On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, George Pinto wrote: > --- "Frederick Noronha (FN)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > My Bengali friend, Bijon Shaha, is of the view that changing the name of > > Bombay to Mumbai was a stupid thing to do, Maharashtrians could just let > > the world call the city whatever they wanted, while calling it "Mumbai" > > themselves. > > I disagree. There ought to be some standardization, at least for the post office to > function > effectively. I don't think postal employees ought to be linguists/polyglots and > decipher > variations of some place's name.
Place names are often language/dialect-specific. It is often the case that different languages have different names for the same place. Insisting on a single name could be a Big Brotherly attitude. How does Germany/Alemanha/Deutschland... manage with the European postal services? We are still happy with the word India. This is an externally-defined name; nothing wrong about that. So is the term Hindu, now accepted as the label to define the faith of hundreds of millions. Bharat, Hindustan, Aryavarta have or still are being used in different contexts. Goa too has its different versions. Aparant (hence, the newspaper's name *Sunaparant*), Gomant (hence *Gomantak*). Why not Gouba? Or Goverashtra? Try to push for one over the other probably betrays a hegemonistic attitude. Anyway, that's how life is... > In the case of Mumbai, was the Shiv Sena elected when they changed Bombay's name and > in theory > reflected the will of the people? Or was it done against the majority's wishes? > What do MOST > Mumbaites call the city today? You probably know that India's first-past-the-post system means that the party in power often wins with 35=40% of the votes cast. If this is taken as a percentage of the total electorate (20-40% could have not ventured to vote, as often happens), this is an even smaller percentage. In today's world of post-poll alliances and political marriages-of-convenience, it means that the party in power has far less than a majority too. A colleague was pointing out that in the last elections, the BJP actually got a slightly smaller percentage of votes than did the Congress. Yet it came to power in Goa, since it won one additional seat (and could hobble together an alliance with the UGDP, NCP, etc). So, the argument of the "majority's wishes" can come in for questioning. Just for the say of taking ahead the debate... FN ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
