Sunday 4 August 2013

Jack of All Trades, Master of None.

A cold draught blew through the warehouse, even though it was supposedly a summer day in July. The man addressing the small audience of hopefuls pulled down a retractable projection screen and pressed a button on the remote control that he held in his hand. The brief video glorified the joys of distributing telephone directories, for that is what the job was all about.



Half an hour later, I was driving away from one of the loading docks, my old second or third hand (I was not sure, I had paid CAD$500 for it) Corsica sedan groaning with the considerable weight of  Telus telephone directories stuffed into the trunk and the back seats and the passenger seat next to me. Armed with a map and a very rudimentary knowledge of the layout of the city, I drove out of the parking lot. I was in Burnaby and headed for Vancouver. Like any new immigrant, I was elated that I had found a job; well, not a real job, but work of some kind. My ability to make money would depend solely on how many telephone directories I could distribute on a particular day. My hopeful innocence was in for a shock.

I had been in Canada for barely a month. It was July 2001 and summer was slowly creeping in around the Lower Mainland, as the Greater Vancouver area is generally referred to. Thumbing through the city map kindly gifted to me by our friends Natala and Don Goodman from Seattle, I worked out the shortest route to the area I had been allotted.

It turned out to be a voyage of discovery. The Angus Drive locality of Vancouver tends to house some really wealthy people who live in beautiful houses with long driveways, security cameras scanning their automated gates. Why would these people need a telephone directory, I asked myself. For the most part the houses were empty, their well heeled residents holidaying in Europe or other parts of the globe. The only humans I met on these properties were Filipino caretakers. They were a cheerful lot, always had a smile for me and as I left the telephone books with them I couldn't help noticing that they drove better and more expensive cars than my beat up blue sedan!



After a couple of days of pounding the pavement in rain ( I was learning that in Vancouver it can rain at any time of the year!)and shine, I sat down to do the math. After crunching the numbers, I realised that I was wasting my time : I was making less than the minimum wage ($8/hr at that time) after factoring in the amount I spent on gas! I had seen the regular phone book distributors drive into the warehouse with delivery style vans of humongous capacity, dollies to carry large amounts of books at the same time, and the whole family being roped into the task! Ah, it all made sense now; they could probably deliver at four times the pace I could and their volumes translated into more dollars as the payment was proportionate to the number of books you delivered.

I had no regrets quitting that gig, though I must admit that the job gave me an insight into the social stratification of some parts of the city and therefore was a learning experience.

Thus began a series of experimentation on the job market front, some happy some not so happy, and some downright painful. I shall begin with two of my worst jobs, so I can end this post on a happy note.

THE TOTAL CON :

I had heard that selling a product was not an easy thing....but I had not realised just how low companies and people can sink to make a profit. My education was about to begin....

The company was in the business of selling vacuum cleaners door to door. They would call up people at random and ask if they would like to participate in an "air quality" survey. If they said yes, a bait would be thrown in at the conclusion of the telephone survey: we would like to thank you for your participation in this survey by giving you a small token of our appreciation; one of our staff will call on you to deliver this gift personally at a date and time which suits you!

Armed with this "gift" - in this case it was a set of kitchen knives - and the vacuum cleaner in the trunk of my car, I would ring the doorbell. Once having gained entry into the house, I had to sweet talk the victim into allowing me "just 15 minutes" to demonstrate a product that was guaranteed to improve the air quality in the house! Of course the demonstration would take approximately 45 minutes at the best of times.



Needless to say, the price points offered would vary with how much resistance I would encounter to the sale. At the highest level, it would nudge the $2000 mark....I know this sounds atrocious, but obviously my commission would be larger as I only had to pay a fixed amount back to the company. All kinds of payment options would be trotted out to ease the pain of parting with such a ridiculously large amount of money.

At the distress sale level, I could let go of the machine for only around $750. In my one week with the company, I sold only a couple of them. I met people in various stages of financial health : there was a single mom struggling to feed her kids, there was the retired couple who did not really need a vacuum cleaner as their current one worked perfectly. What really made me throw up this work happened late one night.

