Whats in a name!

I have a habit of asking the meaning of someone's name if I find it interesting/obscure/amusing. While I keep wondering what is the best response I can give if somebody asks me the meaning of my name. If you google for Siddharth one of the hits shows some interesting statistics. "The name Siddharth, is the 37945th most popular baby name at mybabyname.com placing it in the top 53% of names by popularity.". I think that's some achievement. In school we had at a maximum 3 Siddharths in my class or my grade. In my college, there was only I AFAIK. Thats not a lot of Siddharths compared to Amits or Rahuls but nevertheless it has become one of the most common-place name.

The earliest known usage of the name is by the great Gautama Buddha. Many fail to realize that he was Siddharth"a" before he became the great buddha. Ironically Siddharth means he who has achieved his wishes or he who knows the meaning of life. If that was true Buddha would have stayed put within his palace walls knowing that he has achieved all but he didn't. Instead he went out in the search of the very answers his name claimed he already knew and boy, did he achieve greatness.

A million things to write about but.....

The question that almost kills is what does a newbie blogger blog about. He wants the blog to start on the right subject and the right note to attract the right kind of readers. I would rather write something that I hope to attract any readers at all to begin with. This is turning out to be more of a meta-blog. I really thought I would write about movies but nothing came out recently that deserves a truly special mention.

Too many people have ranted about how Danny Boyle's Slumdog millionaire took the growing, gleaming, superpowered , financially stabilizing, technologically advancing face of India and splattered all over it the dehumanizing, impoverished and fetid details from the mumbai slums and worse, packaged it into a typical commercial hindi cinema well one third hindi and brought in international accolades.

Another movie in recent times that made me raise an eyebrow of interest was Zack Snyder's Watchmen. The trailers were very slick, Although I was more curious to understand what prompted Zack Snyder to take on probably THE most difficult comic book adaptation ever. He probably failed to realize that he was digging a bigger hole for himself than the one into which Leonidas kicks the Persian messenger. In all fairness, Snyder faithfully captured the three dimensional painted panels of the comic book but completely failed to capture all the other dimensions that Moore had so deftly interwoven in the comic series. For me as a true Watchmen fan it was a bit of a disappointment but that was expected and I wasn't surprised.