Word: kannada
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...India last week, the high-tech boomtown of Bangalore was wiped from the map. No, it wasn't hit by a nuclear attack or a natural disaster. Instead, the city simply ditched its British colonial--era moniker in favor of Bengalooru, which, in the local Kannada language, means "town of boiled beans." Other big Indian cities have already taken new names--Bombay is now Mumbai and Madras became Chennai. According to Kannada writer and Bengalooru advocate U.R. Ananthamurthy, such moves are a long-overdue reassertion of local identity. "It was the colonizer who changed the name first," he says...
...will his deep pockets be enough to win him the political power-and thus the respect-that he craves? Many doubt it. "You can't buy votes in this state," says N. Gururaj, editor of the Udayavani, an influential Kannada-language newspaper. Indeed, the politics of caste still count-and Mallya, a member of a tiny mercantile caste, has yet to win over the support of any major caste in Karnataka. Certainly, many of his views should resonate with the state's hard-hit rural masses. He notes with outrage that some of the state's farmers, charged interest rates...
...Nagarahole, which means Snake River in Kannada, one of India's 18 official languages, was once the exclusive hunting ground of the maharajas of Mysore. That status helped to preserve the area's diverse animal and bird life. One government survey recorded 16 species of snails and 70 species of spiders that call Nagarahole home. Bigger creatures abound, including antelope, sloth bears, civets, spotted deer, elephants, wild dogs, tigers, panthers, bison, pangolins and boars. There are hundreds of kinds of birds and dozens of reptile species as well...
...Bahadur Shastri. Under the new law, official business now must be carried out in Hindi, and civil servants, India's largest urban labor force, are granted higher seniority status for learning it. But in southern India, where 111 million people speak four different, Dravidian languages - Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam - there is frustrated opposition to the law. Along with suicides, there were riots, bus burnings, and demonstrations. Before they ended, 1,500 people had been arrested...
...well as Prime Minister Shastri's home). The officialization of Hindi has long been fought by non-Hindi regions, chiefly four southern states to which Hindi is as foreign as Tex-Mex; they are Madras (which speaks Tamil), Andhra Pradesh (Telu-gu), Kerala (Malayalam) and Mysore (Kannada). Anti-Hindis accuse the Hindis of being out for political gain. In any case, should Hindi become the exclusive official tongue, thousands of civil servants, who do not understand Hindi but get government clerical jobs through their knowledge of English, would be totally adrift...