Mumbai or Bombay?

In case you're wondering why I've come to use Mumbai and Bombay pretty much interchangeably, here's my attempt at an explanation: Officially, the city's name was changed from Bombay to Mumbai in 1996, although it wasn't accepted by the AP until 2006. Initially, I was of course in favor of this eradication of British-Raj era names, done in an apparent attempt to re-claim the city's identity from its colonial heritage. I assumed that calling the city Mumbai was the politically correct thing to do. However, once we got to Mumbai I was surprised to hear a lot of people continuing to call it Bombay. Same thing for the main train station, formerly and ongoingly called Victoria Terminus (VT), although officially it is Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), the Prince of Wales Museum (now officially Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya - quite a mouthful that one) and a number of street names, including the one that Ritesh used to live on (Coppersmith Road - no idea what the official name is now). People either just continue to use the old name or at most use both interchangeably. Old habits die hard, you might say. However, there is a deeper, political reason for this ambivalence. It has to do with the fact that the party responsible for these name changes, the Shiv Sena, is very far right, violently pro-Hindu (i.e. anti-Muslim) and aggressively pro-Maharashtran (i.e. anti-everything else, be that Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil or foreigner) meaning that large swaths of the population don't identify with it and feel excluded if not openly discriminated against. In that light, calling the city Bombay can actually be seen as a rejection of the Shiv Sena's extremist and anti-outsider policies, which is certainly a decent stand to take. So basically you have a choice between two names that each carry their own unfortunate connotations, a choice between sounding like a pro-colonial jingoist or a Maharasthran Hindu extremist. Which is why I do what most Bombayites and Mumbaikars tend to do - I just use both.