Skip to main content

Named After Typo

I woman of my acquaintance has a son she has named Alvil. Not being familiar with the name, I asked her what it meant. There was a certain pharmaceutical ring to it to my ears at least. She told me it meant "bravery and valor" but was not sure of the exact etymology or even the language.

"So how did you find the name" I asked her. "On the internet" she replied. This woman is hardly the most net savvy person I know, but doing a Google search on "boys names" is a no-brainer. I am sure she gets strange looks from people when they hear her son's rather unusual name. To a lot of people like her the internet's veracity is a foregone conclusion. They don't feel the need to verify or corroborate.

I hope for her sake and the boy's that someone was not exercising their right to be an idiot when they wrote up a post about Alvil and that it is a real and meaningful name.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi there,

Came across ur blog yesterday and haven't been able to do anything useful since. After reading a few posts, I decided to start from the start. If you have some tracking widget installed, just wanted to assure you, I am not here to stalk you. I am just a regular sub urban desi mom of a 3 year old. I am wasting my life working in analytics too :-)
Your posts have this ability to make someone want to know you better..I am just catching up with the past ones, once that is done I won't come across as a stalker.

Take care
5:34 PM
Anonymous said…
What made me comment on this particular post was to tell u that I know a girl of desi origin who has named her son Avkash (means holiday in hindi). She says, it means 'without an end' but I always wonder if Aakash was the word she was looking for.
5:39 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more