The Names…
Posted: 14/08/2009 Filed under: Personal | Tags: naming, wolkenkinder Leave a comment »On August 3rd, 2009, Francesca and I had twin boys. Here’s the email I sent out to announce their names.
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Dear friends and family,
Francesca and I want to thank you all for the kind and moving emails, phone calls and gifts both prior to and since the birth of our twin boys on Monday, 3rd August – if you didn’t receive the original birth announcement, my most abject and contrite apologies. We’ve (all of) our hands full right now – it’s 0430 – so this is the last mass email blast before we try to respond gradually to all your messages individually. We’re particularly appreciative since a number of you have your own time-consuming challenges to face at the moment, and it’s at times like these when the value and meaning of friendship becomes all the more apparent.
To recap: Twin A was born at 2.50pm (New York Time) weighing in at 6lbs 3oz, and Twin B a minute later, weighing 5lbs 8oz – both lost a fair bit of weight in the first week, but we’re fattening them up again slowly. A is fairer, has chestnut brown hair and – for the moment – blue eyes, and has the profile and demeanour of a Roman emperor (hence his current nickname Augustus, though if you saw him feed, you might be more inclined to pick Caligula). B is browner, has silvery-brown eyes, black spiky hair, and looks variously like a manga character, Sonic the Hedgehog and me. Francesca did amazingly, is recovering well and is enjoying being back on coffee and sushi.
So people keep asking what their names are… In the USA, you’re generally supposed to have the names sorted within 24 hours of the birth, unlike in the UK, otherwise the kids are perceived as a security threat and immediately hooded and shackled. We managed to push this to 96 hours, through repeated references to the need to consult Vedic astrologers “in the ancestral village in India”, and asking the Birth Registrar whether she had seen The Namesake. Naming can be nerve-racking. Naming boys more so. Naming two requires the assistance of crowd-sourcing. The names we picked needed to reflect in full the Indo-Celtic-Swiss-Italian-Italian Separatist-Kenyan-London heritage that we together possess, that both families wholeheartedly approved of, and that would reflect some of our deepest moral, intellectual, culinary and technological values. So, after the birth, we took a few days to roadtest some of the naming strategies we had lined up:
–> baby name books – yielding many gems, including my personal favourites, “Paki“, which apparently means “witness” in Xhosa, and a Native American name I can’t remember meaning “deer contemplating eating wild onions”
–> every artist or filmmaker or writer we have ever liked – meaning we nearly ended up with Bacon and Eyquem Padania
–> our favourite brunch items – Rothko and Bacon (I like Francis Bacon and I eat bacon – OK?)
–> aforementioned Vedic astrology, determining the appropriate initial syllables for the boys’ names according to the exact time of birth
–> names we liked for veiled, mysterious reasons
So we weighed all this very seriously. And then we went for names we liked. Introducing…:
A –> Paras Mitra Silvani Padania (Paras Padania)
B –> Miro Siddharta Silvani Padania (Miro Padania)
If you’re interested, here’s some linked background on Paras Mitra and Miro Siddharta (I didn’t expect to have three conversations about the Mithraic mysteries in a week, so it seems that many of you are closet bull-worshippers. Taureans reprazent.)
We hope you like the names, and that you get to meet/know their bearers in the coming months and years.
Sameer
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