"Russia cries" . " Russia has gone to school and Russia has finished her home assignment". Sounds odd. Nothing to be surprised. In India children are the victims or saviors or the ambassadors of cultures and countries for parents who name their kids after their political/cultural and many more affiliations. Thus many children born in the 1960's and 70's were named as Russia and China by the parents who loved communism. In my region I have at least two Moscows. While giving names of countries to kids gender is not an issue as Moscow can be either a girl or a boy. One may be surprised why Indians are so fond of such names but as a new born old nation eats,walks, drinks and breathes politics. So the initial periods of the free India saw millions of kids named after Gandhi and Nehru and the kids who were named as Gandhi had to shoulder lot of responsibilities and tread carefully in their words and deeds as expectations would be very high from the community of friends and relatives. Many a times one comes across news items proclaiming 'Gandhi arrested and sent to jail' may be strange for the reader but the accused is convinced that Gandhi too was arrested by the British and incarcerated for long spells albeit for different reasons.
But at times parents go overboard politically like the following ones. In 1975 India saw the Emergency declared by the late Prime minister Indira Gandhi by bringing in MISA, (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) , a provision enshrined in the constitution of India for emergency situations. Thousands of political activists of the opposition parties were jailed. They had to spend at least a year inside the prison walls. Such leaders and activists who were jailed named their kids who took birth during that period as MISA Bharathi or MISA Sharama. Now those kids are in their late thirties and enjoy or suffer their father's political adventurism. But their names in applications, especially the passports, are not expanded but simply they put Misa Gayathri, other wise they have to write Maintenance of Internal Security Act Gayathri and their fathers' names too as per the Indian custom. But I have come across kids named as Sirai Selvan ( Sirai menans jail) too. Here one more thing that strikes our minds is that the mother has no role in this big affair. The women who carries the baby in her womb for 9 months has no say in naming the child.
Nothing wrong in having Kennedy's and Shakespeare's in a distant Eastern Land. Similarly the kids here were named after historical, ,puritanical, puranical characters and so on. But again there is a custom of naming their kids after celebrated and venerated cities and towns. In the south of India the name Kasi's are common ( named after the pilgrim town of Kashi in the north) and Rameswar in the north (name of the pilgrim town of Rameswaram in the south) and kids do get names after rivers and mountains too. Cauvery , Ganga and Narmada fall under the rivers category. In Chennai Elumazhai is so common after Tirupathi the most popular pilgrim destination of Indians meaning Seven Hills.
But you see names do matter in certain countries just as the following one in Saudi Arabia and in the U.S how the persons with Islamic names have to undergo severe frisking in Airports.
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