Doland Trump and His Sacred Text, the Vestas

Donald Trump never fails to entertain the world. In his recent visit to India, his speech became another comic fodder when he mispronounced the Hindu sacred text Vedas as "Vestas" (maybe what he had in mind was a term that sounded like "vestal..." something), the name of the Indian spiritual guru Swami Vivekananda as "Swami Vivekamannand," and the names of cricket superstars Sachin Tendulkar as "Soo-chin Tendul-kerrr" and Virat Kohli as "Virot Ko-leee" (See The Daily Beast article).

To add icing to the POTUS cake, Indian PM Narendra Modi, in turn, came out with his own metathetical mistake by calling his new BFF "Doland Trump."

I guess all these mispronunciations are fine to most people -- until you realize that perhaps Dale Carnegie was right when he said, “A person's name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” And so you actually show respect to a person by calling him by the name he likes to be called, and by saying it the way it should be pronounced. But well, since both leaders made similar mistakes, they could call it even. Too, some will be more forgiving, for if Trump cannot even pronounce English words or names and some other well-known words -- "Beyonc-ee," "Ne-vahhh-duh," " "Tan-ZAYN-ia," "Two Corinthians," "Premedication," "Oar-ian," "In-DUH-stry," and  "Ch-eye-na" -- we should not expect him to say strange-sounding Indian names the right way.

Given Trump's current status, this verbal gaffe reminds me of the power of naming in colonial and neocolonial discourse. The Spaniards in the Philippines, for example, indiscriminately or arbitrarily named people and places following their own orthography. The Americans did the same, naming places and people without much regard for the way natives would have spelled their own name and the names of their communities based on the native speaker's pronunciation. In both cases, the act of naming was an exercise of power

This calls to mind the facetious re-naming of Bahrain's Shaikh Isa Air Base to "Shakey's Pizza" by US soldiers during the Gulf War. Apparently, for some of these sophisticatedly armed Westerners, pronouncing the name "Shaikh Isa" was too complicated to learn. And for them, learning to pronounce it the right way was not worth the effort, even though it was the name of a highly important Bahraini leader.

And so it is in this recent verbal gaffe: names are symbols of power, the act of naming is an exercise of power, and words are pronounced according to how they are prescribed in the Vestas, the sacred text of a certain "Doland Trump."