Bangalore, as a city, has come a long way from the time when Kempe Gowda built it in the sixteenth century and named it ‘bendakaaluru’, to the times when our local government wants to change its name from Bangalore to Bengaluru. It has seen the British invasion and also survived to see the IT revolution by building a strong economic platform which heavily depends on its name – The Brand ‘Bangalore’.
For anyone who knows about this famous city, hearing it’s name brings to mind the beautiful weather, the numerous defence establishments it has, the famous gardens (Lal Bagh and Cubbon park), the culture and warmth of its residents and the more recent IT industry.
With everything a city needed to grow, God knows how the idea of changing its name came about in the first place.
I know it definitely has nothing to do with the new trend in India of renaming its cities to remove the anglicized names. The cities that were renamed from Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai and Calcutta to Kolkata had lost their original names and the new names were the result of colonization. Even though the word Bangalore was coined during the colonial times it was always known as Bengaluru in Kannada, which means even though the entire world knew it as Bangalore it never lost it’s original name of Bengaluru which is it’s official name in Kannada.
In this way, it had joined ranks with few cities who had an English name and a different native name such as Turin(Torino in Italian), Florence(Florentia in Italian) , Venice (Venezia in Italian) and Paris (pronounced as Pari in french).
It looks like this is purely a political motive rather than something which is good and widely accepted as our beloved home – Bangalore.
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I like the name written as Bangalore, more than Bengaluru. But my pronunciation would be the latter
For me, changing names of Indian cities has never made any sense. If we had to change them, it should have been done right after independence. The cities were given these names by the British but now there is a long history attached to them and there’s no point in changing the names. I have not been able to call Bombay as ‘Mumbai’ or Calcutta as ‘Kolkata’. The growing regional politics have brought about these changes. It’s just a colossal waste of public money by our great politicians, nothing else.
I echo Amit’s comment. These things are done by politicians to gain regional votes.
Well, it was political, i agree. whims and fancies of the chhosen and arrogant few.
Think about the expenditure incurred on the name change. Idiots of teh first order.
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