Skip to main content

India, Bharat, Hindustan

India, Bharat, Hindustan


Brownie’s latest largesse is three kittens who look very similar to one another. They are so cute that I am sure someone will come to adopt them. That is why I didn’t name them. But now that Modiji has decided to rename India as Bharat, I have decided to name Brownie’s offerings as Bharat, India, and Hindustan.

Who is Bharat, who is India, who is Hindustan among them? I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Each one of them will be all of these. When I call India, all three will come running. Same when I call Bharat or Hindustan. This is the new Vedanta. Tatvam Asi.

Will Modiji’s India change for the better with a new name? He renamed a lot of things and places. Direct Benefits Transfer became Jan Dhan; Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan became Swachh Bharat; Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana was rebaptised as Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana; Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme became Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana; Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission was transmogrified into Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation… Did anything change really more than the names? When India becomes Bharat, what will change?

Maybe, a lot. We can never be sure with a man like Modiji on the throne. He is our new Tughlaq. The name Bharat can be as beneficial to India as Modiji’s earlier experiment of demonetisation. You never know. Quite a lot of Modiji’s enemies were sent to the netherworld with that one genius stroke. Now Bharat may decimate a million other enemies of the nation.

Rechristening is one of Modiji’s favourite hobbies anyway. Mughalsarai became Pundit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya railway station. Rashtrapati Bhavan’s Mughal Garden became Amrit Udyan and Delhi University’s Mughal Garden changed into Gautam Buddha Centenary Garden. A lot of places have got new names now. Allahabad = Prayagraj. Faizabad district = Ayodhya. Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium = Arun Jaitley Stadium. North Maharashtra University = Kavayitri Bahinabai Chaudhary North Maharashtra University. Allahabad State University = Prof. Rajendra Singh (Rajju Bhaiya) University. Sardar Patel Stadium = Narendra Modi Stadium.

These are just a few samples. A lot more names were changed. What actually changed for the citizens? Shakespeare would ask: ‘What’s in a name?’

There’s a lot in a name. Modiji knows that. I know it too though I don’t possess even a fraction of Modiji’s brains. I named an aggressive cat that used to come in the darkness of nights to attack my pets as Modiji because that cat reminded me of Modiji rather terrifyingly. There’s much in a name including terror. [By the way, now the Modiji in my feline world has vanished. Those who are too aggressive don’t last long.]

Brownie’s new kittens are Modiji’s gifts. They all resemble him without any hint of difference, not even subtlest ones. Some aggressors are like that: they plant their seeds too deep.

I will keep these kittens with me now. Bharat, India, Hindustan. They are powerful symbols for me now. Names matter a lot.


PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon

Previous Post: Teacher Today

Labels:

Comments

  1. CareenaSeptember 6, 2023 at 10:52 AM

    Just our PM doing his usual. Distract and divert. That aside, those kittens are adorable!!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 6, 2023 at 11:12 AM

      I picked them up from their milk drinking, that's why the lip smacking.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanSeptember 6, 2023 at 3:03 PM

    Hari OM
    First of all...awwwwwwwwww.... adorable, the kittens, and your caring for them.

    Next... your post had me chasing down the news items, for I had not heard about this latest nonsense. Well, of course, for Sanskrti speakers, Bharat has always been the name for the subcontinent. But that is irrelevant. I live in Alba, which is fine if you are a Gaelic speaker; for the English speaking word it will always be Scotland. Just as in India, not so many speak Sanskrit, in Scotland, only a fraction of the population has the Gaelic. It would be hubristic indeed if the government here were to try this on! Oh my... could this be the 'aggression' that undoes the other Modiji??! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 6, 2023 at 9:00 PM

      What India needs is not Name-changing. Bharat or Hindustan is also fine with me. What bothers me is the motive. Modi is becoming as fatal as Hitler.

      Delete
  3. magiceyeSeptember 6, 2023 at 6:20 PM

    They are so sweet!
    Someone rightly said this is another weapon of mass distraction. As you pointed out it does not matter to anyone except the media who are always on the lookout to fuel their TRPs at the cost of so many other important issues at hand like drought in Maharashtra and Karnataka.

    ReplyDelete
  4. peppylady (Dora)September 7, 2023 at 8:51 AM

    I know nothing about Indian names.
    Coffee is on, and stay safe.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 7, 2023 at 9:04 AM

      Don't worry. Our prime minister loves changing names of things and places.

      Delete
  5. parwatisingariSeptember 7, 2023 at 10:28 AM

    It does not matter Tomichan, at the end of the day the Ma-Hatma Gandhi road is just MGRoad and swami vivekananda road is SVRoad. It anyway gets amputated...I mean abbreviated.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 7, 2023 at 4:09 PM

      With Modiji on top, nothing can be so innocuous. He is determined to put an end to certain histories and certain futures.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
8 comments
Read more