A decade in Toronto – 10

Che in Kingston (2010)

I return to my memoirs after a long gap of over a month. The last couple of months have been hectic and difficult. I’ve changed my job and will be working at the Canada India Foundation from Monday, May 28. A former friend and colleague in Bombay had described my penchant for continuous transition rather aptly. He called me dust. “He takes time to settle down.”

In any case, the pressure of a job change and the freelance assignment led to a severe curtailment in the free time I could have at my disposal to do what I ought to do more – write. So, here I’m back blogging.

The year is 2010. Let’s continue from where we left off in the previous post. In November 2010, two years and some months in Canada, we took a three-night tour to Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City and Kingston in a bus. I’ve blogged about the visit earlier and if you’d care to read about it, click here: Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City.

The grand Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal

In Quebec City, while strolling down the market, we met Jean-Philippe Vogel, a pen-and-ink artist who was selling sketches of cityscapes on the street. These were exquisite and detailed. I bought a few and recently gifted to a dear friend and another to a colleague.

We returned to Toronto with a promise that we’d go back to Quebec City and Montreal frequently. But such is the fate of immigrants that the lure of “back home” overrides every other destination. In 2011, we returned to India for the first time after immigrating to Canada, but we’ll talk about that later. 

Sheridan Medal for Academic Excellence

With Nelson and Laura
at the Sheridan Convocation

One of the major highlights of 2010 was my graduation from Sheridan College where unsurprisingly I won the Sheridan Medal for Academic Excellence (silver medal) for coming first in the class. After a couple of decades in journalism, both as a journalist and as a teacher, I guess I knew a bit more than the others on the subject.

It was the first convocation that I attended in my life. I’d skipped the one when I got my university degree nearly three decades ago. It was also the last time I met nearly all of them. And but for a few, I don't really miss their absence. Joyce, Yoko, Teenaz have become friends.

I was working on my manuscript and learnt about the 3-Day Novel festival that is held during the Labor Day weekend. I entered the competition and worked furiously to complete a manuscript in three days. It was terrible in quality but such a great experience that I did that for the next three years. At present, I’ve four novella length stories that I plan to cut down to short story length.

I continued to go to readings by other authors, and participate in literary events. Although 2010 was not the first time I participated in the Word on the Street festival held towards the end of summer, it was definitely the first year when I knew many authors. 

I met Robin Maharaj, whose novel The Amazing, Absorbing Boy I’d recently read. Katherine Govier had her new novel The Ghost Brush published the same year and both Robin and Katherine were reading at the festival. My friend Dawn, whose short story collection was to be published by TSAR later that year, was reading at the Diaspora Dialogues tent.

That year, I also attended the play reading of Habib Tanvir’s classic Charandas Chor. Sally Jones, who ran Rasik Arts in those days, had organised it. Another play that she staged at the Harbourfront Centre was about Tagore as a painter. Tea with Tagore had Ishwar Mooljee enacting the role of Tagore. I blogged about it, too, and should you be interested in reading it, click here: Tea with Tagore.

One of the most pleasant surprises of my life was to meet a college friend Nandita Desai (now Nandita Chawla) at the Harbourfront Centre. In high school, I’d a major crush on her, and everyone (but she) knew about it.  It’s such a strange thing about life. I exchanged polite pleasantries with someone who'd meant so much to me three decades ago. It all works out the way it’s meant to be. I was with my wife and son and she was with her husband and her daughter.  

That year, we also went to the Masala Mehndi Maasti, which turned out to be a washout thanks to torrential rains, but I was happy to hear Janice Goveas read excerpts from her play Dinner with Akbar. And, of course, Meena Chopra invited me to the launch of her collection of poems Glimpses of Setting Sun and an exhibition of paintings. If you’d like to read about the book launch event, click here: Meena Chopra.

A decade in Toronto – 6

2009 was our first new year in Toronto and it began with a lot of promise. I started my program in journalism at the Sheridan College in Oakville. I was returning to school after a gap of over 25 years. The journalism class comprised students who were just like me – practising or former journalists from across the world who were trying to get a toehold in the profession in Canada.

It was ironic that after nearly two decades in journalism, both as a working journalist and as a teacher, I was returning to journalism as a student. But I was keen to learn and unlearn. The Sheridan college campus at Oakville was as impressive as any that I’d seen or imagined, and the most interesting part of it all was the daily commute from Toronto to Oakville on the GO train.

With Yoko, Nelson and Mike at Sheridan

The class comprised students from South America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Japan, and Africa - an interesting bunch of highly talented individuals, who were extremely independent-minded and like most journalists were not natural team players. 

Some became great friends during the duration of the course of the program. Yoko Morgenstern and Nelson Alvarado Jourde are friends I dearly miss.  Yoko is in Germany and visits Toronto infrequently, Nelson is back in Peru, and I haven’t met him in years.