The prospective customer lived in a ramshackle old house. The yard was unkempt, the grass grew wild, a willow tree drooped over the shiny new cab of a semi. The family of four had finished their dinner, it was a cool summer night and I went over my spiel. Best value for the money, incredible and indestructible motor, awesome suction capabilities (one of the standard demos was to suck in a pile of sand weighing about 10 pounds, conveniently at hand as part of the demo kit!), lifetime warranty, etc. etc. The woman of the house watched from a distance. The man listened, intrigued by all the technical jargon I threw at him. I could tell that he was a gadget guy; he would love to add this new toy to his collection.



The haggling over the price began. This man wanted it, but at the lowest price. As per procedure, I excused myself and said, "I have to talk to my manager to approve this very very special price for you, sir!" I called the office and of course I did not really need approval, I only needed to enact the scenario.

I beamed at the man and said, "You are a very lucky man indeed, sir! My manager said he will make an exception in your case. The machine is yours!" I began to get the paperwork ready when the wife intervened.

"Can I talk to you privately, please?" she said.

We walked out into the cool night and stood in their little driveway.

"Do you see that big rig?" she pointed to the semi parked under the trees. "My husband bought that brand new recently, that is is livelihood, he is paying a huge sum of money every month on the loan that he took to buy it. He loves new toys and I can see he is very tempted to buy your vacuum cleaner. But please understand that, honestly, we cannot afford it. I manage the house and the groceries and I know how hard it is to put food on the table every single day so my family can eat. I'd like you to think about that."

I looked at the semi, its grille glinting in the moonlight filtering through the trees. Then I looked at the woman before me. Her face radiated stress, anxiety, worry. She was ageing before her time. There was no debate, I had made up my mind.

"Thank you for bringing this up, ma'am, I do understand your plight. Rest assured : your husband is not going to get this toy." I picked up the vacuum cleaner, thanked her for her time, wished her good night, and walked slowly back to my car.

The next day, I called up the company and told them that I was not the right fit for the position and would like to quit. A great sense of relief swept over me as I put the phone down.

HELLO! HELLO!

When the home phone rings, and someone says,"Hi Mr.Surin, how's it going today?" I know at once that this is a call from a telemarketer. I try to be nice and polite before putting the phone down, because I know that at the other end of the line is a poor soul trying to make a living; I know, because I was that person too, if only for two weeks.



The company was trying to sell long distance phone services to clients in the USA, trying to switch them from their current service provider. The call centre that they put up was huge, it looked very impressive with hundreds of cubicles with hundreds of people working three shifts, talking into their headsets and peering at a computer screen that was divulging all kinds of information on the person being dialled. The company emphasised that their call list was a gold mine, that they had worked very hard to get hold of all that information, therefore, we the agents should make good and profitable use of the data. They put us through a whole week of training in how to sell a service that the prospective customer had never asked for, and in many cases never even heard of!

In my one week of real work, I sold only two accounts. I joined a bunch of poor performers for retraining, but this did not help. Once, a shaky, female and feeble voice at the other end said in a faltering way,"Excuse me, do you know what time it is here? We are all asleep.....this is a Seniors' home!" The computer had auto dialled a number in Florida, which was three hours ahead of us, and it was around 9 o'clock in the night here.

I felt bad and apologised. A couple of days later, after listening to my sales spiel, an arrogant voice from California rasped, "You sound like a damn terrorist to me". I cut the line and handed in my ID card to my supervisor and walked out the door.

Among other jobs that I tried was being a courier, a car jockey, a retail sales guy.....but none of these can really provide you with a steady income.

However, in all this madness, one small weekend job stands out like a beacon in the wilderness of frustrating part time work : I was a snowshoe guide at Mount Seymour.

Goldie Lake : part of the Discovery snow shoe trail network at Mt. Seymour


Mount Seymour has provided me many days of hiking bliss, in all weathers, so when the opportunity arose to work as a weekend snow shoe guide, I took it up eagerly. Thankfully, by then I had a regular full time job, so the slightly-above- minimum wage did not really affect me that much. I could not believe that I was being paid to wander around snow shoe trails, talking to groups of people and showing them little secrets of the snow and the trees around! Sometimes the group would consist of only two or three people and it was more like taking friends around on a hike of discovery through the hushed winter forests. I met some wonderful folk and had a great time. This was truly working for the love of it!

Snow shoe trail to Dog Mountain on Mt. Seymour.


