VT to CP

Queen Victoria’s reign was the time when the railway network in India really grew and expanded. It was therefore fitting for the British who constructed it to name it after her. Similarly when the Mumbai airport needed to be named, it was absurd to overlook the name of JRD Tata, the first licensed airline pilot of India, the man who created and groomed Air India till its nationalization and equally importantly lived in Mumbai all his life...

Take the case of Connaught Place in Delhi. The colonial era market and its roads were renamed Indira Chowk and Rajiv Chowk decades ago but no one cared. The people of Delhi continued to call it by the name it was always known by, no matter what its repainted signage might be indicate. Then came the Delhi Metro. It needed to construct a metro station in the Connaught Place area and in keeping with the official nomenclature called it the Rajiv Chowk Metro Station. It is an important inter connecting junction on the route. Within months, Rajiv Chowk became a landmark station. Since the Rajiv Chowk metro station was an entirely new creation with no historical associations or baggage, no one thought of calling it the Connaught Place metro station. What government notifications had failed to do, the Metro Rail managed to do.

More importantly, perhaps, there was a sub liminal connection between the modernizing Rajiv Gandhi under whose auspices the first phase of Delhi’s infra structure up gradation took place in preparation of the 1982 Asian Games and the current round happening in preparation of the 2010 Commonwealth games... Retaining Names, Retaining History from Desicritics by Shantanu Dutta