this is amazing! all these shireens coming to my blog! shireens of the world unite! haha. you know how we sometimes say "what's in a name?" i think names do matter. well, to a certain extent i guess. i mean, if i had been named elizabeth or ariana or rachel (my parents almost named me that) or mei ling or shanti or fatima, i think life would've been quite different. i would never have met some people. whether it's through this blog,(like shireen ruth from maryland or the other shireen), or in school (i would've been pre-assigned to other classes in smu and face the probability of never meeting the friends i have now since we are assigned in alphabetical order), or..well...you get the point. and seriously, life WOULD have been really different.

after reading shireen ruth's first comment, i decided to google myself on the net. so i just typed in "shireen"and i got a whole long list of results!pages and pages! at first, i felt cheated cos i wasn't special anymore (haha!). but after that, i was amazed and amused! i was a doctor, a dragqueen, a fire-spinner, a little girl scout, a divorced woman with 2 kids, an associate professor, a nude model, an interviewer on an abu dhabi channel, a child patriot.....

some cultures take naming really seriously. my mom told me that when i was first named, my aunty had to call all the way from the states to whisper my name three times into my ear through the phone(of course i was only a baby and my own name probably sounded like gibberish to me then) before it could be announced. for my brother(pravin), there was one big ceremony because he was a boy. (phew for me!)

a name can affect a person's whole life! some parents give their children really bizarre names and it affects their whole social life in school and they are the butt of jokes. (there are always bullies and cowards.) some people can fall in love because of a name. some people slide into a bad mood at the utterance of a particular name. the list goes on and on...

well, if you ask me..really...what's in a name? i don't believe you can know a person just by knowing his/her name. then again, since names have meanings, some names are appropriately given to certain people and they seem to encompass the meaning of their names. for others, they could be sub-consciously living according to the definition of their names. (some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy maybe?) perhaps it is an interaction of both or other factors. but still, it's not different from judging a book by its cover (though we judge correctly sometimes hehe). but well, what i can say is that even your name can change the course of your entire life! even if it has changed only a BIT, it has still changed.

but if you think about it, everything plays a part in moulding the course of your life. a name is only one thing. but still, it's just mind-blowing to think that this one thing can wreak such havoc and/or create so many beautiful moments in your life! imagine the whole universe of things! all the things you know, all the things you don't know and all the things that you don't know you don't know!

thanks, shireen ruth! your mere presence here inspired the thoughts for this post. =)