FN: Frederick Noronha’s blog

Check this story on Slate.com, which says Mumbai? What About Bombay? How the city got renamed. Christopher Beam explains how this Indian bustling, crowded megapolis got it’s (recent) name-change.

It says: “Almost 200 people were killed on Tuesday when seven bombs exploded on a train in Mumbai, India. When did Bombay become Mumbai?Officially, in 1995. That year, the right-wing Hindu nationalist party
Shiv Sena won elections in the state of Maharashtra and presided over
a coalition that took control of the state assembly. After the
election, the party announced that the port city had been renamed
after the Hindu goddess Mumbadevi, the city’s patron deity. Federal
agencies, local businesses, and newspapers were ordered to adopt the
change….”

There was a discussion on the South Asian Journalists Association (in the US) email discussion mailing list, about this issue. Mostly critical of Slate’s views, or questioning their accuracy.

Slate.com aruges: “The name change didn’t impact all of Mumbai’s residents. Speakers of Marathi and Gujarati, the local languages, have always called the city Mumbai. “Bombay” is an anglicization of the Portuguese name “Bombaim,” which is believed to derive from the phrase “Bom Bahia,” or “Good Bay.” (Portugal held territories in western India until 1961.)”

It notes that places like Chennai also changed its name of late. Incidentally, some other articles Slate.com has includes ones on the rules of Bollywood, traveling through India, the surprising triumph of the Indian National Congress in the 2004 elections, and a 2001 report on “why India didn’t have its own War on Terror”.

Should Panaji be renamed to Ponnje (or Pon’nje) then? I’ve argued earlier that Panaji is more of a Devanagari misspelling of the old Portuguese Pangim (with a silent ending). It gets rendered as Pa-N-Jee, very similar to the name used by the Portuguese pre-1961, but for some reason gets misspelt grossly into Paa-naa-ji when rendered back into the Roman script… and misspelt back as ‘Panaji’.

Likewise, Panjim is an Anglicised version, widely used by English speakers, with the ending ‘m’ getting pronounced. Who remember Ponn’je, the word on the mouth of everyone wanting to name the city in Konkani?

PS: Just playing devil’s advocate here… I really believe that a city with badly managed garbage stinks as much (specially near the Mandovi bridge) under any name Likewise, with neatly kept gardens and the lovely trees at Campal (influenced by a trip on GoogleEarth this afternoon), is as sweet regardless of what it’s name is!

Kumar Kalanand Mani of the Peaceful Society based at Madkai-Ponda in Goa, gave me a copy of a book he compiled, called Panchayati Raj or Gram Sarkar. This title comes from the Centre for Panchayati Raj.

As Mani explains, the book “was first printed and circulated at a three-day national seminar organised by me in 1993 at the Sevagram Ashram, Wardha, on behalf of the Gandhi Peace Centre, Hyderabad.”

It contains essays on Panchayati Raj and Mahatma Gandhi, Panchayati Raj and Jayaprakash Narayan, Panchayati Raj and Vinoba (Bhave), , Panchayati Raj and Various Models-Structures, Panchayati Raj: Women, SC/ST and Employment, Panchayati Raj and the Ashok Mehta Committee and The Constitution Bill, 1991.

As we critique the post-colonial Indian state, and its failures or lapses on many fronts, ideas like panchayati raj (come to be regarded as corruption-prone institutions in today’s Goa for instance) and Gandhian thought, might not be getting due attention. Some interesting ideas here; but is it sufficient to cope with the storm brought in by the fast-pace of change that rural India is today being pressured with?

Incidentally, my friend Mani’s other initiatives include the River India network, and Swaraj India

Kerala Tourism at Park View in Trivandrum-695033 has come out with this simple, but interesting one-page multiple-folded brochure called 101 Things To Do In Kerala.

Found it interesting. It introduces one to a colourful state in a fun way. For instance the “things to do” include wake up to the world’s best breakfast (vellayappam, uppuma, iddli, puttu, masala dosa, appams…); walk through paddy fields; tip-toe across a coconut trunk bridge; sip tender coconut; take a swig of toddy; stay on an exotic houseboat, ride a canoe; work out on a treadmill (traditional ones, used to irrigate rice paddies); see Chinese fishing nets (billowing from massive bamboo poles brought in by braders from the court of the Mongolian king Kublai Khan; choose your pick from the fishermen’s net; feast on kappa and meen curry (Kerala’s hot red fish-curry with steamed tapioca or boiled rice)… and there are still 90 things left to do on this list!

Interesting way of promoting tourism in Kerala. Wish Goa could be more creative in packaging itself. There’s nothing much to do once you’re in India’s most-hyped State. When do we outgrow North and South Goa tours, canned entertainment on the Mandovi and soap-on-a-roap? Of course, this isn’t the job of the sarkari-run Goa Tourism or Goa Tourism Development Corporation alone. Understandably, their officials and politicians involved have become big-time tourists themselves, travelling the world in the name of “promoting tourism”

Interesting initiatives which could add colour and value to Goa are soon hit by controversy (take Ingo’s Saturday night markets), and we live in such an information-poor State that even the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.

Mafalda Mascarenhas once planned to set up a CulturGoa site, just to announce in a more efficient manner what all was planned to happen in this part of the globa. As of now, you can’t even depend on the newspapers to adequately announce and review events of public importance here!

What’s the http://osd.byethost8.com/?

Raseel Bhagat writes in via the FSF-Programmers list to say:

Please don’t think this is spam of any kind.
I am a [GNU] Linux (and OSS) enthusiast and a moderately active member in the Bangalore and Bombay LUG mailing lists. I have just started out with a venture called The OpenSourceDeal. I plan to cater to the insatiable appetite of Indian OSS enthusiasts, newbies, converts and anyone else who may care to join in with an onslaught of OpenSource Software . Check out out site at: http://osd.byethost8.com/ Please feel free to forward this to your friends, girl-friends, imaginary friends, LUGs, other mailing lists and whoever else you think might find this site useful.

India Linux Users’ Group-Goa member Nelson Lobo runs another venture at http://linuxdvdsale.tripod.com. Check both out!

A young friend (from our local GNU/Linux users’ group in Goa asked me the question, “So how do I write a review?” In return, I pointed him to Slashdot’s guidelines for writing reviews.

But, while searching around, I also came across this fascinating section dealing with O’Reilly’s open books. A very interesting concept.

O’Reilly — a US-based publishing firm that offers it’s latest books to Free Software user groups and members willing to review them — explains it thus: “O’Reilly has published a number of Open Books–books with various forms of “open” copyright–over the years. The reasons for “opening” copyright, as well as the specific license agreements under which they are opened, are as varied as our authors. Perhaps a book was outdated enough to be put out of print, yet some people still needed the information it covered. Or the author or subject of a book felt strongly that it should be published under a particular open copyright. Maybe the book was written collectively by a particular community, as in the case of our Community Press books.

And here’s a very interesting book, Dan Gilmore’s We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People.

This book is described thus: “In We the Media, nationally acclaimed newspaper columnist and blogger Dan Gillmor shows how anyone can produce the news, using personal blogs, Internet chat groups, email, and a host of other tools. He tells the story of this emerging phenomenon and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make — and consume — the news. Journalism in the 21st century will be fundamentally different from the Big Media oligarchy that prevails today. We the Media casts light on the future of journalism, and invites us all to be part of it.”