DailyOh! London’s Havelock Road may get a new name. What is its Kanpur connection?

Hi there,

In a unique strategy to ensure people stay home and come out only if they can’t do without coming out, the government has set petrol and diesel prices soaring. Over the last six days, prices have risen every day, including today. You may say, fuel prices have been deregulated and are no longer set by the government, but then you can’t deny the strange phenomenon of prices remaining steady, even falling, when elections come knocking.

Now, those regulating fuel prices have discounted the fact that global fuel prices have fallen in the last two days. It’s not just the fuel price which is beyond government control. Private hospitals charging as much as Rs 8 lakh and more from Covid-19 patients is also beyond control. Is that all? No. The virus too has a regulatory framework of its own, which allows it to spread without any checks from the government. The spread is so fast that the central government has warned that five states – Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh - could run out of ventilators and ICU beds.

What can you do? Regulate yourself. If you do not step out, or step out taking all precautions, you save on fuel, duck the virus and hence do not have to look for hospital beds. It’s easier said than done, or easier written than done.

But what is being done in the UK to control racism and pacify those protesting against racism? The UK is trying to remove statues of people known to have committed racist crimes, after certain monuments came under attack during Black Lives Matter protests. The country is also looking at changing names of places named after ‘racist’ characters. One such road being considered for a name change is Havelock Road. The road could be named Guru Nanak Road because Southall, the place where the road is located is Little Punjab, given the number of Punjabis nestled there.

Havelock Road, however, has a Kanpur connection. To understand that connection we need to go back to India’s First War of Independence in 1857, what the British called Sepoy Mutiny.

Nana Saheb, born as Dhondu Pant, had wrested control over Kanpur. It was Havelock who then took back Kanpur from Nana Saheb and his forces. Havelock then realised that his country had lost control over Lucknow too, but entering Lucknow was impossible given the force of resistance. Havelock than deployed the Sikh regiment to ensure the British forces could complete construction of a bridge over Ganga. The Sikh soldiers managed to control the ‘rebels’ but a lot of blood was lost in the process. While Havelock was busy capturing Lucknow, Nana Saheb’s lieutenant Tantya Tope recaptured Kanpur.

The British eventually managed to use the same bridge to reenter Kanpur, the one that they had used to make their way into Lucknow. They used Indian resources to fight and kill Indians. Havelock was instrumental in wrecking havoc on people in this war. Kanpur back then was spelled as the British found it easier to spell - Cawnpore. It became Kanpur in 1977.

Now a point to note here is that India also had an island named after the same Havelock. In the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, the most famous island, the one where you find the pristine Radha Nagar Beach, was called Havelock Island till 2018.

When PM Narendra Modi visited Andaman and Nicobar in 2018, Havelock Island was renamed to 'Swaraj Dweep'. Modi was there to mark the 75th anniversary of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's visit to the islands, and along with Havelock, two other famous islands also got new names: Neel Island became Shaheed Dweep, and Ross Island is now Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Island.

It is 2020. Names are being changed every now and then. Coimbatore became Koyampuththoor yesterday. The Tamil Nadu government has changed 1,018 British spellings in a recent order.

But we began by telling you that Southall in London is known as Little Punjab. You can’t think about Punjab and not be reminded of its food. What is Punjab without its parathas? It is the shape of a roti, may even resemble khakhra, but it is none of those. A paratha in Punjab, becomes parota down south, but retains all its unhealthy values. We won’t get into the debate of where it originated because here we are concerned about what we are paying for it. Health is just one part of that payment.

A parota, or paratha, is your guilt food and that can make you guiltier when you have it with that extra serving of molten butter all over it. And so the extra butter will come at an extra GST. The Karnataka bench of the Authority for Advance Rulings has ruled that a GST of 18 per cent would apply to parotas. Maybe it is their way of keeping you away from the guilt. The humble roti comes with a GST of 5 per cent.

The ruling did not come just because someone was in a mood to rule. The ruling came on an appeal filed by ID Fresh Foods, which makes ready-to-eat foods, that parota eaters be charged lesser GST.

If you needed more reason to eat roti than the greasy parotas, you got it. For the taste buds, roti can’t do what parota does. Similarly, a ready-to-eat parota can’t achieve for the taste buds what a straight-from-the-tawa parota can. That would be cheaper too.

A Supreme Court petition to ban Coca Cola and Thums Up cost the petitioner Rs 5 lakh. Why should a person pay just because he filed a petition? Because Umedsinh P Chavda filed the petition for extraneous reasons, meaning the real reason he cited for the petition was not the real reason. To understand the nitty gritties of the case, read this.

