Siddharth joins two Sanskrit words: siddha, accomplished, and artha, purpose. Together they mean “one who has found what he came for.” It was the name given to a prince born in Lumbini around the sixth century BCE — a child whose father filled his palace with every comfort so that he would never see suffering.

“He left a palace to sit under a tree, and found there what the palace could not give him.”

The story of that prince is one of the most retold in human history. He slipped out of the palace, saw age, illness and death for the first time, and spent years searching for an answer to them. He found it sitting beneath a fig tree in Bodh Gaya, and from then on he was called the Buddha — the awakened one. Siddharth was the name he was born with; Buddha was what he became.

That is why the name still carries such weight in India. To call a child Siddharth is not to wish them a throne. It is to wish them the harder thing — the clarity to know what their life is actually for, and the courage to walk towards it even when it leads away from comfort.