U K – Borderless

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada

Author: Ujjal Dosanjh

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

The Punjabi Diaspora is a global phenomenon that has grown in size and complexity in recent years. It is estimated that there are around 20 million Punjabis living outside the Punjab region in India and Pakistan. This is stretching across multiple continents and countries. Punjabis have migrated to different parts of the world since the British Raj. However, this diaspora has become more visible in recent decades due to technology and global connectivity.

Highly diverse and dynamic, with different groups of Punjabis living in different places around the world. In North America, Punjabis are concentrated in the United States and Canada. In Europe they are mainly settled in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and France. In the Middle East, they are found in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In South East Asia, they are mainly settled in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.

Punjabis have had a significant impact on the culture and economy of the countries where they have settled. Their positive contributions were felt in multiple industries, from agriculture to tech. They have been key to spurring economic growth in the areas where they have settled. They have also had a major influence on the culture and cuisine of these countries, with Punjabi food being a popular choice in many areas.

Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life : From India to Canada by Ujjal Dosanjh speaks about the Punjabi diaspora in all its splendor. Dosanjh was born in the Jalandhar district of Punjab in 1946. He emigrated to the UK in 1964 and from there to Canada in 1968. He was Premier of British Columbia from 2000 to 2001 and a Liberal Party of Canada Member of Parliament from 2004 to 2011, including a period as Minister of Health and Minister Responsible for Multiculturalism, Human Rights and Immigration. In 2003 he was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honour conferred by the Government of India on overseas Indians.

The blurb contends: “Journey After Midnight is the compelling story of a life of rich and varied experience and rare conviction. With fascinating insight, Ujjal Dosanjh writes about life in rural Punjab in the 1950s and early ’60s; the Indian immigrant experience—from the late 19th century to the present day—in the UK and Canada; post-Independence politics in Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora— including the period of Sikh militancy—and the inner workings of the democratic process in Canada, one of the world’s more egalitarian nations.”

Dosanj states candidly: “Today’s world has few leaders brimming with great ideas. The paucity of great leaders afflicts India as well. There are no inspiring giants on the national stage tall enough to lead India out of the ethical and moral quagmire. Asked whether he was working to create a new India along with seeking its independence from Britain, Mahatma Gandhi had declared that he was trying to create a new Indian–an honest, fair and just Indian for a proud, progressive, prosperous and caring India. Since the Mahatma’s time the moral and ethical values of India have decayed. In Indian politics, civil service and public life, there is little evidence of the ideals he lived and died for.”

He continues: “A substantial portion of the Indian economy is underground; all due to the sadly enduring disease of corruption. The albatross of financial, ethical and moral corruption is strangulating and shortchanging the country. Those who say economic progress will by itself free India from corruption are just as wrong as those who in the 1950s maintained that education by itself would reduce corruption. It obviously hasn’t, and India finds itself counted among the most corrupt countries on earth. Corruption shatters human dreams and stunts ingenuity. It constrains personal and political liberties. It severely limits opportunities. The main hindrance in the path of social, political, economic and cultural progress is the disconnect between knowing what is right and doing the right thing; most know what is the right and the ethical thing to do, but they continue to do the wrong and the unethical thing; hence the ubiquitous corruption.”

Calling upon the Indians for a moral revolution Dosanj writes: “The sculpting of Gandhi’s Indians, and the building of the India of the dreams of its founding fathers and mothers, requires a moral and ethical revolution-a revolution of values that are of Indians, by Indians and for Indians. No matter how bleak the political and ethical scene today, I’m certain there are great minds fearless, humane and brave among the billion plus residents of India. We may not see
them, but they exist. We may not know them, but they are among us. They must heed India’s call. They must come forward and lead. India’s destiny demands it.”

In the ‘Afterword’ he laments about the state of affairs of Punjab in recent times: “Punjab is staring at the prospect of turmoil, radicalization and violent fundamentalism, and yet many in the government and otherwise seem obsessed with presenting and treating the likes of the late singer Moosewala as modern Punjab’s heroes. That the young singer’s life was cut short by gangsters’ guns was horrible and must be condemned. Beyond that the AAP and others must be careful not to glorify violence. Unfortunately, almost the whole of Punjab seems taken with Moosewala; the young man was a talented singer but much of his poetry and music was about guns and aggressive machismo. Is that what Punjab needs and must idolize?”

