Boy named after paramilitary force that helped deliver him

If ever you thought what’s in a name, here is the answer. Maya Devi from Bhojpur has named her newborn baby “NDRF Singh”.

This is her way of expressing gratitude to the personnel of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), who helped her deliver the child in the boat which was carrying her to hospital.

The NDRF team was in Bhojpur assisting flood-affected people when it was told that Maya had started experiencing labour pains and was to be rushed to the Ara hospital.
“With roads submerged, we were in deep waters, literally. It was then that I sought the help of the NDRF team and asked them to allow us on their boat so that she could be rushed to hospital,” said her husband Indrajeet Singh.

But before they could cross the flooded area, Maya delivered the child in the NDRF boat with the assistance of the rescue team.
So indebted was the couple towards the NDRF personnel that they immediately decided to name the baby NDRF Singh.

The practice of giving babies unusual names started some four decades ago, with Lalu Prasad and Rabri Devi deciding to name their first child, a daughter, Misa. Lalu was at that time booked under MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act), a draconian law of the Emergency days.

In mid-90s, former MP Anand Mohan (now jailed for killing a district magistrate) and his Parliamentarian wife Lovely Anand named their newborn son “AK-47”. This was in “memory” of Anand Mohan “managing” his by-election from the Vaishali Lok Sabha constituency armed with the sophisticated weapon.

In recent times, or to be more precise, in August 2008, Manju Devi from Purnia named her newborn daughter Kosi because she had delivered the child in a flood-relief camp set up after the swollen Kosi river rendered lakhs of people homeless and caused incalculable loss in the region.

Such was the devastation that another person in the same camp, Satya Narayan, named his child Pralay, which translates to catastrophe. “The Kosi tragedy was no less than a “pralay”. Hence we named our son Pralay,” he had said.