What's in a name? More than you'll know, dear lions

Last Thursday, responding to a petition, Calcutta High Court asked the state government to change the lion and lioness' names..

What is odd is not that Justice Saugata Bhattacharya wanted to know whether state additional advocate general Debjyoti Choudhary would have named his own pet after 'some Hindu god or Muslim prophet' - adding as any good Bengali for the benefit of another good Bengali would, 'Can anyone of us think of naming an animal after Rabindranath Tagore?'..

If the petition finds it problematic for a non-human to be named 'Sita', is it because the petitioners find lions - and by extension, all non-human animals - to be not god's creation?.

If I find the safari park authorities guilty of naming two fine specimens of Panthera leo after one respected and another revered human, should I drag iconic writer, Bengali to boot, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, and change the title of his story, 'Mahesh' - another name of Shiv - which is also the name of a buffalo in the story, that too owned by a poor Muslim farmer?..

Since the naming of the two lions were actually done in 2016 and 2018 by Tripura Zoo authorities, should we check what other names they may have given to other non-human animals before carting some of them off to different parts of the country spreading nomenclatural haraam?..

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