@knc1: Oh pooh! I know there's no insult intended... I'm laughing at myself. I never thought of myself as particularly patriotic!
The former East Pakistan is now Bangladesh. In India, there is a huge Bengali speaking community in West Bengal. During partition (pre-independence) Bengali Hindus moved to West Bengal, India, Bengali Muslims moved/stayed in Bangladesh. I won't do a history lesson now. Suffice it to say, rough estimates put the population of the state of West Bengal at around 91 million while that of Bangladesh around 152 million. Of course, this is not taking into account the millions of Bengalis scattered throughout rest of India. The reason why Bengali is associated with Bangladesh is because it is a national language while in India, its a regional language.
As it so happens, there is a very large Bengali speaking community in Delhi. Mostly people who have settled there during partition. Other than that, Bengalis (like other communities in India) are settled all over India.
When I started this project, I really didn't think about GNI(PPP) or HDI (in fact, Economics was never my forte!). I calculated that if 1% of the entire Bengali speaking community in the world (181 million according Encyclopedia Brittanica) could be tapped thats 1.8 million people. Not bad. Wait. That doesn't sound right. If there are 152 million people in Bangladesh and 91 million people in West Bengal.... Oh I give up.
I know this is way off topic but I'm having too much fun!
