Day: September 10, 2023
Will The Government Change The Name Of India to Bharat?
The current government is considering a yet another silly thing – to change the name of the country from India to Bharat! The invitations to a state dinner to mark India’s hosting of this year’s G20 came not, as you’d expect, from the office of the president of India, but from the “president of Bharat”. There’s a growing push among BJP MPs to adopt the name change, since “India” – the conventional English rendering of the country’s name – to some at least, symbolises “colonial slavery”. The nation of more than 1.4 billion people is officially known by two names, India and Bharat, but the former is most commonly used, both domestically and internationally.
Bharat is an ancient Sanskrit word which many historians believe dates back to early Hindu texts. The word also means India in Hindi. Given the Hindu-nationalist ideology of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and its push for increased use of Hindi, critics responded to the use of Bharat in the invites by suggesting the government was pushing for the name to be officially changed. Changing India’s name to only Bharat would require an amendment to the constitution which would need to be passed by a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament.
The BJP has already renamed cities and places that were linked to the Mughal and colonial periods. Last year, for instance, the Mughal Garden at the presidential palace in New Delhi was renamed Amrit Udyan. Critics said the new names are an attempt to erase the Mughals, who were Muslims and ruled the subcontinent for almost 300 years, from Indian history.
A Relaxing Saturday Spent At Home
I should have gone out today but I made the lazy decision to stay in. The plan was, made earlier in the week, that I would stay in on Saturday and relax and go out today. Yesterday was a quite rainy day and a bit cold and it felt like a good decision. I woke up by 8:30 am and other than coffee and a quick grilled cheese sandwiches breakfast, I didn’t stress much until 12:45 pm when I was given a list of things to buy from the grocery delivery app. Ensuring to get some snacks for the weekend, I placed the order and then took note of the things that were not available and added it to the fruits I was going to buy later from another app. When the delivery guy came by, I went down and brought the thing up.
Post a lunch of rice, curry and fish I went to lie down on my bed and watched Star Wars Episode III : Revenge Of The Sith but fell asleep in between. By 5pm I still had around 40 minutes of the movie left but I needed some tea. So I got up and went to the loo and washed my face. I then went to get some of the snacks and tea with milk and then went back to my room and back to Youtube. The evening was spent mostly at the laptop until at 7pm when I went to take a hot shower.
Hot shower and toweled down then I got to listening to some tunes. My mom wanted some shawarma rolls for dinner from Bektash, a place nearby which she and my dad liked when the went there a couple of weeks ago with my sister. So I ordered their reasonably priced chicken shawarma combo which comes with a regular chicken shawarma roll, peri-peri fries, some pickles and refreshing watermelon juice. Deliciously good. Post dinner I listened to more tunes and then watched the end of the movie and then fell asleep.