With Yoko, Nelson, Mike and Joyce Wayne

The teachers were all equally interesting; Teenaz Javat is now a friend. She is a Bombayite who has had the privilege of working as a journalist in India and Pakistan. I have fond memories of Patricia Bradbury. She made the classroom come alive with her engaging, animated teaching. She also introduced us to Katherine Govier, the renowned and accomplished author, and now an activist for swifter, seamless integration of immigrants into the Canadian mainstream.

Of course, the hero of the program was Joyce Wayne, the program coordinator of the Canadian Journalism for Internationally Trained Journalists. A veteran professor, extremely well-read, a true heart liberal, with a permanent glint of mischief in her eyes, Joyce propelled the program to great heights and constantly challenged its participants to strive to do better.  One of my regrets (and I have many) was not to have done English literature at the university. With Joyce at Sheridan, I finally found a mentor who was as interested in literature as I am.

It was an evening program, so I had to change my shift timing and I returned to the night shift at the condo. After a while the hectic schedule became strenuous, and by April 2009, it was impossible for me to get enough sleep during the day, go to Sheridan in the evening, and then do the night shift at the condo. On a couple of occasions, the patrol who roamed around in a vehicle at night caught me napping.  I decided to quit my job as a security guard.

I was confident that at the end of the Sheridan program, I’d at least get an internship placement somewhere. A major lacuna in the Sheridan program was the absence of a design component. To complete that gap, I joined the Yorkdale Adult Learning Centre’s web designing program; a free program meant for newcomers.  It was an enriching experience. I was now spending several hours at a high school had both eager adult newcomer students and regular school students who were my son’s age.  

Yorkdale group

At Yorkdale, I met a bunch of fun-loving group of Latinos from South America. The classroom had students of all ages and from everywhere – Africa, South Asia, South America, Eastern Europe – all of us sharing a sort of desperation: of getting a proper job. I wrote about my encounter with two religiously devout fellow students.  Click here to read: Question of identity.

Around the same time, I also joined a memoir writing workshop conducted by Allyson Latta at the North York branch of the Toronto public library. After quitting my security guard job, I had the entire day free for myself. Latta’s class was a perfect fit for me; the sessions taught me to look inside myself for stories. Click here to read about Latta’s memoir writing sessions: Allyson Latta.

When Che turned 12, Mahrukh began working at a telemarketing company but was inexplicably laid off, despite doing well. Then, she worked as a data entry operator but the two-people company, operating from a basement on Dufferin and Lawrence disappeared when it was time to pay wages. She was singularly unfortunate in getting steady, sustainable employment; it caused her immense frustration, but she remained cheerful despite the adverse circumstances.

We didn’t let these reversals deter us from exploring our neighbourhoods. On weekends, we’d get into the GO bus or the GO train and go to different towns near Toronto. Even when we were still to know the lay of the land, we did an open-top bus ride in Toronto, within a month of our arrival. On my first birthday in Toronto, we went to the Niagara Falls; it was all that we thought it’d be, and then some.  The most memorable part of our trip: The butterfly garden; we’d never seen anything as exotic and exciting as this garden.  

For me, there can be nothing more exciting than riding the streetcars in the rains. We’ve done the Queen Street streetcar ride more frequently than we’d care to remember – all the way from Long Branch to Neville Park. That year (2009) we went to our first Toronto Auto Show and continued doing so for the next few years. 

When I recall the number of road trips that we did in our early years, the one that stays etched in my mind is the one to Stouffville, ON, to take rides on the model trains.  Click here to read about it: Day trip. Some years later, the federal government used extracts from this blog in its booklet for newcomers.

I was increasingly veering towards writing and started working on freelance assignments for the Canadian Immigrant and the New Canadian magazines. I had also begun work on improving and updating my short story that I’d written in December.  In May 2009, I sent the short story to Diaspora Dialogues, a Toronto not-for-profit that promotes creative expressions in diverse people. This simple act of courage (courage because rejections can be depressing) was to change my life.

The Wayfinders

It’s always nice to meet friends after a gap. Yesterday was no exception. Yoko Morgenstern and Nelson Alvarado Jourde are two individuals I met in January this year.

I admire and respect them.

Yesterday we met at the book launch event of 2009 CBC Massey Lectures.

Briefly, the Massey Lectures – started in 1961 and named after Vincent Massey, Canada’s Governor General – is an annual event.

A Canadian or an international scholar gives a series of lectures across Canada on a political, cultural or a philosophical subject. The lecture is based on a book.

Last year, Margaret Atwood surprised the world by her prescient Payback that anticipated the global economic recession.

The lecture series is a joint venture between CBC, House of Anansi Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto.

Wade Davis will be giving the Massey Lectures this year. Davis is an anthropologist, ethnobationst, filmmaker and photographer.

He looks like Bjorn Borg, the tennis ace of my era.

His book – The Wayfinders – analyses the extinction of human cultures. The back cover of the book says, “...anthropologists predict that fully 50 percent of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world today will disappear within our lifetimes. And languages are merely the canaries in the coal mine: what of the knowledge, stories, songs, and the way of seeing encoded in these voices?”

So far I’ve merely browsed through the first chapter of the book. But I'll read any book that begins with a quotation from the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi.

