What is in a name?

What is in a name? Very much if the wit of man could find it out.

This small writeup is about selecting name of a child based on her birth nakshatra. This is to be used during namakarana samskar, an important ceremony that is performed after 10th day of birth of the child.

The idea is to find out the birth nakshatra and nakshatra pada, and name the child according to the starting letter specified in the list below.

While using this methodology, there are two problems:

• The starting letters are too vague and most of the time no good names begin with the letter. E.g., I was born in PurvaFalguni Nakshatra, 2nd Pada. Hence my name is supposed to begin with "ta". One of the names that I could be given was "Tarzan". Nope, nothing doing… In the end, good sense prevailed and my parents did a decent job in choosing my name
• The list is so small that it can cause tremendous amount of duplication.

To find out the starting letter of child’s name, look her Nakshatra and Nakshatra Pada up on birth chart generator page. Then come back to this page and look at the list. The letter to choose corresponds to the Pada. e.g. If Nakshatra is Purva Falguni, Second Pada, then the starting letter of the name should be "Ta" as it is second in the list. Similarly, if the Nakshatra is Anuradha, Third Pada, then the name should begin with "Noo" because it is third in the list. If you still have some doubt, please add a comment to this blog, or send me an email at "vedic dot astrology at gmail dot com".

I have had a lot of visitors to this web site complaining that they are not able to view this list in one browser or the other because IE and Firefox are not always able to display Indic fonts properly. To solve all the problems once and for all, I have generated the list as an image and have stuck it to this blog.