On Friday, I read to my wife, who is herself Indian (born and bred in Trinidad), of how Mumbai has 15 million people, most of them dirt poor. Odd, how we could have never heard of one of the world’s largest cities.

But of course, we had! Mumbai is Bombay! Bomb-friggin-bay!

We’d known of it since we were practically wearing diapers. Now, why would the press and educators use a strange word most people had never heard of, to describe a city that hundreds of millions of people were long familiar with? Because they are conspiring to confuse and confound us, and make us feel ignorant and inadequate, and make themselves look as if they were competent and knowledgeable, which they ain’t.

But we don’t live in India, so we have no reason to call Bombay, “Mumbai.”

I also didn’t realize, until reading Indian journalism professor Suketu Mehta’s New York Times op-ed, “What They Hate About Mumbai,” that “Mumbai” is the home of “Bollywood.”

Then why isn’t it called, “Mollywood”? Because almost everyone knows it as Bombay. In his op-ed, Mehta refers repeatedly to “Bombay,” and uses it in the title of his book: Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.

No “Mumbai” there. I wonder if the references to “Mumbai” in his op-ed were even Mehta’s idea.

My wife can’t believe that CNN refused to tell viewers that it was reporting from Bombay. She thinks, “They’re trying to be sophisticated.”

Now, say after me: “Peking,” not “Beijing.” “Black,” not “African-American.” “Girls,” not “young women.” “Ladies.” “Females.” “Whores.” “Prostitutes,” not “sex workers.” “Illegal aliens,” “illegal immigrants,” or “illegal human beings,” not “undocumented immigrants” or “undocumented workers.” Say “Gypsies,” not “Roma.”

Say “Calcutta,” not “cold cut,” or whatever the hell the language police are demanding. “Madras,” not “Chennai.”

Say “Mt. McKinley,” not “Denali.” Say “abortion,” not “family planning.” “Abortion,” not “termination of pregnancy.” “Abortion,” not “choice.” “Abortionist,” not “abortion provider.” Say “unwed mother,” not “single mother.”

Say “welfare,” not “income maintenance.” Say “riot,” not “demonstration.” And “insult,” “criticism,” or “disagreement,” not “verbal assault.”

And no pronouncing Spanish names and words, as if we were in Mexico City, while Hispanics disrespect our language, nation, and laws. And it’s not, the robber “requested” (or “asked for”), the robber “demanded” the victim’s money.

It’s not “international affairs,” it’s “foreign affairs.” “Foreign travel,” not “international travel.”

Don’t say, “activists” or “militants,” say “terrorists.”

Don’t call the Kurosawa movie, Shichinin no samurai,” the way the pretentious morons at the Internet Movie Database started writing a few years ago, as if it were a Japanese Web site, and as if the Japs used the Latin alphabet, call it “Seven Samurai“! The IMDB censors have even re-written the history of the Oscars, putting the names of Seven Samurai and other foreign films’ nominations in phoneticized foreign words, instead of the English titles they were nominated in at the time.

And maybe most important of all, it’s not “tolerant, enlightened, progressives” or “multiculturalists” or “liberals,” it’s “ignorant, pretentious, arrogant, smug, intolerant, totalitarian, godless communist bastards”!
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