Sikh naming traditions

Tuesday was the most fun I had in recent days. Internet was down for most of the day, and since all our license files are accessed over the internet, work just stopped. So we ended up just chatting and discussing all sorts of things like philosophy and salvation! After that I went down to meet our HR who's a very sweet lady/girl to ask for some vacation time (she's Sikh). She showed me the pics of her daughter who's two years old. They named the kid Harnoor (which, incidentally, is the last name of a Kannada Hindu friend of mine!)

She went to explain how the Sikhs name their kids. Turns out you don't name the kid for the first 40 days after birth. Then you take the kid to any Gurudwara; obviously many try to go to the Golden Temple. There, in the morning, when they open the Guru Granth Sahib (their holy text) the note the first letter of the first verse that the book opens to. That's the latter with which the parents are supposed to name their kids. Interestingly, this particular "letter of the day" is somehow transmitted to all the gurudwaras (in the world?) and so the parents who take their kid to any other gurudwara also get the same letter.

Of course, some parents cheat and name their kid in advance, and then go to the gurudwara on the day that the letter of their choice is picked. Like my HR, who actually wanted to name her kid "Gurnoor", and ended up with the letter "Ha" when they went to the temple. She and her husband wanted to go ahead and name the kid Gurnoor anyway, but her father insisted on following the "rules" and that was that.

I also learned something about Sikh names that had been bothering me for a while. Basically Sikh boys and girls share a lot of names. In theory there are no "male" or "female" names. The only way you tell the gender of a person by their name is by the "Singh" or "Kaur" that follows the name. In fact in our office, we have a boy and a girl by the name Jaspreet!