What's in a name?

I made the mistake of reading the paper early in the morning before leaving for college today.. I don't usually do this because I know that what I find in the paper is probably not the first thing that I want to read at the beginning of a full day of college if I intend to be in a good mood so I leave it till I get back and have shed the stress of the day. So it was a Big Mistake. I was so disturbed that I forgot to put on my kajal, didn't brush my hair and almost missed the last of the 'last-minute-fast-trains'...

I knew the story already thanks to Jo who sometimes gives me real-time news updates because of my lack of 24/7 access to 24/7 news channels (which is actually a blessing a lot of the time) but to actually read it first-hand in the paper this morning really did me in...

Here's the story:

One of the sad sad saddest things of living in BOMBAY. Why can't they actually do something constructive!?

To me Mumbai is Bombay just because I'm used to calling it that. Thiruvananthapuram is Trivandrum because let's face it, Thiruvananthapuram is mouthful to say (and a handful to type) and Udhagamandalam is Ooty for the same reason. I call Calcutta, Kolkata when I'm speaking in Bengali because it just fits, that's what we call it in Bengali. When I speak in english, I'm most likely to call it Calcutta because that fits better for me too. Bengalooru is Bangalore for the same reason that Mumbai is Bombay and it will remain that way. And they can send me to jail for it if they want to (as you can see I'm still pretty fired up with the whole Arundhati Roy's "one day in jail story":))

Of course I know that officially Bombay IS now Mumbai and where official matters and bureaucracy is concerned I will call it that and I have no problem with others calling it that and I'm pretty neutral to the fact that the name was changed. But what I just fail to understand is how somehow the character and essence of Bombay/Mumbai is changed according to what you call it? How does it matter? Does calling Bombay Mumbai somehow make all the real and pressing problems of this city disappear? Does it somehow change our history? Rub out the British - the bad and the good. Rub out all the other people who are not "sons of the soil"? Does it somehow prove to the British colonialists and the rest of the world that we...? I can't even finish that sentence because it baffles me. I fail to understand what this proves because some politicians obviously feel that it does prove something. Or maybe they're just being politicians and making huge issues of complete non-issues because they haven't been in the news for anything worthwhile and bad publicity is better than no publicity?

Again I ask. Freedom of expression still is a basic human right, right?

Sigh. All I can say is that they could probably do with some exposure to Shakespeare:

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

-- Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)