Standing By India

Christopher Hitchens writes a passionate piece today at Slate.com arguing for standing by India as an important ally. India is more multi-ethnic and religiously diverse than many of us realize. They are becoming much like the United States in that area of the world. That may be a large part of the reason they find themselves under attack by jihadists.

With Europe on in inescapable decline, maybe India is just the ally we should be cultivating.

Mr. Hitchens also does the great service of explaining why Bombay is now called Mumbai:

When Salman Rushdie wrote, in The Moor's Last Sigh in 1995, that "those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay," he was alluding to the Hindu chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had forcibly renamed it—after a Hindu goddess—Mumbai. We all now collude with this, in the same way that most newspapers and TV stations do the Burmese junta's work for it by using the fake name Myanmar. (Bombay's hospital and stock exchange, both targets of terrorists, are still called by their right name by most people, just as Bollywood retains its "B.")

I hate name changes. I'm not real fond of changes at all, really.