows that girls with unique names seem to excel in school while boys with unique names do worse than average. I'm not sure where that research was done, but it is one small piece of information to discourage the use of a unique name for our boy.

As we narrowed our list down to the final five, we started sharing them with the extended family and friends. A few got ruled out right away due to existing associations with ex boyfriends, gangsters, etc. while a few others remain on the list. Our favorite (right now anyways) is Rohan. When we first came across that name, i had never actually heard of it, but it turns out that it is becoming a rather common Indian name in both India and here (never mind the LOTR reference).

The Social Security Administration keeps records of name popularity going back to the 1900's for the top 1000 names. Surprisingly none of the standard Indian names seem to show up (Ravi, Raj, Amithabh, etc), yet Rohan went from 999 per million in 1990 to 504 / million in 2003. Someone created a great graphical site of the same SSA data.

A part of me wants to default to a different name on our list since Seshu & Sangeeta named their kid Rohan. I think however, that is an Indian's desire for uniqueness in ones name more than anything else. Were we all Italian, the kids would probably both end up named Tony.