At least, it’s not called Milligram

The residents of Millennium City should heave a sigh of relief that the area will merely morph from Gurgaon to Gurugram. The city and surrounding district could well have been conferred a multisyllabic new-old appellation instead, as happened in the case of Tiruchirappalli — formerly Trichy, not to be confused with Thrissur, earlier known as Trichur —and many other Indian cities. Haryana has commendably restrained itself to redesignating just two districts, the other being Mewat that has been further shortened to Nuh. Fortunately, despite the purported mythological provenance of Haryana’s second city that paradoxically forever remains a village, no suggestions for Gurgaon to be renamed Dronacharyagram have apparently been proffered or accepted.

If pronounced with the right foreign-returned accent, Gurugram exudes a certain cool hipster vibe. So much so that, had Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar not grabbed the name double quick, it could well have been commandeered by tech-savvy denizens of that very conurbation probably to be bestowed on an app on the lines of Instagram, as some in the Twitterverse have already averred. It is, however, most providential that the state authorities did not decide to have a bit of both worlds — the millennial and rural — and rename the city Milligram.