Hi all,
It is the age of moving to sandy from sandeep, Dj from Daljeet, but Mamata Banerjee has chosen the opposite pth, moving back to Paschimbanga from a quite cool name West Bengal. Paschimbanga sounds nice but why not bangla? and why the hell name change? I had a lot of questions on my mind and was surfing the net to get something logical. Today's Anandabazar front page highlights the keys points regarding this issue. I am just
briefly pointing them out.
We need name change to:
- Go up in the alphabetic order of states in India.
- Because West Bengal comes at the end of state list in India, by the time West Bengal representatives get the chance to discuss something, people have already fallen asleep :D
- Since, Paschimbanga is what the name of west bengal is, in its official language bangla (bengali), it is recommended to keep both the name same.
These reasons reminded me that I am leaving in India :) It is absolutely insane (insane is the word most appropriate here) to spend so much money for the name change just to go up in the order and if it is the sole reason then Bangla makes more sense as
- People of West Bengal calls their land as bangla, there is huge sentiment associated with the name Bangla. Mamatadi would have gained a lot of public support if it was named bangla. Whereas, paschimbanga will bring negative support to her leadership.
- Bangla sounds good, not like the ancient name Paschimbanga, which would be phonetically tough to pronounce by people having mother tongue other than bengali.
- Bangla is alphabeticall way above than paschimbanga.
I consider there was a possibility for Mamatadi to gain a bit of public support if Bangla was cosen instead of paschimbanga. Obviously, taking anything other than paschimbanga means changing all the bengali documents which doubles the amount of effort and budget. That is might have been the sole reason for sticking to the name paschimbanga.
According to me, I don't think this name change will make any difference apart from wasting a lot of money. Mamatadi should concentrate more on doing effective stuffs other than keeping watermarks of her party in the history of West Bengal. Keeping general public sentiment aside, Paschimbanga is acceptable to me, as my schooling was in bengali medium and hence, I recognize (and also prefer) that name more than West Bengal or Bangla. Bangla sounds more like bangladesh which is not my country. Also, the word paschim reminds me of the ancient land bangla whose western part is my state. Being in West Bengal, I have felt the ambiguity that both the people of west bengal and people of Bangladesh call their land as sonar bangla or bangla. So, bangla, bangladesh, sonal bangla all sound like the same land, whereas banga or paschimbanga keeps itself apart from Bangladesh. There could be huge debate on this issue since it is a subjective issue that depends on person to person and his/her sentiments attached to their mother land. Just to remind my readers that this is entirely my own opinion and I apologize if I have hurt anyone's sentiment.