News Analysis India

Tag: K T Rama Rao

  • Telangana emblem: BRS opposes Congress govt’s ‘attempt to remove’ Charminar from Telangana emblem

    Hyderabad: The opposition BRS in Telangana on Thursday said it would hold protests against the Congress government’s alleged move to remove Charminar and the ‘Kakatiya arch’ from the state emblem. BRS working president K T Rama Rao, who visited Charminar here along with other party leaders, said Charminar is the identity of Hyderabad.

    Speaking to reporters, Rama Rao alleged that the Congress government does not want former Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao to get a good name for the BRS government’s performance during the last 10 years.

    He also accused the Congress government of trying to belittle the progress achieved during the tenure of BRS. “We oppose the Congress government’s attempt to remove Charminar and the Kakatiya arch from the official logo of Telangana,” he said, adding that the BRS would also take up protests on the issue. AllUttar PradeshMaharashtraTamil NaduWest BengalBiharKarnatakaAndhra PradeshTelanganaKeralaMadhya PradeshRajasthanDelhiOther StatesHe demanded that the Congress government withdraw its alleged attempt to remove the Charminar and also the arch of the Kakatiya dynasty of Warangal from the state emblem. The proposed agitation by the BRS came in the wake of the state government’s move to make a new state emblem reflecting the “struggles and sacrifices of Telangana” and also a new state song. BRS leader RS Praveen Kumar opposed popular music director M M Keeravani of Oscar-winning ‘Natu Natu’ fame composing music for the state song ‘Jaya Jaya He Telangana’ penned by poet Ande Sri. Kumar took exception to the “authority” of Keeravani, who is a native of neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, over the state song of Ande Sri.

    “Tollywood and Telangana movement are different. Tollywood is for entertainment and on the other hand, Telangana anthem is a common thread of emotion that brought all hearts of Telangana together during movement. It’s not Hollywood that gave tune to Jana Gana Mana and Vandemataram,” Kumar said on ‘X’ on May 27.

  • Floccinaucinihilipilification: Tharoor’s latest tongue-twister in friendly banter with KTR

    By PTI
    NEW DELHI: Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, known for his penchant for rarely used, difficult-to-pronounce English words, on Friday threw in another head scratcher, floccinaucinihilipilification.

    The noun, which had Twitterati once again running for their dictionaries, came up as Tharoor engaged in friendly banter with TRS working president K T Rama Rao over COVID-19 medicine names.

    Oxford dictionary describes floccinaucinihilipilification as “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless”.

    It started with Rama Rao, or KTR as he is popularly called, wondering why medicine names are so tough to pronounce.

    “On a lighter note, any idea who comes up with this unpronounceable names for meds? – Posaconazole – Cresemba – Tocilzumab – Remdesivir – Liposomal Amphoterecin – Flavipiravir – Molnupiravir – Baricitinib. And the list goes on,” he said on Thursday night.

    He tagged the tweet and added in another post, tongue firmly in cheek, “I suspect @ShashiTharoor Ji Pakka has a role to play in this.”

    Tharoor responded to the Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader, popularly known as KTR, in the same spirit.

    “Not guilty! How can you indulge in such floccinaucinihilipilification, @KTRTRS?” “Left to me I’d happily call them “CoroNil”, “CoroZero”, & even “GoCoroNaGo!” But these pharmacists are more procrustean,” the MP from Thiruvnanthapuram tweeted.

    The author-politician had slipped in another not-used-so-often word.

    But there was scarcely any attention on “procrustean’, an adjective defined by Oxford as “(especially of a framework or system) enforcing uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality”.

    The focus was on the many-syllabled floccinaucinihilipilification — 29 letters and three more than the English alphabet.

    According to the Cambridge dictionary, “The honour of being the longest non-technical word goes to floccinaucinihilipilification.”

    It also said it’s an 18th-century coinage that combines four Latin prefixes meaning “nothing”.

    Several people responded to Tharoor’s post, with many joking about how difficult it was to pronounce the word and many others sharing memes on it.

    Tharoor has been a man of many words earlier too.

    In the past, he has stumped people with rarely used English words such as “farrago” and “troglodyte”.

    While farrago means a confused mixture, a troglodyte means a person regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.