Name calling

My little daughter had just learnt her geography lessons on the difference between hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, storms, and so on, and s...

My little daughter had just learnt her geography lessons on the difference between hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, storms, and so on, and she wanted to know why we don8217;t name them like they do in the US. She had liked the name 8216;Katrina8217;. I had to give her a convincing answer. So I told her that the recent cyclone that hit the Bay of Bengal was named 8216;Pyaar8217;, and went on to explain to her that this did not mean love, as in Hindi, but 8216;flattened8217;, as in Burmese if my memory served me right. My daughter was not completely convinced about this, but she was somewhat impressed with her dad8217;s knowledge.

However, what I did not know at that point of time was that the heads of the Congress, BJP and Shiv Sena were also working out an answer to the same problem.

The Congress, for instance, was toying with the idea of naming the cyclones after Gandhiji, after they had passed a resolution noting that hurricanes don8217;t hit India, only America. India gets hit only be cyclones caused by depressions in the Bay of Bengal, they observed sagely. In the event of a hurricane, they will name it after Nehru. The names of Indira and Rajiv were also shortlisted without much debate. One senior Congressman even suggested that if a cyclone were to hit a Dalit area, they should call it after Ambedkar. Meanwhile another wise and equally senior Congressman suggested that they should not name the natural calamities after their party leaders. People shouldn8217;t associate their leaders8217; names with any calamities. Their mere governance all these decades was enough of a calamity!

Meanwhile, the scene at the BJP headquarters was no different. They wanted all tsunamis and hurricanes to be named after mythological characters 8212; in keeping with Hindu mythology. This was unanimously okayed. Nobody could object.

The Shiv Sena seniors, while discussing the issue, felt that such phenomena should be named after those who had abandoned the party like Bhujbal, Rane, Pradhan, and so on. After all, their departures were nothing short of disastrous for the party!