195 thoughts on “A Desi by any other Name would smell like Me”

1. Especially if given to a Mallu child whose siblings are Paul and Penelope? 😉

   Other suggestions: Anna-mol, Kutty-anna.

2. Anna-mol sounds pretty good to me 🙂

   Anna…..don’t worry about the Trolls who’ll insist on crapping. “Desi”ness isn’t about religion, though some nuts would like the world to believe it is. Most people in India (and by this, I mean most people) don’t care, really. They have much more important things to do…like earning a living….to care. I wonder why the desi’s in the states care so much.

3. Good thing I haven’t been commenting much lately… my handle probably causes ire all around. 🙂

4. And that’s when the “confusion” first reared its shitty, unwanted head. Could I be “Indian” without being Hindu?

   I’ve had the same thought re: not speaking Hindi (and at my university, not speaking Punjabi.)

5. For what it’s worth, long before I ever visited (or had any reason or desire to visit) India I met a disproportionate number of Keralites in San Francisco, all of whom had “Christian” names. And then the only India I did visit was Kerala itself. So such names seem as “Indian” to me as any.

   Ironically, some people have assumed I’m desi because of my first name. Online only, of course – I’m blindingly pasty in real life.

6. Oh ! Boy ! what did I start. just to clarify -not that I can do anything now to redeem myself -I was responding to a post where I felt religious identity was being used unnecessarily.

   i can throw out a ” my best friend is a christian” but won’t bother. 😉

   I did learn a few things though

   1. sarcasm is not my strong suit
   2. Stay away from religion even in jest

7. complicated topic. hope it will spur informed rather than primitive comments. but i will say this, when i was a child, and less explicit about my atheism and lack of religious affiliation or affinity, i did get the distinct feeling that brown muslims were never muslim enough for arabs, turks or persians, and never brown enough for non-muslim (which usually meant hindus) browns. there are lots of angles to approach these identitarian issues, especially for those who espouse particular regional and universal identities simultaneously (ie; membership in a world religion and a local ethnic identity) though i think the central tendency of SM is to go broad church*…primitivism is a marginal end of the range….

   • obviously there are skews in terms of who actually participates in the comments or reads, but, i don’t get the feeling that anyone is explicitly excluded.

8. Now that the depths of my soul have been searched by the exceptionally gifted people on this blog and I have been declared a troll I ask you to read the full

   http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/002133.html#comments>post

   Also, read the post I was replying to

9. actually my post is

10. The brown muslims in South Asia are over 400 million and are the biggest single group in Muslims by far. You would think they would be more secure in their identity.

11. Keralites in San Francisco, all of whom had “Christian” names.

    Isn’t it funny that I have exactly the opposite prob from Anna-chechi? I’m sick of people that assuming I’m Christian b/c I’m Malayalee.

12. Speaking of names, people assume I am a jihadi/islamic radical because of my jihadi name ;). Speaking of jihad, I do know quite a few people(actually 2 now that I think about it) in the US who have ‘jihad’ as their first name…….shudders…

13. Cicatrix wishes to reveal the fact that she was not named after a Sex in the City character, by god, so would people please stop asking if that was her real name!

14. Anna,

    Very moving post : must’ve taken a lot of courage to pour your heart out like that. Very well written and lots to think about, loved the notion of hairy monsters lurking in our inner rainforests.

15. I get the same reaction from people when I tell them my name is DeCruz..

    “no way.. that’s not your real name..”

    “he’s just ashamed of his Indian name”

    Lord…

16. I did get the you-look-brown-but-your-name-doesn’t-sound-so at my University by quite a number of people. I have seen a number of Chinese students taking on western names to make it easy for people – maybe thats what caused people to assume that my name wasn’t my real name either.

    Incidentally a lot of desi Christians(or at least Catholics) that I know of, name their kids after Saints(while others look for Biblical names) most of whom have western-sounding names. Although of late a number of them are breaking away from that tradition.

17. When my daughter was born last year, we gave her an American (i.e., Biblical->French->English) name. Almost everyone we know had a question or dozen about it. Desis asked what her real name was and assumed by themselves that she was named a desi name closest in sound to her real name. Others always reacted with “so you gave her an American/Anglo name? Why not a Pakistani name?”

18. Arent most Jewish americans have taken preety much standard “american” names as opposed to their Israeli brothers ??? In Israel you here all kinds of Hebrew name. So if the Jews did it why not us ?? Good post indeed on a very complex issue.