Dosanjh writes candidly about his dual identity as a first-generation immigrant. And he describes how he has felt compelled to campaign against the discriminatory policies of his adopted country. He opposes regressive and extremist tendencies within the Punjabi community. His outspoken views against the Khalistan movement in the 1980s led to death threats and vicious physical assaults, and he narrowly escaped the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985. Yet he has remained steadfast in his defence of democracy, human rights and effective governance in the two countries he calls home—Canada and India.

The writing style is fluid and languid. This is not a book that can be judged on the basis of its literary merit. It isn’t just a simple memoir, but rather a record of a turbulent period in India’s history. It is a book that represents a lifetime journey, crossing oceans and cultures. As a memoir, Ujjal Dosanjh’s book is at once personal and political, but most importantly, it is inspiring.

Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

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By Matthew James Friday

The Birds in These Strange Times
A pair of kites have come for the lake
now the airport is closed, buoyed by empty
skies, rustling wooded hills, lacey waters.

My wife shows me trees on the lake’s
whispering edge where cormorants gather,
roosting in the trees like paused pterodactyls.

An adult swallow giddy with its suddenes,
rolling in the early April air, the very first
migrant recoiled by a changed climate.

Back to Blue
Imprisoned in caution,
the cases rising, fear abundant,
school closed, classes cancelled.
All online now. I watch
a documentary about Miles Davis.

I have always struggled with Jazz,
berated the lack of melody,
felt lost amongst the jostling notes.
But following his story, the craft
from the chaos, the passion in tone

I choose to try again. Back to Blue
starts, and notes sound as alarming
as the online coverage but the jingling
chords, the blasts of trumpet suddenly
sounds peace while the world tears.

Balance

From the balcony I watch a cat
watching a squirrel leaping
from one tree to another, change
its mind, return and scuttle
up and down branches, a slither
of fast fur perfectly balanced,
death either side of sure claws.
The squatting cat tilts its head
as the squirrel becomes branch,
then pads off to draw its own line.

In Rooms, Therefore We Are

The rooms we build define us, shape us, create and consume us.

To function as a modern human is to be in a room: offices, classrooms, waiting rooms, shops, bedrooms, gardens, cafés, libraries, trains, airplanes, theatres, cinemas and stadiums.

Alone or confessing, on holiday, marrying, working or transgressing. Watching or waiting, dancing, defecating or contemplating.

Our own heads are a skeletal room we stare out of; thoughts, ideas and words bouncing around the bony walls. Billions pray to be safely ushered into the everlasting room beyond these rooms, to be reunited with those who were once in our rooms.

The number of rooms make all the difference between a slum resident and a billionaire, freedom and imprisonment; rooms that can be built from waste material or secreted into yachts; rooms that only the most valiant warriors can ascend to while others descend to the deepest unreachable rooms.

To feel free, we leap over the walls to the open, roomless countryside, though we return to rooms at night or make them using tents. We stare deeply and longingly into the blinking night sky, wondering if there are rooms on other planets like our planet, which is one giant, spinning room, moving through an ever-expanding room.

Even the atom itself is a kind of theoretical room, built mainly of nothing, of potentially something through which hums the moments of energy that we use to build up all the matter around us.

Perhaps we love rooms because that is where we began, in our mother’s warm interior room; safe from everything outside and other. Perhaps it is the safety of this dark, nourishing room that is the shadow between every room thereafter.

As children we build pretend rooms, hide in them from the monsters that sneak into our rooms, that lurk in their own dark spaces in the corners.

As adults we spend days rushing in and out rooms. Now, confined to our rooms in fear of that which knows no walls, we are more thankful than ever for the walls. We stare at each other from balconies and buildings, all afraid in our rooms and wondering when the doors will open again.

Matthew James Friday has had poems published in numerous international magazines and journals, including, recently: All the Sins (UK), The Blue Nib (Ireland), Acta Victoriana (Canada), and Into the Void (Canada). The mini-chapbooks All the Ways to Love, Waters of Oregon and The Words Unsaid were published by the Origami Poems Project (USA).
Website: http://matthewfriday.weebly.com