A View From Middle England - Conservative with a slight libertarian touch - For Christian charity and traditional belief - Free Enterprise NOT Covert Corporatism

Sunday, July 31, 2005

Mumbai Duck - New BBC Delicacy!

The BBC is sometimes infuriatingly annoying. Their attachment to some kind of liberal PC paradise is bewildering. Hugh Edwards, with deadpan expression, suddenly talks about a place called Mumbai, as if we all know where this is. Most of us don't. It's actually Bombay! Why the BBC can't say Bombay is utterly peculiar, but there it is!

The BBC's PC brigade seem to think that the place names around the world fall into two camps. European ones where we call them as we have always done and "ethnic" far away ones where we call them as they do. The BBC haven't mentioned Den Haag, Munchen, Roma, Firenze, or Bruxelles in their news broadcasts. They don't say the Donau is a river in Europe! They haven't told us about Bayern being a province of Deutschland. No, it's Bavaria to the BBC!

Why then Mumbai? Who are they trying to impress. We had the same with Peking! It suddenly became Beijing! Now, interestingly, the Americans are not so stupid. Most newspapers and TV stations are happily talking about Bombay. And, BBC, so do the Indians when addressing an audience outside India.

The monsoon that has befallen Bombay is a tragedy, but the disaster does not deserve confusion by people not knowing where it occurred!

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=994063

1 comments:

To be fair, the Indian government changed the name of Bombay to Mumbai quite a long time ago. In fact, I think Mumbai was changed to Bombay during the Empire era and they Indian government have simply changed its name back now we're gone.

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