Hunting for Ghost

If you live here long enough, you will start to encounter at first eerie anomalies to that which is an accepted part of Thai culture. Sometimes after periods of months, calling up your business contacts or dropping by his office to look him for a chat, you will be surprise the receptionist informs you that they have no Mr Somchai (example name) in their company, and never had before. Calling Somchai’s mobile and be greeted “the number you are dialing does not exists” or something. Mr Somchai never existed, especially with the pretty receptionist you have never met before insisting you have the wrong office with her large confused boobs eyes. You met a ghost. Does one really exists by the name of Somchai, did one encounter an angle that have given a large order once, an aid from the other world to help one’s business and then returned to the other side? It does happens, Somchais from the parallel universe.

Maybe they believe so much the fortune teller, maybe they just feel like it. If you live here long enough, you will know more then a handful of people that changed their names. Thais, I asked them why, I always do ask them why. “Err… just want to change name…”, “Err… someone else in my office higher position have same name…”, “Err.. doctor fortune teller say this name better…”. Just some but not all of the reasons. Thais can even change their sir names. It is not necessary for the wife to follow the sir name of the husband’s, it is possible for the husband to change his to follow the wife’s. Done for reasons such as wife is from a family with some distance royal ancestry, with permission from the wife’s family the husband must seek. One can change the name given by one’s parents, it doesn’t matter one’s roots in the meaning of names. Mobile numbers I see as one’s important identity in life, not to be changed as friends from a decade ago could still call and locate me up. Never the Thais see this as an essential, change them numbers one after the other they did. MSN for life I believe, but with the advent of password remembering messengers, many will loose their accounts when moving from one computer to the other. That just simply because one never bothers to remember the passwords.

Somchais becomes Samchais, Tivakorns changed to Tinakorns. Even Davids can become Jennys after an operation in the gender hospital, and mobile numbers recycling a popular statistics. Thais vanishing from the face of planet Earth just another thing of this amazing Kingdom. Eventually you will find them lost souls. Eventually they will tell you the reasons.