Donald Trump came to India last week and announced the launch of Trump Tower in Mumbai, a 75-storey residential complex with apartments whose price tags will be between $80-100 million. If this wasn’t enough to generate envy the colour of bile, The Donald also pouted and pronounced that real estate in Mumbai is very cheap right now, a statement no one with an EMI would ever be heard saying. Now, the only thing I have in common with Trump is that my bank balance is as thin as his hair, yet I found myself scouring for details about the project the following day. If there were no libel laws in this country, I would have described the details using another word; but for now let’s just call them puzzling.

Mumbai’s floor rise charges (the extra money you pay per square foot as you go higher up the building so you can comfort yourself that the smell outside the window is that of a cirrus cloud and not sanitary waste) being what they are, my guess is that the $20 million range would be the difference between the lowest and the highest floors in the tower. And that’s money very well spent. But the remaining $85 million fetches you, and here I suggest you play a guessing game with other members of the family, a 3 BHK. At best, a 4 BHK! Now, even though the Trump Tower will not be designed to look like Godzilla bit off chunks of it, it would still be awkward to invite Mukesh and Nita Ambani for your housewarming party and take them on a grand tour of four piddly bedrooms. Who are these rich people who can do with so little?

It is only in Mumbai, where real estate expectations are so low that four poles and a stretch of plastic can pass off as a credible dwelling, that people will meekly settle for this. Trump would have found his 4 BHK tower impossible to price as a “luxury lifestyle” anywhere else in the country. In Gurgaon, where I live, people would have sneered at its name even. No one would voluntarily live in a building called a ‘tower’. It has to be ‘court’, ‘gardens’ or ‘terraces’. And that first name? Trump? A building named after a mere mortal? No way.

In the NCR (and, I am told, in Bangalore as well) builders take the naming of their creations very seriously. The first lot of buildings grabbed all the palace names — Belvedere, Windsor, Hamilton. Then came the names of fancy localities from around the world — so there is Beverly, Bel air, Regency, Trinity and Westend. And even though there isn’t a water body larger than a puddle in its vicinity, there is an entire Malibu Towne, smug with that redundant ‘e’. If you can name a building after a distant town, then it isn’t much of a stretch to name it after an imaginary location on a TV show. And so, there is Wisteria Lane, where the Desperate Housewives of television lived. I am not exactly sure of the marketing advantages of calling a building by a name that invokes images of scheming housewives who cheat on their husbands with the gardener and the handyman, but there must be a reason.

When I first started looking for houses in Gurgaon, I was astounded by the builders’ ability to string any two English words together while deciding on a name. After going through a blur of Deerwood Parks and Parkwood Heights, I asked the broker if the place had any buildings at all that didn’t have an English name. “Yes,” he beamed, and that is how we found ourselves outside ‘Karam hi Dharam’ apartments. Standing there, looking at the words written in deep red and a large font, I realised that ludicrosity is a greater calling than linguistics.

Since I didn’t want to wake up every morning to the thought of a righteous Dharmendra, I eventually decided on a building called Orchid Garden. There wasn’t a single orchid to be spotted for miles nor was there a garden. Yet, the worst part of living there wasn’t the falsity of its name, it was its pronunciation. Everyone called it ‘orchchid’, like it was a relative of Bachchan.

The first few months I refused to relent and stuck to the right way of saying the word. But when groceries and pizza delivery guys consistently failed to show up, I gave up and threw in my lot with the other Orchchiders. A couple of years later, by which time the ‘chch’ sound was rolling naturally off my tongue, I called a brand new restaurant to order dinner. When I rattled off the address, this very polished voice at the other end said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I feel compelled to point out to you that the word is pronounced orchid. Think of it as being spelled with a ‘k’, then it would be easy to remember.” The galauti kebabs , when they eventually arrived, tasted of indignation deep-fried in embarrassment.

In Mumbai, Trump Towers has no such fears. The brisk and businesslike Mumbaikar, who is an expert in economising everything, will immediately shorten the name to TT. But give the building a couple of years, and come monsoon, it will be wrapped with blue plastic. All 72 floors of it. Even the helipad. And then we can all laugh at it.

(Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law . Follow her on Twitter >@veenavenugopal )

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