NEW DELHI - What's in a name? Plenty in
India where there are links to astrology,
numerology, politics and in at least one case,
beans.
Bangalore, India's high-tech hub in
the news recently for its infrastructure woes, is
to be renamed Bengaluru, a tongue-twister even for
an Indian, let alone a Westerner.
The new
name is a version of the original, Benda Kaal
Ooru, derived from the local Kannada language
meaning "town of boiled
beans"
because, as one story goes,
a certain King Veeraballala, exhausted during a
forest hunt in the 13th century, was fed boiled
beans by a villager where the city now stands.
Another popular explanation involves a 9th
century inscription found with the name Bengaluru
at the Nageshwara temple in Begur, 14 kilometers
from the city. One researcher argues the
inscription speaks of the death of a servant in
the battle of Bengaluru in 890 AD.
Currently, Bangalore has a population of
6.5 million and is home to more than 1,500
technology firms that generate a third of India's
$25-billion software and back office services
industry.
It is not unusual for Indians or
their cities to change their names. Letters are
added or dropped depending on the requirements of
the family numerologist and astrologer. Thus
Bollywood actress Kareena Kapoor became Kareina.
She has since returned to her old self, as she
believed the spelling change did not bring her any
luck.
Actor Vivek Oberoi, facing the dual
problems of his movies not doing well and reports
of his actress girlfriend, Aishwarya Rai, dumping
him, has become Viveik. And TV tycoon Ektaa Kapoor
insists on the extra "a" in her name and includes
in the titles of all her soap operas the letter
"k".
Name changes happen in the US as
well, though reports indicate that money counts
more than mystic methods. According to a recent
report in the Times of India, Clark, Texas renamed
itself DISH because of an advertising campaign for
EchoStar Communications, which gave the hamlet's
125 residents free satellite equipment and
services in return (cost: US$4,500 per home). The
town of Santa in Idaho voted to call itself
Secretsanta.com for a year to publicize a website
- for a fee of $20,000.
Chidanand
Rajghatta, foreign editor of Times of India
writes: "Halfway, Oregon became half.com for a
year at the height of the Internet era after the
dotcom company put $100,000 in the town coffer and
wired up the local schools with new computers. In
the 1950s, the town of Hot Springs, New Mexico
changed its name to Truth or Consequences after a
TV quiz show by that name promised to host the
program from there. Not that the Americans don't
care for history. From Chicago, Illinois to
Chattanooga, Tennessee, from Tallahassee, Florida
to Tacoma, Washington, they respect native
forbears of the land and their own Founding
Fathers."
The reasons for Bangalore's
change are, however, a little different. The city
has followed the example of others that have been
re-christened - Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to
Chennai, Calcutta to Kolkata, Gauhati to Guwahati,
Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram. These
changes are courtesy of Indian politicians and
their supporters standing up to what they consider
to be the wrongs of the past when the British
ruled India and named the cities to suit their
English. One cannot blame them for making Benda
Kaal Ooru into Bangalore. Bengaluru sounds
sufficiently obtuse (for a non-Kannada that is)
though not as bad as the original.
It is
ironic though that much of India's and Bangalore's
growth into an economic powerhouse has been due to
the knowledge of the English language, a vestige
of the British rule.
Not that one is
praising India's colonial past, as the British
destroyed the Indian economy by turning it into a
source of cheap raw material. But, if Indian
politicians had more to show in terms of progress,
one perhaps wouldn't mind a name change as a bit
of regional chauvinism or a symbolic gesture of
political appeasement, which otherwise counts for
nothing as far as changing the lives of the people
for the better is concerned.
The incumbent
political masters of Karnataka have been very slow
to build new roads, an international airport and
other infrastructure and have managed to earn the
ire of the software chiefs who reside in the area
and are caught in long traffic jams on the way to
the office every day. Recent heavy rains also
caused flooding, so bad that some IT firms even
threatened to relocate to a city with better
infrastructure.
Inherent in the name
change is an appeal to the local/rural ethnic
populations that form the biggest electoral bases
in the respective states. The Bengaluru decision
was announced by the chief minister of Karnataka
state, Dharam Singh, who remains in power due to
the support of a regional political party headed
by the irrepressible Deve Gowda, who owes his
power to rural voters largely unaffected by the
software storm in India's Silicon Valley, as
Bangalore was known.
Gowda recently has
been involved in an unseemly public spat with
Narayan Murthy, chief of India's biggest software
firm, Infosys. He accused Murthy's firm of
land-grabbing, an unsubstantiated claim. However,
the manner in which he has tried to belittle
India's software icon has left a bad taste.
Careful not to invite the ire of mercurial
politicians, Kiran Karnik, head of the National
Association of Software and Service Companies
(NAASCOM), said in an interview with the BBC that
the name change proposal was "no big deal".
"Fortunately, the new name is phonetically
similar to the current name," he said. "If it
makes people feel good, I don't have a problem."
Others, such as Bob Hoekstra, who heads
operations in the city for the electronics giant
Philips, is not as happy. He feels the Bangalore
"brand" could be hurt by a change in the name. "We
have spent 15 years building Bangalore as an
international brand and going back to the native
name could hurt that brand. It is like going from
Philips to Philippos," he told the Associated
Press.
However, noted writers of Kannada
have been advocating a change in the name.
National award-winning author U R Ananthamurthy
has been quoted as saying that other smaller
cities in Karnataka, such as Mysore, should also
change their names. "It should happen in phases.
But these cities are already being called by their
Kannada names, so why should they not be
officially called so? We don't need to call them
what the British did."
Meanwhile, most
believe that business will be unaffected, and a
reference to US job losses to India as "getting
Bangalore-d or Bengaluru-ed" is not in danger of
becoming outdated, though the city needs to ramp
up its infrastructure and services to retain its
predominant position in the country.
In an
interview with the Times of India, Richard Heeks,
Manchester University's (UK) resident expert on
offshoring and a proponent of India's economic
growth and reforms, said: "I didn't know about
this at all. It is true there is this notion of
Bangalore as shorthand for offshoring. It is also
true that Trivandrum, say, is much easier to
pronounce [than Thiruvananthapuram], but it would
need something much bigger than a name-change to
stop this leviathan rolling on."
Siddharth Srivastava is a New
Delhi-based journalist.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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