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Friday, October 19, 2012

My common bloopers - 10 - B D Jatti

One of the Vice Presidents of India (he was also acting president for a brief while) was a gentleman by the name of B D Jatti. During my childhood (and in fact till very recently) I used to pronounce his name as B D Jut-tea (hard 't'). I grew up in the north and so I thought this must be a version of Bhatti or JaaT. However, I discovered recently that he is actually a South Indian from Karnataka, and his full name is Basappa Daanappa Jatti and the surname has a soft 't'. So the correct pronunciation of his name is 

bus-up-uh dahn-up-uh juh-tee (soft 'd' and 't')

In Hindi this would read as 

बसप्पअ दानप्पअ जत्ति 

And if you can read KannaDa, this reads as 

ಬಸಪ್ಪ ದಾನಪ್ಪ ಜತ್ತಿ 

The funny part is that in Tamil, the word 'jatti' is the equivalent of 'chaDDhi' and hence we used to be embarrassed when this name came up. As someone famously said, all shame and embarrassment is wasted. Classic example of that. 

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