"What's in a name?" This famous Shakespearean quote suggests that a name means very little in the grand scheme of all things. It is the soul of an individual, object or place that matters the most but events both in the past and present tell otherwise. Before 2001, Kolkata was officially called Calcutta , the erstwhile capital of India and the second city in the British Empire during colonial times. Its birth is a fascinating account of how unremarkable villages can be turned into jewels of urban living. This wider trend of renaming Indian cities has been an attempt to emphasize our independence from the British. There are a multitude of theories on why Calcutta came to be known as Kolkata, the most amusing one being when an Englishman asked a Bengali villager for the name of his village, he answered 'kal-kata'('I cut it yesterday') thinking that the question referred to his grass. In Calcutta, as the population grew, there ...