Career advice gurus constantly harp on reinventing yourself and how the new economy requires that we go through a series of career changes in our working lives. They speak of transferable "soft skill sets" that will help us survive the new world that galloping technology and shifts in world trade are ushering in. They are right, but that doesn't make it any easier to look for work, especially if you are classified as a "mature worker" who might be set in his or her ways, and when insane numbers of people are chasing fewer and fewer opportunities.





Tuesday 28 August 2012

The Not - So - Hidden - Job - Market

A few minutes ago I typed "hidden job market" into the Google search engine. It threw up 4,200,000, (yes that is four million two hundred thousand) entries in 0.41 seconds!

If I were to pursue all those web pages, I can assure you I would be so advanced in years that finding a job would be the least of my concerns!

New immigrants, people who have been laid off, folk who are unemployed, are all apprised of the Hidden Job Market via all the communication channels available in this post modern society that we live in. They talk about it in all the workshops on Looking for Work. Human Resource professionals, market savvy authors, writers and journalists have churned out millions of pages of fluff on the subject. The number of websites devoted to helping the hapless job seeker are as numerous as the stars in the known galaxies. In simple terms, the Hidden Job Market translates to "Networking".  To put it bluntly, it means Do you Know Anyone in the Company You Are Applying to For a Job? Almost every single desirable job in Canada seems to to go to people who fulfil the criteria above. It does not matter if you are the best in your field, if you are competing against the boss's niece, guess who will get the job? At a recent interview, the smart young lady who was calling the shots, went to great lengths to reiterate that there was no "mafia" in her workplace, meaning that it was not biased in favour of any ethnic group. I thought to myself : why take such pains to deny a condition which is supposedly non-existent? Needless to add, I did not get the job. On my way home, I stopped at a gas station to fill up. A cheerful attendant chatted with me and spoke in French to my dog who was sitting at the rear of the vehicle. I asked him where he was from. He said Togo and went on to explain precisely where it was on the African continent. Togo is in West Africa, sandwiched between Ghana to the west and Benin to the east, with Burkina Faso forming the northern border and the Gulf of Guinea washing the southern shores. As he handed me my credit card back I happened to glance inside the convenience store attached to the gas station. There was a large man at the cashier's desk with the same skin pigmentation as my new friend from Togo! I made an educated guess as to his country of origin...


Networking Not Required for this Job

This means that if you are not the outgoing, Hail Fellow Well Met kind of person, the odds are stacked up against you. It means that it does not pay to be modest about your abilities, it means that if you cannot muster up the gumption to knock on doors which clearly state No Vacancy and No Soliciting, you might as well pursue a career as a Trappist monk or a cloistered nun. North America has no place for the reclusive soul, the socially challenged, the shy-by-nature creature. Yeah, I hate it as much as you!


Networking and contacts required in this industry

On my many encounters with people who had immigrated into Canada say thirty or forty years ago, I heard wondrous tales of men and women who mailed their resumes randomly like throwing darts in a pub to big corporations and government departments and were instantly rewarded with an invitation for an interview. In many cases a solid job offer followed. Alas, those happy times are mere stories to regale today's harried job hunter in between tweaking the old curriculum vitae!


Certification, networking, and luck required for this job

However, if you are not looking for a steady, full time job with a great pension plan, dental and medical benefits, three weeks or more of paid vacation, and a salary which will allow you to own a home and occasionally eat out at a restaurant slightly more expensive than MacDonald's Happy Hour, there are plenty of options. And fate would decree that this is the world I would explore when I began to live in Canada at the tender age of 46!


This job calls for latent talent, outgoing personality, self confidence, entrepreneurship and sheer perseverance!

In my next few posts I shall regale you with the agony and the ecstasy of working at jobs you can find without taking the boss's niece out to dinner...


Use of CSA certified workgloves reccomended for this job!

City permit and possibly Mafia connections required!



Many vacancies...Few candidates...APPLY NOW!

Friday 10 August 2012

What Will You Do in Canada?

Mohan and I were waiting for a train on the platform at Shepherd's Bush station in London. It was a crisp November morning in 1999 and we stood in the sun soaking up the warmth.

