Kannada Rising

I had a surprise today when I went down to Brigade Road -- one of Bangalore's main shopping streets -- to pick up some dry cleaning and buy some groceries.

Up and down the street, black paint defaced many of the store signs in English. Some signs had just a little paint on them. Others had been obliterated. Store workers along Brigade Road were busy scrubbing the signs.

The Kannada Committee, a group supporting the local language known as Kannada and opposing the use of English, had thrown the paint during the previous night, according to three people I talked to separately.

The most badly hit stores included a big Levi's jeans store whose building also sports a big picture of an attactive young woman prone in tight jeans (that got a lot of paint, too) and the Planet M music store, Bangalore's answer to Tower Records, Virgin Music and HMV

The sign for Nilgiri's supermarket, which I mentioned in a previous post, was one of the more striking metaphors for the protest. The left side of the sign displays the thick, rounded characters used to write in Kannada. The right side is in English.

A little black paint had been thrown on the right side. The left side was clean.