When I read George Carlin's exceptional book "Brain Droppings", I couldn't help but quietly smirk and knock my forehead in resignation when reading the list of his favorite redundancies:
 added bonus
 exactly right
 closed fist
 future potential
 inner core
 true fact
 young children
for I had used these almost always. So when I learned that the word "Timor" in the Indonesian means "East", the country East Timor's tautology gave me some solace. After all, it is one gigantic prickle to know that I wasn't as good at the English language as I had thought but it is quite a relief to know that there are millions like me who've not got out of their superfluous ways.
I was once heckled by a KZfaq comment-er who said that I was doing disservice to the country by pronouncing "Nepal" as the British would, i.e. by calling it "Nepol". My argument rested on the case that if a French calls his/her/their country "Paris" instead of "Paree", would it be a disservice too? I don't know why Nippon is called "Japan". Maybe is down to transliteration.
Why are countries named as they are? When I first realised that Pakistan's initial letters PAKI were an acronym for "Punjab" "Afghan" "Kashmir", and "Indus/ Sindh", I was almost caught unawares. But then the grace of the Urdu language added a touch of depth to the word "Pakistan" as the it means the "land of the pure".
After I stumbled upon this meaning, my mind immediately went back to Sahir Ludhianvi, the great Urdu poet, who in his poems, penned down the glorious sentence:
मैं समझता हूँ तक़द्दुस को तमद्दुन का फ़रेब
तुम रसूमात को ईमान बनाती क्यूँ हो
The idea of purity in one's name might not be attached exclusively to Pakistan- the word "Burkina Faso" refers to "land of the honest incorruptible men", and this in a country whose former president, who was amongst the first of the African leaders to raise ecological concerns and plant millions of trees, was assassinated.
There are claims that the name "India" should be replaced by "Bharat" as some Bharatiyas don't want the mispronouncement of "Sindh" as "Ind" to be one of the reasons to call this continent of a country India. Wikipedia writes that "Sri Lanka" means "venerated" Lanka- I don't know how much, if we can at all, translate the essence of the word "Shree" in its entirety in the English language.
I couldn't help but be incensed by the fact that "Venezuela" was named on the whims of a traveller who thought the land was redolent of "Venice", or that New Zealand was named so because a Dutch thought that he'd stumbled into a different form of "Zeeland". If he had cared to learn that Maori people, who have some of the most wonderful way of saying "hello" in the form of a "hongi", were already there, his momentary whim wouldn't have stuck with the name of the only country which sings its anthem in two languages.
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The two men who are at the forefront of WiseDumb podcasts are Karan Bhatta and Rupesh Sah who are researchers, educators and media personalities. You can reach out to them for a collaboration:
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