"What will you do in Canada?" Mohan asked me suddenly. The unexpectedness of the question took me by surprise and I gazed into the middle distance along the empty tracks pretending to spot the oncoming train. Mohan was my flight attendant friend and colleague in Air India and we were in London on a scheduled layover. We were headed for The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Though November might not be the best month to see the flowers, I had never been there in spite of passing through London hundreds of times in my 22 years in the airline, and had decided that this deficiency must be rectified before I migrated to Canada.

"I know what I will not do...", I replied blithely as I searched my mind and heart for the right answer. A couple of years earlier the same question had been posed to me by Laxman, a friend who lived in the same building as me in Mumbai. Back then too I had had no answer for Laxman.

The immigration agent (or "consultant" as they prefer to be called) who was in charge of processing our application with the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi once told us an apocryphal tale about a client of his, a young educated lady from Mumbai, who, when she was asked the same question by the official at the High Commission, answered confidently,"Sir, I will do anything, even clean toilets, just let me into your country!" The consultant thought this brilliant answer had increased her chances exponentially for immigration.

I had looked aghast at the agent. Was that the level of desperation required to emigrate? Okay, even Mahatma Gandhi made it mandatory in his ashram in Wardha that all the inmates should share the task of cleaning the bucket toilets, but this was done to highlight and address a social problem which condemned members belonging to the lowest of the low castes to spend their entire lives cleaning the shit of the rest of society. I reccomend reading "Endless Filth : The Saga of the Bhangis", a book by Mari Marcel Thekaekara on the subject. The performing of menial, boring chores was also very much a part of the great Eastern traditions of teaching humility to the neophyte in search of spiritual liberation. On the other hand, as General George S.Patton  put it so eloquently, you don't want to be remembered by your grandchild for having "shovelled shit in Louisiana"! I had unclogged umpteen toilets at 30,000 feet and it did not appeal to me as a full time occupation. If dealing with human waste had been my forte, India, with its over one billion people, would be the ideal location for such a pursuit...

The question, "What will you do in Canada" lies at the heart of the dilemma faced by all immigrants into Canada. At the core of it all lies the mismatch between what Canada needs to keep the economy humming along, and the rather high standards it sets for potential immigrants : as per the "points system" the more educated you are, the better are your chances of  being admitted. On arrival however, newcomers are rejected for jobs that they apply for on the flimsy (there is no other word for it) grounds that they lack "Canadian" experience or that their credentials are not recognised in this country. This is rather ironic, because the credentials were damn well recognised when they filed their applications!

Obviously I had fallen horribly short in exercising due diligence when researching the kind of work I might be able to find in Canada. If nothing else, it would have prepared me mentally for the opportunities (or lack thereof) I would find. Every immigrant's story should serve as a cautionary tale for the next in line!

Once the driver of a taxi I was taking to the airport happened to be a civil engineer from India! I  bought a cordless telephone in a large retail chain from a salesman who sported a Ph.D in chemistry along with his name tag. This kind of "square peg in a round hole" syndrome seems to be fairly common. The dignity of labour and all that wonderful stuff is fine, but when human talent and skill is wasted it is a great loss for the host country. Perhaps the immigration guidelines and filters need to be changed so that all may benefit.

Happily, the policies never applied in my particular case! I tagged along as excess baggage with my wife ...she was the one who had qualified to immigrate. My profession as a flight attendant obviously had no value to the Canadian economy...and rightly so. A few months after I returned to Canada in July 2001, Air Canada laid off approximately 5000 workers! There was another fledgling carrier called Canada 3000 (who were planning to begin direct Vancouver - New Delhi flights!) which went bankrupt overnight : some of their crew were stranded in places like Hawaii and had to buy their own tickets to get home!!

Aviation was not the only sector affected in 2001. The softwood lumber industry (one of the mainstays of the economy in BC) suffered a devastating blow when the biggest importer - the good old US of A - slapped on an extra customs duty on the product. I remember reading in a newspaper that around 85,000 workers lost their jobs.

These localised events were then overshadowed by 9/11 and the paranoia that followed. The Iraq war followed soon after. The world seemed to be coming to an end.

Given the above scenario, did it really matter what I did for a living? As they love to say here in North America, you still have to put food on the table, you still have to pay your bills. My next post on this blog will cover the myriad things that I tried my hand at to keep the wolf from the door.