    We all have our biases that come out in different circumstances.

19. these issues are so messed up. i mean, isn’t it kind of strange that chinese people and african christians often think “david” is a european origin name when it is hebrew-semitic? a friend of mine was at med school and he started dating this brown chick, and he was like, “by the way, her last name is ‘thomas,'” which of course told me she was probably of malayalee origin, but my friend thought it was kind of weird and couldn’t move past it 🙂

    when it comes to identity i don’t think anyone owns one prima facie in any fundamental fashion. people own things by conquest, verbal or otherwise. one of my main disagreemants with saurav when he was taking issue with the perspective on this weblog is that i don’t think anyone has a right to have their voice heard, they must shout and claw their way to the table. it’s how it’s always been, always will be.

    as i have said on my blog there are a certain subset of individuals, who i identify with, who simply cut their own self-images out of formless cultural rock. i have more affinity with confucius or hume than i do with sankara or muhammad, no matter what ancestral blood and belief implies. here in the united states a substantial number of white americans have unmoored themselves from ethnic identification and mix and match aspects of their identity however they wish too. racial-ethnic minorities do not have quite the same liberties and are not given the same choice, we are slotted into a particular box. i once had a jewish origin zen buddhist tell me sternly that my family should practice hinduism not islam because they were brown (the fact that i told him i was an atheist of course made this lecture totally irrelevant to me). but i think that non-whites who want to recreate their identity need to take a step and grasp that right vocally and without compromise, without apology.

    the history of the human race is about recreating yourself. i have had hindus tell me that they couldn’t understand how my ancestors could leave their religion and go worship a semitic sky god, but i simply responded that it is quite likely that their own ancestors (like mine) abandoned their gods of wood and water and their small sacrifies for the hindu religion with its dichotomy between folk devotion and brahmanical ritual and philosophy, and before that they probably abandoned desert gods which had no utility in their new monsoonal homeland.

    with all that being said, there aren’t 6 billion individuals in the world that we can recognize. i decided to append “the_atheist” to my handle because i’m not ready to change my name and i simply wanted people to stop assuming i was muslim. it terms of conditional probabilities it is quite reasonable to assume that someone with the name “razib” will be a believer in allah, and this weblog has gotten too popular for my fame to mitigate that perception. if i do have children i am unlikely to give them first names like muhammad or fatima in part because i’d rather not have people assume my kids were muslim (perhaps if gave them the middle names “the atheist” that would help, how does muhammad t.a. khan sound?). it seems highly likely that muhammad and fatima will be “muslim” names into the indefinite future. on the other hand, if you look at a list of byzantine emperors you note that in the early 9th century you have the first ruler with a hebraic name (michael), after which this becomes a common pattern (john and michael being the dominant ones). so over time the conditional probabilities can change….

20. it seems highly likely that muhammad and fatima will be “muslim” names into the indefinite future

    A number of Indian Christian women have Fatima as their first name. Also, women named Maria are often called Mariamma in the South which sounds a lot like Mariam (which I am presuming also has a middle-eastern influence?!)

21. The brown muslims in South Asia are over 400 million and are the biggest single group in Muslims by far. You would think they would be more secure in their identity.

    if jews had converted to christianity and preserved their ethnic identity within the religion (ie; christians who spoke hebrew and maintained some jewish customs) i strongly suspect that non-jewish christians would have a mild inferiority complex structurally because the savior was a jew.* as it is, jews rejected jesus, and no gentile people really has a good claim as being more fundamentally christian than any other. not so with islam, the arab tribes took to islam and it seems from even the islamist literature (which is more universalist than say arab nationalism) there is an implicit understanding that the people of the prophet have a special central role in the order of things.

    • there is often scholarly discussion of a conflict between jewish christian and gentile christian factions in the early church. it seems that explicitly jewish (often characterized as the church of peter and james) christians (as opposed to jewish converts to the predominantly gentile christian church) were destroyed by the roman response to the two jewish rebellions. in the case of islam, the abbassid revolt was often characterized as one of the malwalis, converts, who backed the rebellious faction because of ummayyad arab chauvinism. but in the end, even when power shifted to non-arab peoples the primacy of the arab language preserved their place in islam.

