So Madonna Ciccone adopts an African child. Brangelina sees your move and raises you an Indian:

[Angeline Jolie] and partner Brad Pitt have already applied to adopt a tot from an Indian orphanage. An insider said: “They hope to be able to bring the child home by Christmas… they’d like to name the child India to honour its homeland…” [Link]

The queso factor is a bit high. Li’l Maddox is not bemonikered with ‘Cambodia.’ Salman Rushdie agrees:

Her name was India. She did not like this name. People were never called Australia, were they, or Uganda or Ingushetia or Peru. In the mid-1960s her father, Max Ophuls (Maximilian Ophuls, raised in Strasbourg, France, in an earlier age of the world), had been America’s best-loved, and then most scandalous, ambassador to India, but so what, children were not saddled with names like Herzegovina or Turkey or Burundi just because their parents had visited those lands and possibly misbehaved in them. She had been conceived in the East–conceived out of wedlock and born in the midst of the firestorm of outrage that twisted and ruined her father’s marriage and ended his diplomatic career–but if that were sufficient excuse, if it was okay to hang people’s birthplaces round their necks like albatrosses, then the world would be full of men and women called Euphrates or Pisgah or Iztaccíhuatl or Woolloomooloo. In America, damn it, this form of naming was not unknown, which spoiled her argument slightly and annoyed her more than somewhat. Nevada Smith, Indiana Jones, Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Ernie Ford: she directed mental curses and a raised middle finger at them all.

Nevada Smith, Indiana Jones, Tennessee Williams: she directed a raised middle finger at them all“India” still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial, suggesting the appropriation of a reality that was not hers to own, and she insisted to herself that it didn’t fit her anyway, she didn’t feel like an India, even if her color was rich and high and her long hair lustrous and black. She didn’t want to be vast or subcontinental or excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or ancient or noisy or mystical or in any way Third World. Quite the reverse. She presented herself as disciplined, groomed, nuanced, inward, irreligious, understated, calm. She spoke with an English accent. In her behavior she was not heated, but cool. This was the persona she wanted, that she had constructed with great determination. [Shalimar the Clown]

I’m trying to imagine Auntie Angelina introducing young India at the annual BMM convention. ‘Go meet a nice Maharashtian girl!’ Being Jolie’s son would be like having the mother of all MILFs as your mom.

Alexander: [about his mother Olympias] I am the cracked mirror of her dreams. [Link]