In tough times and in times of tribulation, some people turn to prayer and religion. Some turn to alcohol and drugs. I find succour and solace in the natural world, and locating these eternal fountains of inspiration and hope is never a problem in Vancouver and its surrounding areas.

"Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in its head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

(Act II, Scene 1, "As You Like It", by William Shakespeare)

Monday 30 July 2012

Canada - The First Month

I lay awake in my sleeping bag on the carpeted floor. Turning sideways, I could make out the muffled shapes of my wife Margaret and son Sanal, similarly cocooned in their sleeping bags. No, we were not out camping : we were in a rented apartment with no furniture. We had had the foresight to bring our three sleeping bags fit for Himalayan altitudes. We did not really need the warmth from the bags as the heating (which was included in the rent) in the room was quite toasty. We had arrived in Richmond, BC a couple of days ago and had moved in with our 6 suitcases directly from the airport into this spacious three bedroom apartment which Margaret's sister Hazel had rented on our behalf. Hazel and her family had arrived in Canada six months before us. They lived in the apartment directly above the one in which we were now sleeping.

My inability to cope with jet lag and the time difference of thirteen and a half hours between Vancouver and Mumbai was an old weakness. In spite of twenty three years of girdling the globe as a flight attendant, this was something my body had never got used to.

Finally, at around 4 am I padded stealthily to the kitchen and made myself some tea. The electric stove had four burners and the water boiled quickly. This was a vast improvement from when I was growing up (in the 1960s) in Liluah, a suburb of Calcutta (now spelt Kolkata of course) and we had to cook on little earthen ovens - referred to universally as "chulhas" - cleverly fashioned out of aluminium buckets. The fuel was coal which we bought at a subsidised rate from the railways. It was sold in large blocks which we broke into smaller pieces with a hammer. The coal was placed over a little grill under which wood kindling was lit and the fire thus produced would slowly heat up the coal. Of course this produced copious amounts smoke, so it had to be done outdoors. Once the coal had reached the right temperature, it would glow a bright orange, with little blue flames leaping around like mischievous elves!

Later we transitioned to cooking on kerosene stoves. These had flat cotton wicks dipped in the fuel tank and arranged in a circle. The intensity of the flames could be controlled by moving the wicks up or down with the help of a small rotary device. The wicks would burn in the space formed by two concentric metal cylinders with little circular holes in them to assist the air flow. If properly maintained, you could coax a beautiful blue flame from this kind of stove as well. The only catch was that kerosene was available only through the so called Fair Price Shops under the rationing system which was introduced around the time of the Indo-China conflict of 1962. That brief war had heralded an era of scarcity in India, so the government decided to sell staples like rice, wheat and sugar through their public distribution system.

By the time LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) became available in Calcutta I had moved to Mumbai where I had to start all over again! Since I was registered in the family ration card in Liluah, I had no access to kerosene in Mumbai! This commodity was like gold and each family was entitled to 5 litres or so every week. When Margaret (who, like me, was not "domiciled" in Mumbai) and I got married in 1981 we rented an apartment and bought a kerosene stove. The next problem : where would we get our fuel from? An angel in the form of Carmen, who worked with Margaret, came to our rescue. Her parents lived in Wadala and had graduated to LPG, so she persuaded them to part with their quota of kerosene to keep our home fire burning! Every month Margaret and I would ride my 250 cc Yezdi motorcycle (based on the Czech Jawa) the 13 km to Wadala to collect our stock of kerosene.

But I digress. That was then and now was twenty years later. I went across to the bare living room and looked north. Through a gap between the edge of the apartment block and the roofs of the houses in the vicinity, I could see the rounded hump of Cypress mountain, perhaps 30 km away. I could make out the white patches where the ski runs divided the dark green conifers.


Cypress Mountain in April as seen from our apartment

I sipped my tea at leisure and contemplated the almost thousand square feet carpet area of the apartment - this was bigger than the 841 sq feet (built-up area) of the 2 bedroom apartment we had vacated in Mumbai. And when you factored in the almost 25% reduction in the "built-up" square footage to give you the actual floor area, it left  only 631 sq ft of usable space! I viewed the upgrade as "progress". I had lived for many years as a paying guest in Mumbai, sharing a room with someone, and I knew even that was a privilege -thousands in that city had to share their space with as many as ten people!

