What’s in a name?

I used to visit a country on the other side of the world – actually it was India in the old days.

India had a long and proud history with a varied list of rulers who had left behind fascinating buildings and traditions.

It was a British colony for 200 years and when I first visited, it was celebrating four decades of renewed independence.

Because of their colonial past, Indians went to a lot of trouble to assert their identity and independence.

For my first visit, I had an old street map and set out confidently to explore. But I could not find any of the streets.
I showed the map to an old guy and asked him for directions and he said to me: “You foreigners don’t understand.

When we got our independence from England, we couldn’t tolerate the old colonial street names, and we replaced them with the names of our national heroes.

The problem is that once Congress got into the habit of renaming the streets, it couldn’t stop.
Some of these streets have been renamed five or six times. So now, no one knows what streets are called.”

Actually, I found out this wasn’t quite true – everyone knew what the streets were called but people called them different names according to their age – I guess they just kept to the name they learnt when they were growing up.

Luckily, the taxi drivers knew most of the names so they could always find the place.

By the time my visit finished, my old map was completely covered with lists of different street names.

The strange thing was that, although many streets had shiny new name plates, the buildings didn’t seem to change – the streets were lined with old and decaying buildings, some of which had experienced five different addresses.

Isn’t it an odd world that we live in?