The New Criterion

On my way to the dentist in the middle of the day not long ago, I heard Philip Reeves—a Briton, by the sound of him—on National Public Radio interviewing an Indian gentleman whose name I didn’t catch about the terrorist massacre in the latter’s country last Thanksgiving-tide. The Indian spoke English with the sort of aristocratic British accent that you never hear in Britain anymore. Even the Queen doesn’t speak so “posh.” He was saying that for anyone born and raised, as he was, in Bombay, the sight of the slaughter at the Victoria railway terminus there was particularly traumatic. Now the English-speaking Western media had, in the wake of the disaster, allowed an occasional mention of the Victoria terminus because its Indian name, Chhatrapati Shivaji (after a seventeenth-century Maratha champion of the Hindus against the Mughals), is practically unpronounceable. ...

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