I had plenty of room to go through my pre-jog stretching routine in the living room. The chilly dawn was just beginning to illuminate the blue winter sky as I headed out the door and began walking west on Francis Road. Hazel had told me that there was a dyke a block away and it would give me ample opportunity to run. When I reached the dyke, I realised that there was much much more than ample room : the gravel trail on the dyke stretched north and south for many kilometres. And in front of me, a swathe of tall grass and reeds growing on mud flats separated me from the waters of the Strait of Georgia which flows between Vancouver island and the Lower Mainland (as the collective of different cities and municipalities of the Greater Vancouver District is referred to).

The mountains of the Sunshine Coast form a picturesque backdrop for the mallards near the West Dyke of Richmond



Almost by instinct, I began to run north, towards the mountains in the distance. Although I have never been athletic by any yardstick, I had taken up sporadic jogging in Perth, Australia whilst I was there on a 3 month assignment at the end of 1984. On my return to Mumbai, I tried to continue but it wasn't easy. Where do you find an unobstructed stretch of road or empty gardens to stretch your legs? When we moved to Marol, I was lucky to have the extensive green belt of the Aarey Milk Colony nearby to continue running. When the copper pod trees were in full bloom and the stretch of road near the New Zealand Hostel was carpeted with the turmeric yellow blossoms it was a great time to go running.

The snow bowl of Cypress mountain is visible behind and to the right of Margaret sitting on a bench on the West Dyke in Richmond

Now here I was in Richmond, faced with the prospect of running all the way to the Terra Nova wildlife refuge on the one side or to Garry Point in Steveston on the other. If I headed north, I would pass the bald eagles nesting on trees at the edge of Quilchena Golf course and would make the mallards take flight. I would also see the sharp shinned hawk hovering overhead. If I turned east at Terra Nova I would be running along the Fraser river and could watch the aircraft take off at YVR across the water and the seaplanes roar into the air from the river. And if I looked up on a clear winter day the peaks of the Golden Ears park in Maple Ridge would be glistening with snow and ice in a sheet of dazzling white. This was paradise!

Even in paradise, mundane tasks had to be completed, but these were achieved with rapid efficiency. We had a telephone installed and activated in a day. We were even offered a pool of of numbers to choose from! I remembered that it had taken us 5 years and a payment of Rs.5000 to get our telephone in Mumbai!

My son's admission to the Gilmore Elementary School whose grounds we could see from the balcony of our apartment was completed  within a few days after he was tested by the Richmond School Board. We watched him one day in February going off to school with his cousin Adele, both bundled up in warm clothing as it had snowed the night before and flakes were still falling as they ran through the fields.

Our SIN (Social Insurance Number) cards were mailed to us within 2 weeks and I could not help but contrast this with my 2 failed attempts to obtain the voter's ID card in Mumbai : the grand plan which had been drafted by the then Chief Election Commissioner T.N.Seshan but which failed to deliver on its promise. I had stood for hours on two distinct occasions in a queue to be photographed by some "official" photographer, had filled in a form with all my personal details and yet I never did receive a card. Some of my friends who did receive their cards were not amused : their names and ages had been altered in the processing and some had even undergone a change in gender!

Our bank accounts were set up speedily : oh yes, banks anywhere in the world are always glad to take your money! What was new to us though were the slew of banking charges that was in the fine print: I had grown up with the free service that nationalised banks in India had offered to their customers for decades.


We took public transit one day all the way to downtown Vancouver and were pleasantly surprised at the lack of crowds. We walked around Canada Place, admiring the sweeping architecture of the distinctive white sails as seagulls squawked loudly around us.We took the Sea Bus (a ferry, really) to Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver and spent the afternoon browsing the shops and eateries there.


The Sea Bus making the 10 min crossing from downtown Vancouver to Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver

We were immigrants, but for the first month in this brave new world we felt like tourists! The reality checks would come later and these would radically change our perceptions. In the meantime, we began to furnish the apartment slowly with furniture either discarded by friends or bought at thrift stores.

