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I got high distinctions in linguistics at university, thankyou, so I understood all of it. My POINT was that I'd trust Lala's judgement about these matters because she is part of an Indian family and has Indian friends, so her knowledge of the pronunciation of Indian names is based on knowing the language and, quite often, knowing people with those names.

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Your post also assumed that the letters assigned to Indian sounds in English are always consistent. That's not a good assumption as these names may not have been transposed at the same time. Witness Australian Aboriginal place-names, which have a plethora of spellings from different times, different ears and different understandings.