But why does Thums Up misspell thumbs? Okay, the logo is suggestive, but still, why spell it wrong? Thums Up, you know, was launched by Coca Cola in 1977 to compete against Pepsi, owned by PepsiCo. The drink soon got a thumbs up from its consumers but the logo had a problem.

Back then, as in back in the 1970s, the gesture wasn't considered decent. You may think that it's a sign of approval, but some considered it the exact opposite – angutha dikhana. Also, the name did not sound unique because, well, everyone has a thumb; in fact, two. If you are Hrithik Roshan or Jaadu you may have three. Also, then other companies could lay a claim on the use of thumbs and call their product something like thumbs down, thumbs in, or thumbs out.

So just before the logo was to be registered, the company’s lawyers advised that ‘b’ be dropped and your drink became Thums Up. We wonder who advised Chavda to file the petition in the first place.

China, meanwhile, is acting on its own advice and recipes to cook stories. It cooked stories and dumped it all on Twitter. So, Twitter got to the cleaning act and has removed 1,70,000 Chinese accounts that were dumping Chinese agenda on Covid-19 and the US protests over the death of George Floyd. Yes, Twitter is blocked in China but the propaganda campaign was targeted at Chinese-speaking audiences outside China. Most of these tweets were in Mandarin.

If you want to send out a message in the times of internet and social media, there is no way you won’t find a way. When China tried to stop the truth about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from reaching out and into the world, internet use wasn’t so prevalent and social media wasn’t so social. Now, estimates of the death toll in the massacre, where students were targeted, vary from several hundred to thousands.

China imposed immediate censorship on news from going out. Many Chinese people, both within and outside China, did not know the scale of what struck Tiananmen Square.

The message still got out via fax machines. Not from China, but Hong Kong. A group of students in Hong Kong, pained by the death of students in China, created a list of fax numbers from the Yellow Pages, and decided to send a daily news digest. But this required a lot of fax machines and not just numbers on which the digest could be sent.

They used a method then which is popular now - crowdsourcing. The students called companies and held phone-in shows, and by way of newspaper stories, got companies to hand over their underused fax machines to them.

Now, you see there is no way information can be stopped from reaching while you try. From China, let’s move to India and see how attempts are on to stop correct information from reaching us.

It is becoming clear that states are hiding the number of Covid deaths. States are in some sort of competition that they did better at controlling the virus. So instead of controlling the virus, they are controlling the data on deaths and rate of infection. Some are refusing to ramp up testing because if you don’t test, the tally doesn’t rise and you pass the test in controlling the virus with flying colours.

The other name for misrepresentation of facts, numerical or otherwise, is propaganda. Chinese excel in the art because they aren’t a democracy. Indian leaders do not have a foolproof propaganda machinery because there are some checks that offer balances in the system. So, if Delhi government hides figures, municipal bodies responsible for managing crematoriums can raise a red flag. The same applies to Tamil Nadu, where too it has been found that the number of dead is more than those shown dead in government records. And let's not even go to Bengal.

So while the government is telling the world, which includes India, that it has the world’s lowest fatality rate, the truth needs some fax machines to get out and about.

A government lie that it wants to spread as the truth is propaganda. But where did propaganda find its origin? In the place of God. What is religion but propaganda?

Propaganda, our Word Of The Day, first came into common use in Europe. This was a result of the missionary activities of the Catholic church. Pope Gregory XV, in 1622, created the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome. A College of Propaganda was set up under Pope Urban VIII to train priests for the missions.

Back then, ‘propaganda’ was an honourable word. Those indulging in it still consider it an honourable act. Now, the Oxford dictionary defines propaganda as “ideas or statements that may be false or present only one side of an argument that are used in order to gain support for a political leader, party, etc”. Back then it was done in the name of God; now it is done in the name of national interest.

In democratic societies, propaganda has been met with counter-propaganda. The efforts to get to truth are on amid all this.

You can stop thinking about propaganda because the weekend is here. Okay, you can’t party like you partied but you can watch movies like you did. Not in theatres though. For this weekend, you may watch Gulabo Sitabo. But should you? Read this to know.

We will be back on Monday and try to bust some more propaganda.

Stay safe.

Also read: DailyOh! How Gunjan Saxena ducked missiles in Kargil, to why black is 'ugly' for a Bengal school