Changing City Names

UPDATE: I SOLEMNLY SWEAR THAT I SHALL NOT LOOK TO OTHER BLOGS, HOWEVER INTERESTING THEY MAY BE, FOR NEWS TO POST ABOUT. I SHALL ALWAYS VERIFY MY POSTS BY REFERRING TO A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE. I AM ASHAMED TO BE A CLASSIC EXAMPLE OF A GULLIBLE POPULACE WHO WILL EAGERLY LAP UP ANYTHING THE MEDIA GIVES THEM. GOES TO SHOW HOW EFFECTIVE CLEVER GOVERNMENTS CAN BE IF THEY FEEL SO INCLINED, AND HOW WARPED INFORMATION CAN GET AND RUMOURS CAN SPREAD.

AND YES, BE FLATTERED GAURAV! YOU COULD DEFINITELY START YOUR OWN VERSION OF TALKINGCOCK!

I'm really quite ashamed of how behind the times I am. I really should read more than cartoons and fortunes. So according to this post by Gaurav Sabnis, Delhi is to be renamed. I'm sorry, it makes me laugh everytime, if not for the gravity taht is evoked by the underlying issues at stake here.

So people want to rename Delhi Indraprastha or Hastinapur. Hah! Indraprastha is highly inappropriate, except for the fact that Delhi probably has more green spaces than the other metros in India. They can't possibly be referring to the rule of the Pandavas! Hah! Likening our governance to theirs! Theirs was marginally better since it was the Dwapara Yuga at the time. Hastinapur - hahahaha.... likening justice to a game of dice are we! Of course! That game in the Mahabharata was laden with stakes, vested interests, power, limited options, trade-offs, and women making or breaking penis egos in the background, just like politics today! The leftists want to name it Leningrad. Oh my. This is rapidly degenerating into a farce.

Why this rush to rename cities? I'm an extremely patriotic Indian, because I believe I'm the adarsh Indian, I'm a fair balance between accomodating and ethnocentric, I absorb multiple influences and inhabit different worlds. And that's what most of us are! By taking us back to some magined indigenious past we don't remember, recognise, or identify with, these organisations are trying to obliterate an essential part of our history - one that is instrumental in bringing us to the level of progress that we have been rapidly achieving in the last couple of decades or so. You can't deny that! We have history books and grandmothers to tell us about our great past. We relive it daily in our temples and rituals, bowing down to our parents and the ghaghras at weddings. I know it sounds superficial and I know that you will contend that things aren't done the same way they were 50 years ago - they're infinitely more Bollywood-ised, but whose fault is that? Can it even be called a fault? It's a normal sociological phenomenon! Change is absorbed by culture after a period of time called the cultural lag, the length of which varies according to the type of change and the similarity of the phenomenon to the original culture. If this is natural why wasn't that?

How do we even know what the original names of any place were? We're also faced with a subjective opinion there. Was Bombay ALWAYS called Mumbai before it was Bombay? If not, then what? And why isn't it renamed that name? I distinctly remember in school that we called and wrote in English " Bombay", in Hindi, "Bambai", in Marathi only it was different: "Mumbai". And everyone was happy! To each his own! Why did the Shiv Sena have to go and force this change on the rest of us? I was so disgusted! Mumbai doesn't have a lilt to it, or the cool blaseness that Bombay does! And anyway, all the monuments they have renamed as exquisite vestiges of our past! Why don't they try to maintain them and our traditional architecture instead? Hold on, WHAT traditional architecture? Do you even remember when India was last not occupied by some foreign culture or other? Yes, that was the Indus Valley Civilization and Lothal and we don't even know what the seals or the hieroglyphics mean! It's all conjecture! Or if they are SUCH purists, why not destroy these foreign structures and deny our history altogether? What a disgusting farce. (I crossed out that sentence because you never know which freak will take it seriously and decide to Hindu Talibanise their ideas further.)

Bengaluru for Bangalore? Ok, everyone knows the British couldn't pronounce Indian words. Hence 'Pore' for 'Pur'. etc. Bengaluru? What does that even mean? Even if Calcutta were spelt Calcutta, speaking in a native Indian language, it was pronounced Kalkutta or, in Bengali, Kolkotta anyway. Why the hell is Ahmedabad Karnavati? Madras Chennai? And now Delhi! None of these are even English words, that everyone is crying so much about them. And even the story of the name 'Bom-baia' or "good bay" in Portuguese is lovely because Bombay was the dowry given by the king to his English son-in-law Charles II upon his marriage to Catherine de Braganza I. Our former name reeks of history! Mumbadevi is apparently the local deity. It's lovely and all but what % of our natives even pray to her?

Seriously you political parties who are just creating a ruckus because you've been feeling left out of the loop lately, GET A LIFE. SPEND YOUR RESOURCES CONSTRUCTIVELY!! Rather than trying to change the past by rewriting it why not work for a better future? AND hell, change yourself first! By changing city names, we won't be changing the type of rule that we have! You are hardly the satvik visionaries our nation needs in this day and age!

I liked the old, inclusive system better. We're getting caught in a web of cultural paranoia much as the west has post 9/11. We can't have our economic interests stuck in one ideology and be forced backwards into an entirely alien one culturally.

Sigh. I miss the old world.

Here's Stylestation's impassioned view on the same topic. Babe, cross-posting is fun!