Dear Mamatadi, isn't Abol Tabol a good name too for West Bengal town?

The first time I heard the word Gajaldoba I thought it's a poem from Sukumar Ray's Abol Tabol that I had missed. For the uninitiated, Abol Tabol means nonsense. It was pretty high on the must-read list of most Bengalis till even a generation ago. It was AIB on paper nearly a century ago—and, yes, much better nuanced. But, there you go, I am talking abol-tabol.

So, Gajaldoba, which would have gone rather well, if I am to be believed, with “Kumro Potash”, "Tyansh Goru”, “Kimbhut”, or even “Huko Mukho", will now be known as Mukta Tirtha. Yes, after the first thought, I googled it. It's a place—a rather nice one—in the Dooars jungles near Siliguri. Mukta Tirtha means liberated pilgrimage. Gajaldoba means, well, nothing as far as my knowledge of Bangla goes, though it does not go very far. At best, gajal means, well, nothing; it's the Bengali pronunciation for ghazal at best and doba means a small pond, mostly decaying pond that raises a stink. So, you get the drift.

Mukta Tirtha—now that Mamata Banerjee has renamed the name, among five other names, beating about the bush does not make much more sense than Kumro Potash singing a ghazal in Gajaldoba—is set to be established as a tourism hub in West Bengal. Part of a Rs 2500-crore tourism project, Gajaldoba is set to get a plush hotel and a corporate golf course. Or so Banerjee had announced a couple of years back. I don't know the status of the PPP projects, as the chief minister had emphasised, there but I sure can imagine the corporate folks getting all excited about golf at Mukta Tirtha.

“Hey, how about a round of golf at Mukta Tirtha?”

“Great idea. Let's tee off at a free and liberated pilgrim site.”

And then both of them get tickets done for Varanasi or Haridwar.

I am joking, of course. I have nothing against either Gajaldoba or Mukta Tirtha. I have nothing against changing names, in fact. But someone please tell me Mamata Banerjee, too, is joking. There's nothing in a name, some wise man wrote. Then why change it? I can still understand Calcutta, Bombay, Madras or even Victoria Terminus changing (though I do not really understand the need for Bengaluru and certainly not Mysuru, but I can still understand the underlying need for those changes). They were changed to make the local people feel better. Or so went the logic, though I cannot figure out how the average Bombayite or Calcuttan feels better now that she/he is called a Mumbaikar or Kolkatan, unless the vada-paav, bhelpuri, jhalmuri and sondesh taste better now.

But Mukta Tirtha? Which local person in Gajaldoba wanted that? And why would anyone in Gajaldoba be interested to be called a local of Mukta Tirtha? Why Tirtha, a pilgrimage? I mean I can understand the nice folks in Gobardanga (yes, dear non-Bengali reader, it gobar means that shitty thing, and danga means land, and the place is in North 24 Parganas district) or Mashagram (masha=mosquito, gram=gram or village, of course, and the place is in Bardhaman) itching for the CM to rise to their defence and bring about a partial change in their postal address. But would Banerjee rename them Sonar Kella or Mishti Alo, just to use two random words with no connection to either mosquito or manure, just as neither Mukta nor Tirtha has anything remotely to do with either Gajal or Doba?

So, why? Unless Banerjee is writing a 2015 version of Abol Tabol?

PS: the other five renamed towns are Siliguri (Teesta; now I will go to Teesta to see Teesta river), Bolpur (Gitabitan; if nothing, Amit Shah and Siddharth Nath Singh would be in a spot of bother pronouncing it whenever they hold rallies in CPM veteran Somnath Chatterjee's former constituency), Asansol-Durgapur (are they not two different places? Anyway, now Agnibina) Garia (Uttam City; how much by the way do taxis charge from South City Mall to Uttam City these days?), and Kalyani (Samriddhi; well, nothing).

Note that none of these are English or French or any other Mephistophelian words over which people have launched agitation. So, why rename them? Well, let's not ask abol-tabol questions to each other.