I paused at the point where the West Dyke meets the Fraser river as this great waterway loses itself in the Georgia Strait. The mountains of the North Shore were by now a dazzling white and it was easy to be lulled into a state of bliss, as if this was truly paradise. The sceptic in me, never far from the surface, questioned if I was living in a fool's paradise : had I been seduced by the physical environment around me and by the glowing write up I had soaked up from "Passport's Illustrated Travel Guide to Vancouver and British Columbia", a book I had impulsively bought on 18 Nov 1996 (yes, I used to write down the precise date and place where I had bought a book!) in a bookstore in Manhattan? Was Canada really the land of milk and honey, and were the streets here really paved with gold?


Copper Pod tree (also known as the Rusty Shield Bearer) in April in the Aarey Milk Colony, Goregaon, in Mumbai.

For the moment, my running shoes pounded the gravel street once more as I headed back home for breakfast. I spent a month in Richmond and then returned to Mumbai where I planned to tie up all the loose ends which were still pending. Margaret and Sanal would remain in Canada and I hoped to join them permanently soon.





Monday 23 July 2012

Never Say Never!

Autumn was creeping down the Valley of the Parbati in 1996. The air was cold and crisp with the recent passage of a snowstorm above the pastures of Thakur Kuan and up to the Parbati river's gravel flats at Mantalai. The foliage was already transforming into a beautiful, mellow pallette of ochres and reds and yellows.


The upper Parbati valley, Kullu Himalaya, India.

Ajay Tambe, Karen Close and I were lounging on a grassy meadow peppered with wildflowers, soaking up the warmth of the sun. We were hiking back to Manikaran after a couple of weeks of climbing as part of the Indo-American expedition to Glacier IV at the head of the Parbati valley. Across the gorge of the river a rainbow came to effervescent life in the spray from a waterfall tumbling down from the snows above the black cliffs. After days of strenuous activity at high altitudes, our bodies revelled in the increased doses of oxygen in the air and our enriched red blood cells gave a turbo boost to our systems. Life was perfect.



I looked across at Karen and Ajay and said spontaneously,"You know, if there is one reason I would never like to leave India, it is this...." and I swept my hands in a grand gesture, taking in the incredible beauty of the landscape.



Two months later, back in the sweltering heat of Mumbai, Margaret and I filed our papers for immigration into Canada! Was I a hypocrite? What was driving me to leave my motherland for good and settle down on a foreign shore? Both of us had stable, long term jobs. India was not a country ravaged by war. We were not being persecuted. We were not seeking political asylum. We had neither family nor relatives in Canada. So why would I want to abandon the country of my birth, the country that had given me my education, the country that had given me a pretty decent livelihood? I tried to be analytical, but it did not help. I sought refuge in history.

My father had left his village in search of a job and a better life for himself and his children. That was understandable. The Aryans swept down from Asia Minor across the gigantic mountain ranges of the Karakorum and the Himalaya down into the Indo-Gangetic plains in search of a fertile land and they found India. Small bands of Indians went forth and made a new life for themselves in East Africa. Under the British Raj, illiterate villagers from the provinces of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh went off to distant islands like Fiji and Mauritius and never looked back.

In more recent times, the IT boom propelled thousands of brilliant, educated Indians to lust after the H1B visa in the United States and chase the Holy Grail of the fabled Green Card. Some of my own colleagues in the airline that I worked for had gone off to Canada and New Zealand and Australia.

Had these events set off an unconscious longing to sample a different lifestyle in a different continent? Perhaps.

To actually set anything in motion, you need something to trigger the process and then momentum takes over: this was precisely so in my case.

As soon as I returned from the Parbati expedition, Margaret (my wife) told me that one of our neighbours in the building in which we lived were departing for Canada and would I be kind enough to help them get to the airport? They were emigrating, so they had lots of baggage and the taxi to the airport would not be able to accomodate everything. So I stuffed as much as I could in my little Maruti Gypsy and away we went. After they had checked in and were heading for the departure gates, I had a brief chat with Rodney, the head of the family. We were neighbours and colleagues at work.

As I drove home from the airport on that early Sunday morning, a life-changing thought occurred to me: If Rodney can pack up his bag and his life, what is stopping me?

Perhaps I needed a change from the sticky climate, perhaps I needed less congested living conditions, perhaps I did not want to share my space with more than 10 million other Mumbaikars, perhaps I was sick of my job and the only way I could quit with a clear conscience was to make a complete break with the country...or perhaps it was just the lure of adventure, of a new life in a new place. There was nothing rational about my decision...it was an impulse. Whatever it was, now I began to nurse it consciously. I had spent the first 22 years of my life in eastern India and now I was completing another 22 years on the west coast in Mumbai. Time to move on...Go West, young man, as they used to say. I told myself I was still young at heart...

