Aamar Bhalo Lagche

This transliterated Hindi, so far as I could glimpse, was on a billboard I saw this morning on the way to the airport. Roughly translated, this is "[Something] leaves me feeling good", which may be as close to "I'm lovin' it" as you can get in Hindi.

I saw one McDonald's in Calcutta, in the Park Street neighborhood, which is old and fashionable and largely populated with ancient restaurants where the waiters wear funny hats (different from the funny hats they wear in McD's). I don't know what it replaced, but it was pretty big, two stories I think, and it was down the street from KFC, and both were reasonably busy, but not swamped.

I'm interested in two things about this ad, which I'll ask you to picture as, in addition to the quoted phrase, the golden arches writ large on a field of red.

1. The direct translation of the US slogan. I guess there are a couple of reasons I can imagine for this. One is that McD is lazy and somewhat time-constrained and so they were not about to test into an India-specific slogan. After all, in the States this one covers a pretty wide demographic swath. Second possibility is that the strategy for the India entry is, either in whole or in part, to use Indians who have spent some time in the US as a wedge for market entry, and hence they've used a recognizable slogan.

Problem with this theory - these customers would obviously know English, so why bother with the translation?

Possible reason - Desi pride?

2. The transliteration to roman script, rather than writing in Devanagari, which, let's face it, looks cooler (but in fairness rarely can look playful). There may be an entirely practical reason for this - few and fewer people can read proper Devanagari. I've got no data on this (when do I ever have data?), but I do know that when Hindi is taught in schools, it is partly to instruct people in how to read and write. Hindi is obviously a 'live' language, and Bollywood films alone will make sure it stays vibrant as a spoken language for the foreseeable. But I wonder, to put on my alarmist hat for a second, whether transliteration may ever become the norm, so that the cherished bar-bar loopy text that even I, in my deep ignorance of Indian culture, know and love, vanishes.

Intellectually, the interesting thing about this is that, as you would expect, there are some characters in Devanagari that have no equal in English. They get transliterated with various N's and H's in awkward places. If the alphabet is somehow replaced, what happens to these sounds? Are they slowly rounded into oblivion?

Any precedents out there?