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A Doordarshan newsreader was removed from daily bulletins over an "embarrassing error" after she mispronounced Chinese President Xi Jinping's name as "Eleven Jinping". She mistook his first name for the Roman numeral eleven. "The newsreader was tasked to read the bulletin at 6.15 am. She was on the casual reader's panel and has been removed from it," Doordarshan DG (news) Archana Dutta said. TNN
...ToI, Front Page, 20 September 2014
Needless to say, my sympathy, which has nothing to do with her sex, is squarely with the poor newsreader(ess).
No one can pronounce alien names correctly. What about the Chinese counterpart of our poor lady? I challenge any Chinese, or for that matter Japanese, lady to correctly pronounce the name of our own President when he is on a tour to their country.
You may think Pranab Mukherjee is as easy to pronounce as GPS. No, sir, no way.
For one thing, Pranab is not exactly Pranab like Arnab is never Arnab. It is neither Pronab, nor Pranob, nor Pronob, nor Pranub nor anything else anyone can imagine. It is a linear combination of all these and more. No Abangali, not born and brought up in Bengal like my son of a fun, can master even the first letter of its alphabet...as simple as 'a'. Period. You may try to place a couple of rosogollas in each of your cheeks and try and you may get somewhere near it. To this day, after staying all of 40 years in Bengal, I can't pronounce Aniket, my beloved student's name. My son can...he was almost marrying his Bengali girl-friend till his mom got wind of it and snatched the poor fish out of the net.
Next comes Mukherjee. Its very spelling is hundredfold. It can be Mookerjee (aristocratic), Mukherji (shortest), Mukhujye (RKP's favorite), or Mukhopadhyay (in all its glory).
I had a nice Bengali friend in my Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP. His name is Swapan Mukhopadhyaya. He stayed for all of 5 years in Moscow doing his Ph D. And he told me that his valiant Russian girl-friend tried hard to pronounce his name right and pestered him about it. He could somehow teach her to say the Shopoan part of it, but never the Mukhopdhyaya. The nearest she could come to was Mukhopatkhay (the 'kh' thing is a Russian letter alright).
Look below at the vintage photo of my class of 1960 at Vizagh:
The guy standing at the end of the second row to the right, behind the last girl, was my first Bengali friend. His name is Tathagata Sen and our teachers didn't have a clue how to pronounce it...they never had a Tathagata Rao or Tathagata Reddy or Tathagata Sastry in AP. They called him valiantly:
'Taatagaata' (all 3 t's as hard as the 't' in tough).
The joker never helped them out but kept grinning from the last bench...for all of 5 years.
Well, Bengal was a foreign country for us in the 1960s.
But look at our own Telugu girl sitting before him and shyly leaning towards her neighbor (for fear she would be cut out by the landscape photographer).
Hers was a sad story. Her mom was a card-holding communist leader having visited Moscow and fallen in love with everything Russian. So she named her fond daughter, Tanya.
But her father was a rich Telugu landlord and wanted to call his daughter Laxmi.
So she was named: 'Laxmi Tanya'
But none of our dour physics teachers ever went to Russia. Nor did they read any Rusaian novels...they were busy pushing samples into their sample-holders and taking readings (as unreliable as this blog). So they thought it was a spelling mistake and called her: 'Laxmi Tanaya' which means 'Daughter of Laxmi'.
And this girl never complained...she simply smiled and never reported the matter to her red mom for fear she would attack her teachers with a hammer and sickle.
You may think our news reader was happy with the names of English chaps since they ruled us summarily for two centuries and civilized us.
No, sir, not easy...
I had trouble with Maugham till someone told me he was 'mom'. I couldn't forgive him for choosing such a weird spelling instead of calling himself Somerset Mom. Maybe his mom would have denied him free lunches when he was broke.
And what about 'Moffam'? Well, he is simply 'Moom'.
Terrible!
Then again our poor newsreader was reading her news at the ungodly hour of 6.15 am. She must have woken up at 6 and was in a hurry to catch the Metro.
Again, she was summarily 'removed' because she was a 'casual' reader.
What is wrong with a 'casual' reader taking things casually...let them make her a permanent reader and let them try and boot her out...the whole Doordarshan staff would have gone on lightning strike and there would have been a news blackout, which would be more insulting to our honored guest with the weird name:
'Eleven Jumping'...sorry Jinping.
By the way, the lady who booted our poor newsreader happens to be: 'Archana Dutta'. I give it out as a challenge for any Chinese newsreader (male or female or otherwise) to pronounce our Archana-di's name correctly...