22. A number of Indian Christian women have Fatima as their first name. Also, women named Maria are often called Mariamma in the South which sounds a lot like Mariam (which I am presuming also has a middle-eastern influence?!)

    yeah, there is overlap between “muslim” and “non-muslim names.” some zoroastrians have names like faroukh, in mongolia 1/3 of the people are khans and they are all buddhist, while the vast majority of the world’s khans are muslim (by a quirk of history). and of course, semitic names often have a common root, so that there are “christian,” “jewish” (hebrew) and “muslim” (arabic) forms of names, though many arab christians simply use the arab (“muslim”) forms. even not semitic names, like “sikander” have become islamicized, sikander being the arabicized form of the greek name alexander.

    ultimate, weight of numbers matters. if all brown people named their kids “eric” and “erica” than M&M would have to change his lyrics!

23. oh, btw, i had a german american friend with the last name “gross.” since that is a common jewish american last name he often had jews assume he was jewish. he went to a catholic school (his family was catholic btw) and he got tired of jews at his dad’s country club asking him if it was hard being a jew at a catholic school.

24. Try being half-Mallu, having the last name of Abraham and having to explain to your non-desi friends why people in your family take their father’s first name as their last. It’s sometimes worse with desis who think my mom(Tamil/Kannada) is the Mallu and my dad(Mallu) is the Tamilian. But such is life.

25. I studied in a muslim minority (ironically, a term populary used for institutions in India where one specific group are majority in number) college in Chennai, where I used to wonder why my muslim friends have names like ‘Harris’. Razib’s comments gives a good explanation… Man I am awed by your knowledge. Keep up the good work.

    Somewhere I read about partition –> In the good olden days when Punjab was one. Muslims used to have ‘Hindu’ Names and viceversa

26. I don’t think there is an overwhelming “Hindus-only” attitude on SM, but I do think this site cultivates a certain competitiveness regarding who is more “Indian” that invariably causes people to make such comments when they have nothing to say (I count three directed at me since I started reading). I do, however, think there is a general disdain for Christians on this site, in part due to the evangelical nature of certain types of Christianity (in the U.S. and India), it’s vocal alliance with the “right” (and cultural anomalies such as Bobby Jindal), and ultimately, who can claim greater minority status in the U.S. and thereby moral authority. It’s a fiery mixture that seems to hit all the sweet spots here and thus, when any one of those topics come up, there’s always one or two people that love to hit the “Hindus-only”-angle via wholesale condemnation of Christians (which of course include the Indian ones). I haven’t seen it as much for Muslims, in part because the conversation about such a thing is so much deeper and does not bear the mantle of illegitimacy that so many people slap onto Christians due to colonialism…

    Personally, it irritated me when I first started posting here to have people bring religion or my “Biblical” name into the conversation, or, just spout off about Christianity. But eventually there seemed to be no point to argue with them because the number of people that believe otherwise are greater and ultimately, I don’t want to find any way to silence their comments because then there’s no way to address or see the problem.

    I appreciate that you brought this up, it’s an interesting question to ask or consider and while there’s been a lot of commentary on general attitudes, there’s been only one or two directed at the specific dynamics of this site. We should discuss it as this site is pretty much a test-tube for all kinds of things and since most of are us 1st and 2nd gen. experiments…

27. We should discuss it as this site is pretty much a test-tube for all kinds of things and since most of are us 1st and 2nd gen.

    exactly. american brown isn’t going to be made in south asian studies depts, iz going to be made by people like manish, vinod, abhi, cic and anna.

28. as i have said on my blog there are a certain subset of individuals, who i identify with, who simply cut their own self-images out of formless cultural rock. i have more affinity with confucius or hume than i do with sankara or muhammad, no matter what ancestral blood and belief implies.

    Don’t mean to be “snarky” but if that is true, why spend so much time on this blog? Thats like me going on a chinese blog and insisting to everyone that I’m not chinese.

    I’m not saying get out or anything like that obviously. Its just a curious phenomenon to see bloggers on desi blogs proclaim and insist they dont identify themselves as desi, etc.

    one of my main disagreemants with saurav when he was taking issue with the perspective on this weblog is that i don’t think anyone has a right to have their voice heard, they must shout and claw their way to the table. it’s how it’s always been, always will be.

    whoa. are you serious? Does that philosophy apply with respect to public discourse in general? Enfranchisement? Acess to public channels of discourse/benefits?

    I think we are seeing in New Orleans what every man for himself gets you.

