Hello! My name is ... Suriname?

After five weeks of misspelling my name, and me often pointing out the incorrect name, the student seems to have finally figured out how to spell my name.  But, at least this is a student who made that mistake.  A senior citizen takes the proverbial cake with how she butchered my name as "Shram."  I suppose I should be happy that she didn't make an "Ashram" out of my name!

My grandmother said that in the traditions, they gave children god's names so that it then gave them yet another opportunity to think about the divine.  And she, like many elders, didn't care much for the modern names that don't have any godly interpretations.

Sometimes, acquaintances shorten my name to "Sri." If these are people whom I might rarely encounter, then I don't waste my time and energy to correct them.  In my mind, I take it as they are addressing me with the honorific "sri" from the old country.  To others that I might interact with more, I politely tell them that I go by my first name in its complete form--Sriram.

But, never in a million years would I have ever imagined that people might have been duped into thinking that after three months of travel they would meet the god Sri Ram.  And that is exactly how some were misled, writes the author of the book that I have been commissioned to review.

Think about the Subcontinent in the 1860s and 1870s.  The bastards had a tight squeeze on India and were extracting every possible penny that they took with them to London.  Meanwhile, some of their colonies far away needed labor because the damn good-hearted managed to screw up the African slave trade.  So, they created an indentured labor scheme that would then take people from the Subcontinent to halfway around the world to the Caribbean.

The problem was the local culture and the fear of the unknown.  But, the colonial masterminds knew well how to tap into the culture.  "These recruiters knew the inner workings of indenture and skillfully used their experience to inveigle intending indentured Indians."  Bastards, I tell ya!

What strategies did they use?  "For instance, recruiters told the intending Indians that they were going to Sri-Ram instead of Suriname.  To Indians, Ram indicates a religious place that sounds like the Ramayana ... "

The bastards knew their enemy really well; so well that they knew exactly how to string them along.  Sociopaths are experts at this, remember?  "Someone with sociopathic tendencies can ‘read’ other people well and understand their emotions. But a sociopathic person reads others in order to manipulate or take advantage of that person."

Thus, Suriname became Sri-Ram!  And more twists to the names of places so that gullible Indians would fall for it.  And they did.  They boarded ships to Mirich Desh (Mauritius), Chinidad (Trinidad), and others.  For the long voyage: "The sea voyage from India to the Caribbean is about eleven thousand miles."  Took them about a 100 days, to Sri-Ram. Sad!