‘I thought it meant something else, something uplifting,’ says Daren Sammy in a video that he’s posted expressing his disappointment at finding out that the name his Sunrisers Hyderabad teammates had given him, is actually considered a racial slur.
‘I just learned what that “kalu” meant when I played for Sunrisers in the IPL. They called me and Perera by that name,” Sammy had posted on Twitter a few days back after watching an episode of Hasan Minhaj’s show from which he learned the word didn't mean “strong stallion” as he had thought all these years.
"I was listening to Hasan Minhaj talking about how some of the people in his culture view or describe black people. Now that doesn't apply to everybody, but I say this because of something I experienced. I said I was angry after listening to him describing a word that they use to describe black people, which he was saying is not in a good way and it was degrading. Instantly I remembered when I played for Sunrisers Hyderabad in 2013 and 2014, I was being called the exact same word that he described,” said the former West Indies’ skipper in a video posted on his Instagram account.
"But, every time I was called it - it was me and Thisara Perea - there was always laughter in the moment. Me being a team man, I thought, hey, team-mates are happy, it must be something funny. You can understand my frustration and my anger when it was pointed out to me that it wasn't funny at all, it was degrading,” he added in disappointment.
Just as Sammy’s video started going viral on social media, his former Sunrisers Hyderabad teammate Ishant Sharma’s Instagram post from 2014 also started getting shared on Twitter.
In the picture, SRH teammates Ishant, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Dale Steyn and Sammy can be seen standing together with the caption reading: "Me Bhuvi Kaluu and Gun Sunrisers."
Sammy however left the door open for communication as he asked his former teammates to call him and talk.
"All those who used to call me that, you guys know yourselves, some of you have my numbers, you have me on Instagram, on Twitter, wherever. Reach out to me, let's have a conversation. Because, if it was in any way, shape or form what Minhaj said it meant, I'm very disappointed, and I'll still be angry, and deserve an apology from you guys, because I saw all of you guys as my brothers,” he says before ending the video.
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