29. My name is Santosh – no h in the middle, like some other people. It’s how it’s been since I was real tiny. Out in Texas, people drop the “h” at the end thinking it’s a mistake, and take me for Mexican. Then they ask me how come I have Santos as a first name, coz it’s usually a last name. So then the Brazilians come in and say that I’m Brazilian. When I tell them I’m Indian, they’re real happy to find an Indian guy with a Brazilian name.

    I find that it takes far too much time and results in a great deal of confusion to explain that Santosh is, in fact, an Indian name …

    And then there’s that group of Desis that berate me when they hear me being called “Santos”, and ask me why I’d want to change my name … I tell em I didn’t – everyone else kept doing it!

30. re: the mild “hinducentrism” of some commenters and such. i’m not christian, and my median attitude is mildly anti-christian,* so i’m not primed to note the bias, but i’ve seen it several times too, but decided not to say anything because it seemed like it would take the threads in directions i wasn’t willing to follow through on with a lot of argument. but, i think, to the first approximation that being a hindu** is a sufficient validation of brown authenticity, while being a christian or muslim is not. that is, hinduism is an organic outgrowth of south asian culture, the term for indian was hindu before the rise of a large self-consciously non-hindu minority of muslims in south asia. if you are hindu there is a 99% expectation you are brown, if you are muslim there is only a 1/3 expectation you are brown, if you are christian there is a less than 2% expectation you are brown. if you are brown there is a 65% chance you are hindu, a 35% chance you are muslim, a trivial chance you are chrisitan. so, to the first approximation it makes sense that hinduism gives one a prima facie imprimatur of brown authenticity. the holy places of the hindu religion are in india, and the great events of the hindu religion occurred in india, and india is sacred ground for the hindu religion. it is not sacred for the other world religions aside from buddhism (which has a relationship to hinduism).

    that being said, it seems clear that there are multiple ways one can partake of the brown american identity. neither anna or vinod are hindu, but they are enthusiastic and full participants in the social community which SM is an outgrowth of. hinduism might be a sufficient condition for brown authenticity, but it is not a necessary condition (in my opinion, i think brown amerian identity is being made, so consensus opinion will translate into fact at some point in the future).

    additionally, in america hinduism is often termed by evangelical christians a cult, it is ridiculed and mocked in a fashion that is unthinkable with judaism or even islam. i watched a 700 club show about 15 years ago where they basically argued hinduism was a demonic cult descended from the satanic religion of babylon and that it will serve as the base for the hordes of the anti-christ in the end of days. i’m not a hindu, but since i “look hindu” i’ve had people mock hinduism (usually evangelical christians) to my face frequently. now, i’ve laughed along, because i generally mock religion in general, and for every ganesh-the-elephant-god joke i will tack on a jesus-the-dead-man-on-a-stick joke, which seems to burst the jovial bubble. so it doesn’t surprise me that hindus occassionally express resentment of christian browns, because christian browns have an “in” of respectability and a “brother and sisterhood in christ” with the american mainstream that hindu browns will never have with western christians. remaining hindu imposed costs during the mughal period, and to some extent it imposes costs in the united states (a hindu piyush jindal would not have been elected to congress in louisiana, catholic bobby jindal was). all browns have probably experienced racism in the united states, but at least christian and muslim browns can assert that they don’t worship monkey gods and the like*, while i don’t know how hindus respond to these sort of queries and jokes. all this does is explain not excuse the sort of behavior that breaks out on these message boards.

    i don’t think there are black and white answers. i’ve heard brown evangelicals ridicule hindus in vile terms, and if i had a penny everytime brown muslims would talk about how dirty hindus were i’d be rich. this isn’t all muslims or christians, but the aforementioned people do call themselves the same name as people who are far more respectful.

    • no one should take this personally after all, hate the sin, not the sinner!

    ** and sikh and jain.

    *** imagine the outrage if hindu priests were sucking baby penises

    **** no offense intended, i’m actually not trying to make fun of hinduism here, just imparting the tenor of the taunts i’ve experienced.

    ***** i was a member of intervarsity because i liked to debate biblical stuff and was interested in dating korean american chix, so i met some brown evangelicals who were happy to start talking shit about hindus and how they are going to india to convert the heathen, before they found out i was an atheist of muslim familial background.

