Why wuntusk?

A few weeks ago I decided that I needed a new company name.  Although Uncle Gringo Enterprises has served me well for the last year on Linked-In, it lacked a certain "je ne sais quoi".  I wanted something simple and catchy but somehow linked to my philosophy on life and business.  Pdub and I were driving back from a poker tournament in Council Bluffs, Iowa, along highway 80, giving me plenty of time to think on the problem.

These past couple years I've been doing a fair amount of yoga and in turn I ended up doing some reading on the Hindu devas.  If you've never read the Ramayana or the Mahabharata you're really missing out on some awesome stories.  A portion of the Ramayana includes my favorite Hindu deva Hanuman, the monkey god.  Hanuman was incredibly devoted to Rama, and when Rama's wife Sita was kidnapped, he did all sorts of cool stuff to help out, including turning into a cat, burning down a city with his tail, and bringing back a whole mountain, but I digress.

Another deva more familiar to yogis around the world is Ganesha. He's the one with the elephant head on a boy's body. Ganesha is patient, kind, and humble and the deva of intellect and wisdom. He is "the remover of obstacles" and typically invoked before the undertaking of any new project.

The ancient sage Vyasa asked Ganesha to scribe the Mahabharata in a single sitting.   Ganesha knew that no normal pen would work for this, so he broke off one of his own tusks and used it as the pen for the enormous task.  Thus Ganesha is typically depicted with a broken tusk or "one tusk".

So there you have it the "one tusk" became wuntusk, and it all just kind of popped out of my head on the drive home.  When I got home I tried a few different fonts with the word and I really liked the way it looked in the moderna font.

Props to my friend Kalindi for being the only person I know of who immediately got the name.