I came across an interesting article in the daily news paper. A couple asked for suggestion for their yet to be born baby! Many people suggested names with their "googlabity value". Roughly speaking, the word refers to the quality of being easy to be located by search engines, specially www.google.com. They started describing how the name should be good for searching in google, it should be specific yet similar to some keywords, so that it can be well accessed by any search engine and all.
This is today's scenerio. I remember something my late grandma told me regarding this naming buisness of babies in old times. Lack of proper hygine, no understanding of ailments and diseases, blind believes lead to death of maximun babies. So, people believed in giving very odd and bad names to their children believing that Yamraj (God of Death) less prefers bad and ugly names. I just laugh while remembering some of the most given names at that time like Bantia (Vomit), Thupa (Saliva), Pecha (Unshaped) etc. All of these are names given to the male gender. The girls' names are more hilarious. Makhi (Small fly), Khani (wobbly mouth), Kalia pudi (tar- black), Nikha (egg of head lice) etc. People also believed in mutating ceratin parts of body of the babies just in a believe that they will not end up loosing the baby. They tried everything from ear piercing, cutting of one of the finger or tip, tatooing to skin burning by hot iron rods etc. Sounds horrible. But it existed in ancient orissa according to my grandmma.
How contrasting! What an improvement? Bad names to names with high googlabitity value. Certainly we are eating our share from the platter of computers and new technologies.
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