Wednesday, December 21, 2005

New City Names

The Club of Indian cities with an older name in brackets shall have a new entry by November, next year. This time around it’s the IT capital B’lore. This trend of changing name to its regional language name was started about two decades ago in the God’s own country of Kerala. The state capitals shorter colonial name was replaced by a longer but its historical name. List of cities with new names (changed chronologically) below,

Old Name :: New Name
Thrivandrum :: Thruivanthapuram
Bombay :: Mumbai
Madras :: Chennai
Calcutta :: Kolkata
Bangalore :: Bengaluru

This trend might well engulf the national capital. Hindi media do still call the capital ‘Nei Delhi’ to its official more English, New Delhi. Beware, Bollywood still calls, san NRI genre movies, the mother-land of India as ‘Hindustan’. Fundamentalist might push for it in future. The name India was only coined by the Northwest frontier outsiders as the land beyond the river Indus. Remember, Myanmar?

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