Illustrating the hijacking of anthropology by the apologists of the British Raj, Davis writes, “As naturalists throughout the nineteenth century attempted to classify creation even as they coped with the revelations of Darwin, anthropologists became servants of the Crown, agents dispatched to the far reaches of empire with the task of understanding strange tribal peoples and cultures that they might properly be administered and controlled...It followed with the certainty of Victorian rectitude that advanced societies had an obligation to assist the backward, to civilize the savage, a moral duty that again played well into the needs of empire. ‘We happen to be the best people in the world,’ Cecil Rhodes famously said, ‘and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for humanity.’ George Nathaniel Curzon, eleventh viceroy of India, agreed. ‘There has never been anything,’ he wrote, ‘so great in the world’s history as the British Empire, so great an instrument for the good of humanity. We must devote all of our energies and our lives to maintaining it.’ Asked why there was not a single Indian native employed in the Government of India, he replied, ‘Because among all 300 million people of the subcontinent, there was not a single man capable of the job.’"

Curzon, incidentally, is the viceroy who divided Bengal into West and East Bengal. The Indian nationalist coined the phrase ‘Divide and Rule’ that sort of epitomised British colonialism everywhere in the world.

Image: http://images.ted.com/images/ted/1306_254x191.jpg

Story of Language

It’s been one of the most thrilling weeks of my life in Toronto. 

I’m part of a group that’s working on a project for Joyce Wayne on Canadian literature for our course at Sheridan. 

The group comprises Nelson Alvarado Jourde, Mike Odongkara and Yoko Morgenstern. We had to make a presentation for Joyce, and we decided to make an audio-visual because Mike has this absolutely great Apple laptop that makes everything possible.

We’re all trying to be oh!-so-creative! The problem with being creative is that we are all generally speaking quite undisciplined and it’s taken us longer than the time we were allotted to get the project done. 

Then there have been moments of frayed tempers, when Mike and I fought like little children. Mike’s convinced that I take crack cocaine because of my inexplicably sever bouts of anger. 

Nelson, the sage of the group, tries to make peace and quietly gets everyone back on track. Yoko is the charm of the group and smiles really hard so that we remain civilized. She also gets Chinese food and cranberry pop to make the effort worthwhile.

We couldn’t have ever got together but for the fact that we are in Canada and at Sheridan. This is Canada’s multiculturalism at work. Nelson is from Peru, Mike from Uganda and Yoko’s from Japan and has lived for many years in Germany. English is a second language for all of us, and we speak it with different accents.

The recording we have of our presentation sounds rich because it’s not in the same nasal North American twang that’s so common to people in Greater Toronto Area (of course, Caucasian Canadians prefer to think they are accent-neutral).

What also adds to the charm of audio visual is that the recording is so totally amateurish that a professional podcaster told Nelson that it’s just plain horrible.

While working on the project (part of the result is on the blog Canada The Lost Soul) I often thought of an extremely interesting book – Mario Pei’s The Story of Language. 

Another reason for thinking of the book was a pleasant e-mail I got from Ramesh Purohit, a former colleague who’s seen this blog and wrote back to say how much he liked it. I remember lending him this book to him to read, and he, too, had liked it.

Pei’s book is for the non-academic people who are interested in the different languages of the world. In India, we tend to be rather casual about languages because we have so many of them. That’s not the case here in Canada. 

Here, multi-lingual people get the respect they deserve because they enrich the multicultural mosaic.

Pei’s book introduces the manner in which languages across the world developed, and although Pei was often criticized for ‘dumbing down’ the field of linguistics, he certainly wrote this book with a zeal to reach out to as many people as he could.

I read this short review of the book written by a certain Magellan (Santa Clara, Ca) on the Amazon website, that sort of sums up all there’s to Pei’s book. “There is a lot to learn about the basic structure and nature of language…this includes basic concepts about grammar and the parts of speech, the basic principles of word morphology, phonetics, and phonology, language change and evolution, structural linguistics and de Saussure's important and influential ideas in the area, understanding the major language families and how they differ from each other, and the same for the individual languages in your own language group, and so on.”

Most of the statistics of the book would be completely outdated, unless there’s been a new, updated edition published recently. However, that may not be the case because Pei died in 1978. 

I don’t remember which edition of the book I had read, but I do remember that it was the first time I had experienced what in retrospect was nothing but jingoism and (false) nationalistic pride about the importance Sanskrit has in the schema of world languages. I didn’t know Sanskrit then and I don’t know it now. I'm not proud of that, but I certainly don't associate myself with the nonsense of making Sanskrit the national language in India just as Hebrew is the national language in Israel.

Many years later, after a steady dose of reading, practicing and preaching secularism, I realize how exclusivist my views were at a certain age, and I remain thankful to so many different people who at different times of my life inculcated me with values that are more tolerant of the ‘other’.

Images: Mario Pei: http://www.niaf.org/milestones/year_1923.asp

Story of Language: http://reader2.com/tag/language/?skip=&style=blocks&perpage=90&sort=date