31. Don’t mean to be “snarky” but if that is true, why spend so much time on this blog? Thats like me going on a chinese blog and insisting to everyone that I’m not chinese.

    my girlfriend asks me about brown shit all the time. i got tired of it, so i check this place out partly to glean the zeitgeist and pick up on the pop culture related shit so i can give her something.

32. oh yeah, like i said, brown is being made here. i don’t have a long term stake in it (posterity and all), but i have a short term interest since my friends who are progressive and shit are interested in what being “desi” is all about and pin the label on me.

33. Its just a curious phenomenon to see bloggers on desi blogs proclaim and insist they dont identify themselves as desi, etc.

    also, i am of the philosophy that “know thyself” doesn’t actually mean just explore all the stuff that you are can relate too. it means exploring the full range of human experience, belief and passion. so yeah, i really don’t get “desi” and other assorted identities on a personal-emotional level, but it is an interesting anthropological dynamic that i enjoy watching and playing out. i mean, christians are always confused as to why i read so much of the bible and know church history, chinese people want to know why i know chinese history, scandinavians why i know so much about asatru (if they know what asatru is), neo-pagans why i know so much about lage paganism, and so forth. this is no different.

    i hope you can get a grip of that sort of mentality 🙂

    oh yeah, and of course manish and vinod are friends.

34. Hi razib:

    I like your reference to the Socratic counsel (know thyself). Can you say that your wish to study these various and (seemingly) disparate disciplines is motivated by this?

    Also, since I have children, I want to offer a bit of counsel of my own. Don’t give them the middle name “the atheist.” The unintended consequences will be more than even your impressive learning can surmise.

    Enjoyed reading your thoughts on this topic.

35. Anna,

    The man who, on learning your name, does not genuinely express his delight and tell you it is beautiful, has yet to learn the basics in life.

    When appreciation is the simple appropriate response, inquisitiveness is stupid.

36. From my “honky bitch” perspective (sorry, did anyone else see Dishad Husain’s short film on C4 last night?) 😉 with no defined culture in need of preservation, I’ve always kinda dug seeing “mixed-up” names. I’ve known plenty of Chinese and Korean-Americans with English first names. Heck, I’ve met several blondes named Maya, and I bet no one asks them what their real names are. This morning I was reading about these child computer geeks, one of whom has what I think is the perfect Brit Asian name — Piers Sharma. (yes yes, I’m sure Piers is French, but here it seems posh English)

    We’re globalized now, baby! Pick and choose! Eat your enchiladas, wear your cholis and jeans, listen to Arabic rai rap and name your kids Kwan Yin or London. 😉

37. Can you say that your wish to study these various and (seemingly) disparate disciplines is motivated by this?

    my interest in religion is definitely motivated by inability to comprehend how intelligent people could believe in such things. interestingly, i just read the synoptic gospels + john in the past few days, and i came away even more baffled on an emotional level (especially the gospel of john).

    re: the name maia/maya, it has indian and greek antecedants. i actually knew about the greek goddess before i found out my mother has a cousin by that name 🙂

38. my interest in religion is definitely motivated by inability to comprehend how intelligent people could believe in such things.

    Razib,

    I want to understand your answer.

    You are more motivated by learning about the other/s, than about yourself? Is it possible to “know thyself” through investigation of the other? This is not a merely quizzical line of inquiry. I am interested in your answer based on your experience and not on the kinds of data (very valuable) you disseminate in the course of a discussion.

    If I’m pressing here, please forgive the discourtesy.

    re: the name maia/maya, it has indian and greek antecedants. i actually knew about the greek goddess before i found out my mother has a cousin by that name 🙂

    Perhaps you know that Ananda Coomaraswamy is very good on this (cross-pollinization/parallel philosophical developments between/in India and Greece). If you can get your hands on the three volume selected papers ed. Roger Lipsey (Bollingen)you will have a mine of information.

39. “american brown isn’t going to be made in south asian studies depts, iz going to be made by people like manish, vinod, abhi, cic and anna.”

    Razib,

    That one sentence got my interest like nothing else I have read on this site did. (I have been reading it for days now)

    That is owning up to a wonderful responsibility and is very encouraging.

    This is indeed a wider thought than I read in most other posts/articles.

    Am curious about one thing though. In your view, does the identity of American Brown (I have no experience of what that means) differ from that of an Indian?

    I am not sure how you (and your friends here) perceive the difference.

    That difference (or similarity) may be key to many things.