Like countless other times, once again I sought legitimacy in literature :

"There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures."

( Brutus in Shakepeare's Julius Caesar, Act 4 Scene 3 )


















Saturday 14 July 2012

Welcome to Canada!

26 January 2001. The day of the big earthquake in Bhuj, in the Indian state of Gujarat which killed at least 10,000 people. 26 January is when India celebrates its Republic Day to commemorate the day in 1950 on which its Constitution officially came into force. And on that day, at approximately 11:30 am, Flight CX 838 of Cathay Pacific Airways crossed the coastline of Vancouver from the west, flew high over the glittering snows of the Coast Range in a wide sweeping circle as the air traffic controllers at YVR airport slotted it into its landing sequence. The symmetrical 10,781 ft. snowy bulk of Mount Baker and behind it the even higher mass of Mount Rainier at 14,409 ft. swept past the windows on the right hand side as the aircraft banked to the left and turned 360 degrees to line up for Runway 26 north.



Mount Baker catches the light from the setting sun. Seen from Iona, on the north side of YVR international airport.

My wife Margaret, son Sanal Jeremy, and I had had a comfortable journey from Mumbai via Bangkok and Hong Kong. I grabbed an empty window seat and looked north over the mountain wilderness of British Columbia : the very sight of high mountains sets my heart racing and even though I did not know the names of all those summits that stretched away under a cold and clear blue winter sky, I felt I was coming to the right place. It was as if destiny had somehow led me to this city squished (a word I learnt to use here in Canada) between the ocean and the sky, this jagged province with thousands of square kilometres of wilderness and mountains and glaciers and dark green forests.


North Vancouver is dwarfed by Grouse mountain towering above it.

The North Shore hills of Seymour and Grouse sped by in a blur as the big plane touched down with a gentle thud and the roar of the reverse thrust and the braking flaps drowned out any doubts I might have had. We walked through the clean and tidy terminal building, past the totem pole of the First Nations, and down the stairs to the arrival hall. I took out our passports and Landed Immigrant visas and presented it to the officer at the Immigration desk. He was very polite and directed us to a room for newly landed immigrants. I looked around and saw a mix of races, though the majority seemed Oriental! The group sat in a hushed silence, each person immersed in his or her own ruminations. I thought : all these people in this room have taken a major decision in their lives and are about to embark on perhaps their greatest adventure....I wonder if they know that? I wonder how their stories will unfold in the coming months and years?


Mount Seymour seems to almost touch the wingtip. Deep Cove nestles in the gap and boats sail up and down the Indian Arm inlet.

My reflections were suddenly interrupted by a young female immigration officer in a smart uniform who gave the group a friendly glance and said, "Welcome to Canada!" I almost fainted with shock : I had been a flight attendant for over 23 years and had travelled to a lot of countries around the world, both in uniform and out of it; and never in all those 23 years do I ever recall being "welcomed" to any nation by an immigration official! My immediate reaction was - Is she Serious? Or is she just doing her job?  Anyway, for the time being I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Later I was to realize that Canadians were an extremely polite people and that was Purr-fect (which was another word they love to use!) as far as I was concerned.

This blog will chronicle the range of experiences that my brief life as an immigrant in Canada has exposed me to: predictably, they consist of happy as well as bittersweet incidents. I shall try and reconstruct the chain of seemingly unrelated events which somehow led me and my family to travel the 12,300 km from a hot and humid tropical city to the cool temperate climes of the the Pacific Northwest. My decision to immigrate to Canada was never a part of some Grand Plan. It was, well, almost accidental! It will show you what it feels like to try and start a new life in a new country at the age of 45...! My story is entirely personal and subjective and should not be used to reinforce any preconceived notions about the perils or perks of immigration.  Had I done the wise thing by throwing away a life of relative comfort and stability in India and moving to Canada? Only time will tell. For the moment I took comfort in these lines by Tennyson to which I have turned time and time again when faced with tough choices:

"Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move."


Canada Goose on the Fraser river