A rose may be bred for specific colour, fragrance, or specific degree of thorniness, or some other quality such as high oil-content, or long-life. The breeder might rebrand such a flower to emphasise its special qualities and to protect IPR. Renaming is part of the rebranding.
Renaming a city, or a geographical region on the other hand, rarely has such positive consequences. There are no IPR to be protected in such instances. At best, if the city in question has a terrible reputation, renaming it might help disassociate it from the negative branding. Nuristan may be no better than Kaffiristan but at least people aren't offended by the name.
More From This Section
On the other hand, if the city or the region has a positive reputation, renaming might disassociate it from positive branding. If there are associated protected geographical indications, as with Champagne, or Kobe Beef, or Darjeeling Tea, a renaming could cause brand confusion.
Renaming a city does however, lead to some degree of local activity. The municipal corporation will spend some money repainting local signs, travels websites will be redesigned and updated to reflect the renaming, maps will be rewritten, and so on. If the renaming is done in a year of drought and collapsing real estate values, it might act as a mild stimulant to the local economy. A Keynesian who believed in hiring people to dig ditches and fill the ditches up again, could consider such a renaming useful.
The process of renaming also invariably sparks some debate which can serve as a distraction from less esoteric topics. Many cities have been renamed; the renaming is always hotly debated. Those debates are never about brand value, or Keynesian stimulation. Instead, the "debate" usually turns into highly-disputable non-sequitors about cultural values.
The distraction quotient of renaming is important. Let's say a city has inadequate sewage systems, poor public transport, massive pollution, high levels of crime and violence against women. Assume too that this fictional city has just suffered the consequences of some rioting and road blockades.
The civic authorities could spend enormous sums tacking those problems, without necessarily making citizens happy. It costs thousands of crores to put adequate sewage systems in place. Designing and funding an acceptable public transport system and the roads for it to run on would also cost thousands of crores. Cutting down crime and violence against women would be difficult, even if vast sums were to be thrown at the problems. Rioting and road blockades cannot be tackled without huge political will.
Instead of even attempting such difficult and expensive tasks, the authorities might think of a clever cost-effective way to divert the attention of citizens - just rename the city. If the new name is merely a faux Sanskriticisation of the old name, so much the better! Locals can continue to use the old name in casual conversation while spelling it slightly differently when it is written down. This model works well enough with Roopnagar aka Ropar so why not with Gurugram aka Gurgaon?
The entire exercise has however, led to some thoughts about the mythical personage the city was named after. That man had several character flaws, well illustrated in India's greatest epic. He was casteist and vicious in protecting his favourite student from a potential low-caste rival. He was a snob, refusing to teach the son of a charioteer. He ended up on the wrong side of a family property dispute despite being aware of every excruciating detail. Should any place be named after such an individual? Answering that question in any definite fashion would take us right back into a minefield labelled "cultural values".