    Am very interested in knowing how you perceive these differences(or similarities) as related to desis from desiland(namely India)

    To add to it, what takes precedence in defining the Brown American identity, the similarities or the differences, or both?

    (Warning: some logical landmines ahead.)

    Sumita, (in all sincerity.)

40. “Could I be “Indian” without being Hindu?”

    The answer is very obvious, from your blog and people’s experiences.

    Similarly, in Bush’s America, many people ask the question whether it is possible to to be American without being a Christian or a caucasian. They use the constitution ((and American History) to arrive at the answer.

    Am interested in knowing how you arrive at the answer. That process is of grat significance

    Sumita

41. Sumita, It depends on how you define ‘Hinduism’. Hinduism is India’s cultural identity, not national and certainly not political. You simply cannot shake off the cultural aspect no matter what religion you follow. As a St. Thomas/Syrian Christian I can tell you that aspects of Hinduism is found in our religion too, ask the Moslems of Indian and they will tell you the same.

    Anna, I had the same exp. “So are you Jacob or Joseph?” The easy option would have been to do what the rest of the family did, call your self, PC Thomas or PJ Joseph etc.. The more difficult option would have been to go back to your Syriac name, as in Chruch like ‘Chacko’ or ‘Ousep’ etc. followed by the family name.

42. “Could I be “Indian” without being Hindu?”

    For ‘s sake, why not?

    Annakutty dear, regardless of what you call yourself now or at any other time, we all love you 🙂

    I am getting a bit exasperated at this particular line of discussion, we seem to be building up yet another divisive wall within us brownies (as if there weren’t enough already).

43. And did I say what my current religious affiliations are?

    Salsa dancing. Yes. I’m a total Salsa evangelist. I shall spread the Salsa gospel in India when I visit this winter. Methinks some fellow SMers shall not complain 🙂

44. i don’t have a long term stake in it (posterity and all)

    Will you kill yourself if your kids turn out to be more brown than you are 😉

45. Jacob

    I am interested in knowing how Anna defines herself. Her distinction(I may be entirely mistaken here) between religious and cultural identities was not very clear to me.

    Your response is very clear and makes a lot of sense to me. However, as you will soon discover,(after your post) there are those who will disagree with you vehemently.

    This disagreement is of interest to me. It is not as simple as it seems

    Sumita

46. Razib wrote: the name maia/maya, it has indian and greek antecedants

    I always thought it was Indian and, like, I dunno, Aztec or something. 🙂 Some googling gives me definitions and baby name sites claiming it’s also Spanish, Russian, German, Hawaiian and Japanese! I’m sure there’d be more if I kept looking. 🙂

    There’s a girl’s name that’s spelled the same in Hindi and Celtic (but pronounced differently) that I’m saving up should I ever manage to have any half-brown babies, some day in the distant faraway future. 😉

47. There’s a girl’s name that’s spelled the same in Hindi and Celtic (but pronounced differently)…

    Kiran/Keiran?

48. No, I’m not telling you, I’m saving it! 🙂 That’s interesting, but not the one I’m thinking of. Of course now I’m curious how many there might be…I remember being surprised that me and my Indian friend both have younger brothers named Neal/Neil.

49. Freckled and proud

    “Maya” as in the aztec reference is not the same as the others. First of all, Aztec and Maya are regional manifestations of probably the same civilization(by one theory) which had Asian origins. Some accounts also localize this migration from South East Asia. (this is unconfirmed but wonder what genetic data would bring up)

    But Maya in this regard actually stands fo Ma-ja(thats how its really pronounced) which stands for “me no more.” When the Spanish burnet their manuscripts, the mayans exxclaimed this, thereby creating an identity. Before this they did not identify themselves in any other collective form other than tribes.

    Its interesting an external aggression created a (non) identity.

    This history lesson was a recent benefit of a decadent caribbean vacation (and resulatant research). Could not resiste the urge to share it.

    Sumita

50. No, I’m not telling you, I’m saving it! 🙂

    No way… that’s not fair.

    I remember being surprised that me and my Indian friend both have younger brothers named Neal/Neil.

    Yes.. I have a cousin Neal too. I know of at least one Maia with no sepia ancestry incidentally.

    Unfortunately my name doesnt cross the divide so well – I could put it in greek – that would be Ouranos – sky, water etc. – still the same. And no… Uranus doesnt quite do the same thing. 🙂