CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Funny: Where the streets have shame names  Sat Mar 19, 2022 11:30 pm | |
| The 'special military operation' unleashed by Czar Putin I of Russia against a hapless Ukraine has caused a tsunami of protest to sweep the world. Even as a host of countries have imposed a slew of economic sanctions against the grisly bear, the fertile ground of dissent has sprouted other, more creative, forms of condemning Russian aggression.
The sunflower, the national symbol of Ukraine, is blooming across continents as people sport the blossom as a sign of support for the embattled country. In Florence, Italy, what is arguably the most famous sculpture in the western world, Michelangelo's David, has been draped in black to mourn the pillage of Ukraine.
But perhaps the most nose-thumbing 'nyet' to Moscow's belligerence has been displayed by the Albanian capital of Tirana, where the street on which the Russian embassy is located has been renamed Rruga Ukraina E Lire - Free Ukraine Street - bringing home to the Kremlin a demarche of displeasure in more ways than one.
Nothing succeeds like emulation, and taking the cue from Tirana, the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius has given the Russian embassy there a new address by changing the name of the thoroughfare on which it is sited to Ukrainos Didvyi Gatv, or Ukrainian Heroes' Street. Commenting on this flank attack of verbal warfare, the mayor of Vilnius said, 'The business card of every employee of the Russian embassy will be decorated with a note honouring Ukraine's fighting, and everyone will have to think about the atrocities of the Russian regime against the peaceful Ukrainian nation when writing the street name.
Moscow may or may not read this as minatory writing on the wall. However, this form of street warfare has been used in the past with good effect when, during the Vietnam war in the 1970s, Calcutta's Harrington Street, which housed the US consulate, was renamed Ho Chi Minh Sarani by the Left Front government in what might truly be described as an effective example of bolshie baptism calculated to turn Uncle Sam's face red in more ways than one. Prompted in part by the name change, groups of anti-US protestors would congregate outside the consular building and chant the leftist litany of 'Amaar naam, Tomar naam, Vietnam!' (Our name, your name, Vietnam!), 'Cholbe na, Cholbe na!' (This won't do! This won't do!), and variations on the theme.
Such streetsmart villifying of one's ideological and political adversaries might catch on and turn upside down the custom of naming public spaces like streets after notables, and call them, instead, after those who in one's view are 'not-ables', VIPs being, in this case, folks who aren't Very Important People but Verified Incorrigible Pests.
This name-and-shame ploy would prove particularly effective in countries such as India, where the condition of roads - often littered with heaps of uncollected garbage and piles of under-construction rubble and pitted with craters uncaused by rockets or shells, patrolled by menageries of stray dogs and even strayer cattle, spat and peed upon with the vim and vigour of a libertarianism unconstrained by the dictates of hygiene or civic consciousness - makes them more suitable for nominal association with notoriety than with nobility, with not-worthiness rather than noteworthiness.
As a refinement of this name-changing, game-changing strategy, individual features of streets and roads could also be christened after those who deserve to be in the crimelight rather than the limelight. A pothole of prodigious dimensions and spine-jarring profundity might merit such an appellation. Other candidates could include so-called 'police checkposts' that act as traffic bottlenecks and are remarkable for their total absence of constabulary who would undertake the unspecified checking, mountainous cowpats of such hallowed antiquity that they play host to foliage of variegated kinds, and subsided sections of highways that more aptly might be called low-ways and which, inundated with monsoon floodwater, could sink a Tata truck if not the Titanic. You get the picture.
And to add relish to such exercises, those behind them could bask in the satisfaction of having provoked in their targets an altogether different kind of road rage.
.https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-commentary/view-where-the-streets-have-shame-names/articleshow/90326264.cms |
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