‘Gram’ or ‘gaon’: whose village is it anyway?

Why? That was the simple, monosyllabic and stupefied response as people in Gurgaon and outside too questioned the validity and timing of the Haryana government’s decision to change the name of the suburb and the district to Gurugram.

Just why would any government spend time, energy and money to change the quite respectable Gurgaon to Gurugram when there are a million other things that demand attention? If you add the extra syllable to ‘Gur’, don’t they translate to the same thing anyway? A ‘guru’s’ village one way or the other, whether you append ‘gaon’ or ‘gram’ to it?

As the many thousands who come into the suburb to work and those who live in it, whether in the managed chaos of high-rise condominiums or independent homes, navigated traffic snarls on potholed roads and battled multiple water and electricity crises, the many whys circled the air — just as the swirls of construction dust in the city which seems to be a perpetual work in progress. And then there’s the question of timing, of course. Chief Minister ML Khattar’s decision to honour Guru Dronacharya and fuse myth and history came just ahead of Ambedkar Jayanti. The one, as legend has it, who got the tribal prince Eklavya to cut off his thumb so star student Arjuna could triumph; the other, the architect of India’s Constitution and a Dalit icon.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) wasted no time in labelling BJP anti-Dalit with its leader Ashutosh asking whether the party approved of Dronacharya’s act of “getting the thumb of an adivasi and tribal Eklavya cut”. It was dismissed as rancour but really, this seems just too neatly timed to be coincidence. After all, it is in sync with what the Khattar government has been all about — perpetuating prejudice and bigotry of the worst kind. Remember his comments about khap panchayats, rape and premarital sex?

In going with Gurugram, Khattar is not just taking a regressive step back from the promise of a Millennium City and all it should hold, but also doing so in consonance with the RSS, whose branch had reportedly been using Gurugram as its address. Anyway, if the decision was to recall a mythical past where Gurgaon was given to Dronacharya as dakshina by the Pandavas, the fact that the first Metro station in the city is named after the master archer should have been enough.

Gurugram trips uneasily off the tongue. Just as its high-end condominiums with unlikely names such as Beverley Park and Park Place, glittering glass towers, pubs and corporate offices — it is home to 250 of the Fortune 500 companies — are an uncomfortable mix with the rough-cut Jat-Gujjar land that it actually is. Here is a city crying for attention with the state having acceded its responsibility to the private sector — so there is a Rs1,500 crore private metro for a six-kilometre loop but cratered roads, inadequate drainage, insufficient power and water, forcing most buildings to generate their own electricity and bore deep into the earth to extract groundwater.

There’s an identity crisis at work, but one that people are slowly coming to terms with. The rickshaw puller may not be able to say Belvedere Park, but is quite comfortable with “Balvinder Park”. In the working chaos that is Gurgaon, everyone understands, everyone smiles. Adding another twister to this is so unnecessary.

The author is consulting editor, dna