A few days ago, poor little baby Nutella managed quite a spread in newspapers across the world when a French c... Read More

CHENNAI: A few days ago, poor little baby Nutella managed quite a spread in newspapers across the world when a French court admonished her parents about her name. Well, Ella, it is now, a name the judge felt was much less nuttier than her original one, which was inspired by the popular hazelnut treat.

Now, if Ella’s parents had approached Chennai-based naming consultant Anantha Narayan, they might have done a lot better, name-wise. The Kilpauk-based name developer doesn’t just help parents name their newborns, he helps them foolproof the names too. “It’s part of the naming package,” says the ad-man turned professional name developer, who co-founded Albert Dali (inspired by the scientific thinking of Albert Einstein and the artistic genius of Salvador Dali) Naming Consultants, a few years ago. From naming babies to companies to domains and dogs, Narayan has done it all for clients from both India and around the world.

While in the past astrologers, numerologists, over-zealous relatives and perhaps Maneka Gandhi’s forever-in-print books of Indian baby names were the only options for parents, professional name developers like Narayan are now throwing their hats in the ring.

In Mumbai, entrepreneur Vijay Khubchandani, who got hooked to naming and numerology a couple of years ago, launched the part free-part paid mobile app Namemyworld, which helps parents source names for newborns from a database of more than 80,000 options from 108 origins, with names being filtered and added regularly. “The names are from curated online data, but I am constantly developing names because I need to have ones that my competition does not,” says Khubchandani. Clearly, only a rose by another name is going to make the cut.