...Posted by Ishani
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Anchor removed for 'Eleven Jinping' gaffe
...ToI, Front Page, 20 September 2014
Needless to say, my sympathy, which has nothing to do with her sex, is squarely with the poor newsreader(ess).
No one can pronounce alien names correctly. What about the Chinese counterpart of our poor lady? I challenge any Chinese, or for that matter Japanese, lady to correctly pronounce the name of our own President when he is on a tour to their country.
You may think Pranab Mukherjee is as easy to pronounce as GPS. No, sir, no way.
For one thing, Pranab is not exactly Pranab like Arnab is never Arnab. It is neither Pronab, nor Pranob, nor Pronob, nor Pranub nor anything else anyone can imagine. It is a linear combination of all these and more. No Abangali, not born and brought up in Bengal like my son of a fun, can master even the first letter of its alphabet...as simple as 'a'. Period. You may try to place a couple of rosogollas in each of your cheeks and try and you may get somewhere near it. To this day, after staying all of 40 years in Bengal, I can't pronounce Aniket, my beloved student's name. My son can...he was almost marrying his Bengali girl-friend till his mom got wind of it and snatched the poor fish out of the net.
Next comes Mukherjee. Its very spelling is hundredfold. It can be Mookerjee (aristocratic), Mukherji (shortest), Mukhujye (RKP's favorite), or Mukhopadhyay (in all its glory).
I had a nice Bengali friend in my Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP. His name is Swapan Mukhopadhyaya. He stayed for all of 5 years in Moscow doing his Ph D. And he told me that his valiant Russian girl-friend tried hard to pronounce his name right and pestered him about it. He could somehow teach her to say the Shopoan part of it, but never the Mukhopdhyaya. The nearest she could come to was Mukhopatkhay (the 'kh' thing is a Russian letter alright).
Look below at the vintage photo of my class of 1960 at Vizagh:
The guy standing at the end of the second row to the right, behind the last girl, was my first Bengali friend. His name is Tathagata Sen and our teachers didn't have a clue how to pronounce it...they never had a Tathagata Rao or Tathagata Reddy or Tathagata Sastry in AP. They called him valiantly:
'Taatagaata' (all 3 t's as hard as the 't' in tough).
The joker never helped them out but kept grinning from the last bench...for all of 5 years.
Well, Bengal was a foreign country for us in the 1960s.
But look at our own Telugu girl sitting before him and shyly leaning towards her neighbor (for fear she would be cut out by the landscape photographer).
Hers was a sad story. Her mom was a card-holding communist leader having visited Moscow and fallen in love with everything Russian. So she named her fond daughter, Tanya.
But her father was a rich Telugu landlord and wanted to call his daughter Laxmi.
So she was named: 'Laxmi Tanya'
But none of our dour physics teachers ever went to Russia. Nor did they read any Rusaian novels...they were busy pushing samples into their sample-holders and taking readings (as unreliable as this blog). So they thought it was a spelling mistake and called her: 'Laxmi Tanaya' which means 'Daughter of Laxmi'.
And this girl never complained...she simply smiled and never reported the matter to her red mom for fear she would attack her teachers with a hammer and sickle.
You may think our news reader was happy with the names of English chaps since they ruled us summarily for two centuries and civilized us.
No, sir, not easy...
I had trouble with Maugham till someone told me he was 'mom'. I couldn't forgive him for choosing such a weird spelling instead of calling himself Somerset Mom. Maybe his mom would have denied him free lunches when he was broke.
And what about 'Moffam'? Well, he is simply 'Moom'.
Terrible!
Then again our poor newsreader was reading her news at the ungodly hour of 6.15 am. She must have woken up at 6 and was in a hurry to catch the Metro.
Again, she was summarily 'removed' because she was a 'casual' reader.
What is wrong with a 'casual' reader taking things casually...let them make her a permanent reader and let them try and boot her out...the whole Doordarshan staff would have gone on lightning strike and there would have been a news blackout, which would be more insulting to our honored guest with the weird name:
'Eleven Jumping'...sorry Jinping.
By the way, the lady who booted our poor newsreader happens to be: 'Archana Dutta'. I give it out as a challenge for any Chinese newsreader (male or female or otherwise) to pronounce our Archana-di's name correctly...
...Posted by Ishani
1 comment:
If, by some quirk of fate, our beloved GPS were to become the PM or President, how wonderful it would be to hear the Chinese news reader saying "Gullam Plabhakala Sastly" !
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