COVID-19 Inspired Baby Names Catching Parents’ Fancy

By Aashish Mishra

Kathmandu, Apr. 10: There was a brief respite from all the gloom and doom of COVID-19 this week when news broke of an Indian couple naming their newborn twins ‘Corona’ and ‘Covid’. This follows a similar incident last month when a mother from the Philippines named her daughter ‘Covid Bryant’.

And it seems that these aren’t the only pandemic-themed names making their debut in 2020. Parents all over the world are reportedly naming their kids anything from ‘Kovyd’ to ‘Pandemica’ to ‘Quarantina’ to even ‘Coviduvidapdap’.
So, with corona-inspired names becoming popular internationally, are Nepali parents getting in on the thing? Well, Prahlad and Roji Rajaure are two parents who are. The couple are expecting birth within April and they promised to name their child ‘Lockdown’ if the current lockdown isn’t lifted until its birth.

“If we have to give birth during the lockdown, then for sure we are naming our child Lockdown,” Prahlad said. However, his wife Roji did not seem too fond of the plan and stipulated a condition. She said, “The child will only be called Lockdown if it is a boy. We will not name our daughter that.”

Well, not to worry. The global epidemic presents a wide range of choices for naming your daughters too, according to Pushpa Pokharel. Doctors have given Pushpa and his wife a due date of April 21, but they are expecting their child to be born sooner than that. And Pushpa has already thought of the names.
“Ekanta (Isolation) if it’s a boy and Wuhan if it’s a girl,” the soon-to-be dad excitedly said, “I could name my daughter Sanny (in relation to ‘sanitizer’) too.”
Pushpa even has a backup plan in case his family disapproves of his choice of names. “Coruna,” he said, proud of his trickery, “It would be related to Corona, but it sounds like Karuna so I might get away with it.”

Asked if they were joking, both the Rajaures and the Pokharels said that they were not and insisted that they would follow through with the names.
“We might end up giving them a second name, for official purposes, but these will be the names we will use to call them at home,” said Pushpa while Prahlad and his wife said that ‘Lockdown’ would be the official name for their son which would be featured in his birth certificate.

The current pandemic and the ongoing lockdown aren’t particularly happy times and the whole world is eagerly waiting for this crisis to be over. But still, these parents and especially the fathers aren’t hesitant about associating their children with this emergency.

Pushpa explained why. “We want to remember the difficult circumstances that we endured to bring our child into this world and we want our baby to always think about how fragile life is and never take it for granted.”
Prahlad also didn’t think that what they were doing was that unique.

“People have always named their children after memorable and life-changing conditions that surrounded their birth,” he said. “In Nepal too, people named their kid Sambidhan (Constitution) during the elections for the Constituent Assembly, there are children named Bandh (Closure) and Andolan (Movement) because they were born at such times; this will be the same.”
To support his point, Prahlad showed numerous tweets and Instagram posts about people, inside and outside Nepal, naming their children COVID-19 influenced names.

If people’s social media posts and news reports popping up from various parts of the world are to be believed, it seems that a generation of children might grow up with these names that are truly “distinctive” and of “global proportions”.

– The Rising Nepal

Next Post

Chinese Ambassador To Nepal: Work Hand In Hand To Win Battle Against COVID-19

Fri Apr 10 , 2020
TweetBy Gong Yingchun Hou Yanqi, the Chinese ambassador to Nepal, […]

Health Tips