NEW DELHI
\nIn a quiet village tucked in the shadow of India\u2019s capital, the late US president Jimmy Carter\u2019s name is etched for posterity. Carterpuri, or the \u201cvillage of Carter\u201d was abruptly renamed from Daulatpur Nasirabad after an hour-long visit by the Nobel laureate in 1978.
\nThe renaming was suggested by India\u2019s then-prime minister Morarji Desai who accompanied Carter on the visit to the small hamlet, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) from New Delhi. \u201cWhen the proposal was mooted, all the village elders immediately said yes,\u201d recalled 71-year-old resident Attar Singh, who vividly remembers the January afternoon from nearly half a century ago.
\nOne of the last surviving members from the generation old enough to remember the occasion, Singh said he was \u201cdistressed\u201d by Carter\u2019s death last month, and played a key role in staging a small tribute ceremony. A picture of the former president was quickly downloaded from the internet, framed, garlanded and placed at a local war memorial where a group of village elders made offerings of salty porridge and a newly stitched traditional turban. Singh said the porridge and the turban, along with a condolence message, were then shipped to the US Embassy.
\n\u201cThe entire village grieved because we considered him as one of our own,\u201d said Rajiv Kumar, a younger resident who was a toddler when Carter visited. The body of Carter, who died at the age of 100 last month, is currently lying in state in Washington and will be buried Thursday in his home state of Georgia.
\nCarter\u2019s visit to the village, then home to less than 500 people, was not by chance. He was driven by a deeply personal mission: his mother Lillian had worked in the village as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s. The dilapidated mansion where Lillian stayed during her time there no longer exists. It was torn down around 15 years ago to make way for a concrete two-storey structure with a line of tiny shops on its ground floor.
\nLittle else from that era survives in Carterpuri, which now has a population of roughly 5,000. The village council office where Carter and his wife Eleanor Rosalynn Carter were feted while bedecked in traditional headgear, is now a community health centre. Nonetheless, Carter\u2019s visit remains firmly imprinted in the memory of Carterpuri\u2019s old-timers.
\n\u201cI was a little boy then but I remember everything,\u201d said 62-year-old Motiram, who goes by one name. His recollections include Carter smoking tobacco from a hookah and waving at the eager children who looked from the rooftops as he took a tour of the village.
\nBut Motiram\u2019s nostalgia is tinted with disillusionment \u201cDespite such a lofty name, our village has seen no progress in all these years,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they named our village after such a big man, there should have been some work done to justify it.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW DELHI In a quiet village tucked in the shadow of India\u2019s capital, the late US president Jimmy Carter\u2019s name is etched for posterity. Carterpuri, or the \u201cvillage of Carter\u201d was abruptly renamed from Daulatpur Nasirabad after an hour-long visit by the Nobel laureate in 1978. The renaming was suggested by India\u2019s then-prime minister Morarji […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-454270","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n