What’s in a name, Mr Patnaik?

Just as it was visualized when the Shiv Sena bulldozed all sensible reasoning to turn Bombay into Mumbai in 1995, the propensity to change the name of our states, cities, parks and roads has spread like a contagious disease. (Not that this was the first but it caught the nation’s imagination like no other before or since.)The latest to join the bandwagon of name-changers is the Orissa government. Orissa now becomes Odisha and Oriya become Odia. The first question that the Centre should have asked before giving the nod should have been: How will it change the fortune of the people living in the state? After all, what does it do except pleasing the parochial bunch who have nothing better to fight for? Did the name change in anyway alter the fate of cities like Bombay, Calcutta and Madras which have become Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, respectively? No, it didn’t. On the contrary, it cost a fortune to affect the name change in official documents, stamps and seals, stationeries, signposts and publicity brochures etc. Secondly, the Orissa government forwarded the flimsiest of grounds for the change—the state was spelt wrongly. If this logic has to be accepted then Orissa must change three of its four key cities: Bhubaneswar (instead of Bhubaneshwar), Cuttack (instead of Kataka) and Balasore (instead of Baleshwar). Thirdly, the biggest challenge facing the state is poverty and unemployment. All big ticket projects of POSCO, Tata Steel and Vedanta groups are stuck because the locals are scared of losing the precious land on which they survive. Domestic and foreign investors are now shunning the state and the Maoists have now taken control of a large part of the state, preventing whatever little development work was in progress. Wouldn’t it be better to use the fund that the name change would gobble up in addressing more pressing problems of hunger, healthcare and education? And who better than the anglicized Chief Minister Navin Patnaik to understand what Shakespeare meant when he wrote that immortal line, “what’s in a name?.....”