Welcome to the world baby Lucas!!!
This bundle of sugar is the latest addition to my list of nephews :)
Wallah, Kudos God!! Good job done yet again!!

Katrina Who???

Back in my younger days, I thought of my name as being unique and somewhat cool. Nobody I knew had it, and kids at school use to get fascinated by my one of a kind calling. People called me Kat, Kathy, Kanna, Trina and Katax (this one was derived from a disasterous scrabble game with my cousins at 3 am). Some of it stuck on, some of it forgotten- but I always remained Katrina. The others that didn’t matter much insisted to call me Katherine- which by the way, is a name that I absolutely despise.

I think that the representation of this name to me was amplified because I don’t have a middle name. Tragically, my father wasn’t around to watch my coming into the earth and he conveniently forgot to add his name to my birth certificate when he went back a few days later. THUS, I was left with neither a middle name, nor a surname.

Apparently, I was named by my grandmother. My mom feared her existence- her decision was usually final. Little did she know that I failed to carry down the legacy of the “Das”, that has been passed down for generations. Katrina Mudali Das- Yuck. God Bless my Father’s faked pre- Alzheimer’s!!

Maybe I was lucky in a way that I didn’t get stuck with any traditional names such as “Ranjeni” or “Pushpa”. I have a Sabahan brother-in-law whose name is Jamal. He spoke and looked like a Malay, thus my grandmother refused to call him by his original name. Matthias was his confirmation name, and the preferred option. However, over the past year, “Mathias” has slowly and conveniently evolved into being “Muttiah”. Poor boy.

Some people think its kinda cool. I do admit that it would have been cool if my parents came to a conscious decision to name me Katrina- and just Katrina. Once you get around the whole drama of my name’s birth, it just sounds kinda sad. Not to mention the trauma I went through as a child, convinced by my siblings that I was picked up by the rubbish dump. Thank god I grew to resemble one of my two of my cousins- each from different sides of the genes.

Long story short, my point is that there is no other name besides Katrina, that I can truly identify myself with.

As I grew older, I found an album in my dad’s dusty record collection- it read “Katrina and The Waves”. Oh well, it didn’t bug me much, coz they looked geeky anyway, and nobody really took notice of them – besides old school men such as daddy; impressing them wasn’t exactly on top of my list.

On my first day of registration in college, I walked over to the counter to enroll myself. Boy was I shocked when I saw that there were two “Katrinas” on that darn enrollment list. Not only was it my name, it was spelt the same way too!!!! I felt stripped of my identity, and I was determined to find the “OTHER” Katrina to kinda see if she lived up to the uniqueness of the name. Ironically, we met in a lift, and introduced ourselves. She was one of my first few friends in college, and she remains a very good friend to me till today. I grew to like her, Fab Kat; OCASSIONALLY cooler than me J, so there wasn’t any competition for the “True Katrina”. We hung out together most of the time, and ironically, ended up under the same work roof. The confusion that started five years ago still remains. Some people resort to calling us Kat A and Kat B, or Kat 1 and Kat 2. It never really bugged me as I thought it would have, I enjoyed the little jokes that we use to make, and even the jokes made at the expense of us. However, there were also other Kats in college. One of them called Katriona; probably the more sophisticated version of Katrina, and the other was just unacceptable…… her name didn’t even contain the letter “K” in it. It derived from some stupid nickname that her siblings gave her when she was young, and thus it stuck on.

With the four “Kats” in college simultaneously, I kinda got used to being the “less unique”. Soon came Hurricane Katina, Katrina Kaif and many other random strangers that answer to the calling.

I always knew that I was named after a saint. My caloricity led me to a very disturbing fact of history. The name belonged to a 4th-century saint and martyr from Alexandria who was tortured on the famous Catherine wheel. The Catherine wheel (also called the breaking wheel), turned out to be quite a gruesome torture device. A seventeenth-century chronicler wrote the victim looked like, “A sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones.”

*Shudde*

OMG !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Its like naming your child “Doom” or “Curse” !!!!.

In this moment, sitting in my room alone with thousand thoughts running through my head, candle lights surrounding my room, cold air running though my toes, had parquet comforting my body- I don’t really care if I’m really a “Katrina” anymore. Because I have a choice to be who I want to be- I choose to be “Katrina- one ever evolving.

From days that we use to cry by the pool, eat crackers in the balcony, head out to Bangsar with a hankie as a top, spend each day of our lives in the infamous 3-15-5 Pantai Hillpark…….you have come a long way. Caring and loving has always been your way, but now I see something new- I see hope in your face.

Congratulations Joe!!!!!!!!!!!! a new life awaits his turn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s always an honor to watch someone you love become a mother.