Assignment 1: Translate the text into Russian and compare the old and new geographical names mentioned in the text. Explain the ways of introducing xenonyms into the text
No matter where your South Indian wanderings take you, if there’s one thing you can count on it’s that you’ll never be short of conversation: whether it’s chatting with a Keralan couple about local cuisine on a bone-shaking bus trip, or swapping cyber stories with IT yuppies in a swanky Bengaluru (Bangalore) bar, breaking the ice with strangers is delightfully easy.
Much of the current affairs talk on the streets of South India mirrors that up north, with political directives made in Delhi largely influencing what happens down south. Without a doubt, cricket is the most perennially talked about topic, and showing an interest in the game is usually a sure-fire way of making instant friends. If you’re not a cricket aficionado, simply getting up to speed with some star players, such as Mumbai-born Sachin Tendulkar, is going to work wonders. Apart from cricket, the razzle-dazzle world of Bollywood is another hot chitchat topic. Indeed the most avidly discussed subject in early 2007 was the widely publicised racist slurs that Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty copped from some of her fellow (British) housemates while on the UK’s reality TV show, Celebrity Big Brother. The ensuing racism debate made front-page headlines throughout India and lime-lighted the prolific sense of national pride and identity that has been forged on the subcontinent six decades after the British were booted out.
Also making recent headlines was the legal challenge to India’s antigay law, which has existed since the mid-19th century. Prominent personalities, including Keralan-born Booker Prize-winner Arundhati Roy, have added their voices to the growing chorus of public opposition to this controversial law which, its critics purport, patently contradicts the government’s assertion that India is a tolerant and liberal-minded nation. Another headline-grabbing story was the 2006 renaming of two major South Indian cities, Bangalore and Pondicherry, to their precolonial names of Bengaluru and Puducherry. The decision, aimed at proliferating national pride, comes some years after other cities, such as Mumbai (Bombay) and Chennai (Madras), reverted back to their original names in a bid to celebrate Indian heritage.
Meanwhile, in the national political arena the renascent Congress Party seized power from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2004 elections largely thanks to notable South Indian support. The new government, headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has been at the vanguard of the country’s phenomenal economic growth, which has averaged 8.1% over recent years. However, despite India’s galloping economy, vast sections of the population have seen minimal benefit from the boom. Indeed the most pressing challenge for Singh’s government is to spread both the burden and bounty of India’s economic prosperity. Quite a formidable task given that in the world’s biggest democracy, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is far from shrinking, and poverty is set to spiral upwards if India’s population growth rate continues to race beyond that of its economic growth. Despite central government initiatives to rein in the ballooning birth rate, overpopulation lies at the crux of many of South India’s most pressing problems. The government has also attracted criticism for failing to adequately address its AIDS crisis, with India now recording the planet’s highest number of HIV-positive cases.
When it comes to the environment, climate change, deforestation, pollution, tourism-related development (especially in Goa) and ever-expanding industrialisation these are just some of the issues that both the central and South Indian state governments are grappling with. Water is becoming an increasingly hot political potato, with various state governments ardently battling to secure exclusive rights to rivers and dams. One particularly prominent case, the region’s longest-running water dispute (between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu) over the waters of the Cauvery River, was finally settled - but not without controversy - by the Supreme Court in 2007.
Many national political issues make frequent front-page headlines in South India, especially the thorny situation between India and Pakistan over the disputed northern region of Kashmir. Unresolved since the subcontinent’s partition in 1947, the festering Kashmir impasse has been the catalyst for intensely rocky relations between the two countries ever since. From the time he came to power, Singh has reiterated his government’s unwavering commitment to solving the Kashmir quandary. However, bridge-building endeavours between India and Pakistan came to an abrupt halt following the July 2006 train bombings in Mumbai that killed over 200 people and left more than 700 wounded. Bilateral talks concerning Kashmir later resumed, but they faced renewed pressure following the February 2007 bomb blasts on a train travelling from Delhi to Lahore (Pakistan), which left 68 commuters dead and threatened to subvert the Indo-Pakistan peace process. The Indian and Pakistani governments refused to let the attack succeed in its objective of sabotaging relations, vowing to press on with constructive dialogue. At the time of writing, those responsible for both blasts had not been identified.
On a more optimistic note, South India has been going from strength to strength in terms of its IT industry, with southern cities such as Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai attracting massive global interest. The south’s burgeoning IT industry has played a key role in revolutionising India’s once-ramshackle economy, with analysts forecasting an even rosier, future.
A newly emerging market is that of medical tourism (foreigners travelling to India for competitively priced medical treatment coupled with a holiday), which has projected earnings of US$2 billion by 2012 (it currently averages US$330 million per annum). Wellness spas - which include post-operative Ayurvedic treatments and other internationally fashionable home-grown therapies - are set to mushroom in southern centres, especially Kerala and Goa, as the medical tourism sector swells. On the general tourism front, the good news for South India is that recent reports indicate an upswing in the number of foreign tourists heading to the sultry south, which not only translates to a boost in revenue for southern state coffers, but also in increased employment and benefits to associated enterprises (particularly cottage industries), as well as preservation of cultural traditions such as dance and music.