Hello everyone,
I arrived in North America 40 years ago as an immigrant. Managed to find a job in my field, construction project management, in about 2 months time. It was not that difficult but they did not count my experience from India where I managed to successfully complete 5 residential low rises from foundation to occupancy stage in about 2 years. I was very happy when my friend told me that my project was the only one among hundreds of buildings completed in the new development in a suburb of Mumbai. I strongly believe that one of the reasons was that I did not take any bribes and therefore owed no favors to the contractor unlike the other 40 plus engineers in the brand new development. I moved to head office designing ancillary services for the site eventually housing 80,000 people. The rampant corruption was one of the main reasons I left India. I fell in love with my new city and country when I saw the beauty, clean air, friendly people and honest folks. Let me emphasize there is corruption at high level here but it does not directly affect the common folk. We never have to bribe anyone for any day to day chores or services, in fact if you try to do that you will may land in hot water with the authorities. To give you an example of how helpful people are let me relate an incident that happened to me within a month of buying my first car. i was cautiously driving down a roadway partially covered with snow at night and another driver lost control and ran right in front of me and kept going and as I slammed on my break my car climbed on the median with 2 feet of snow. i thought that’s it I am stuck and will have to walk home 6 kilometers away but within minutes 4 cars stopped and dug me out and got me back on the road in 30 minutes and all of them asked me if I will be okay to drive home or did I want them to drop me home. I was touched and thanked them the reply made me feel even better. They said it is for all of us to look out for and take care of each other in our hour of need. I have numerous similar experiences over the years. Sure there are crooks, gangsters, thieves here but they are a very small percentage of population just like anywhere in the world. Slowly I found out that this is truly a multi-cultural and cosmopolitan society. Did you know that 30% of married young people are multi-ethnic, I mean Indian married with Italian or Chinese- White or Dutch-Black etc. I met Chinese and White people who speak Indian languages including Marathi. A month after I arrived here I met a White bus-driver who was fluent in Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu, he told me he went to India when he was 19 and drove bus in Patna for 20 years before returning to Canada. Anyway I love this country and we get everything here from all over the world and some more. More about my experiences and world travels in future. I used to write and still do from time to time on my blog about travel tips, medical tips, restaurant and movie reviews as well as opinion on current topics etc. The standard rule I have is that I write only 1 page or so at a time as most people don’t have time to read long blogs etc. If you want to check my blog ID is http://garymu.blog.ca Later…
GM
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