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Editorial

Come to Canada and complain

by Jayant Bhandari

May 4, 2004

One of the hobbies of the new immigrants--including yours faithfully, a recent immigrant from India--is to find faults with Canada. Difference in cultural background gives eyes to see what those who live where they were born and brought up sometimes cannot see. So what can be better than the complaints of the new immigrant?

absolutely nothing if they go unheard, very useful if they come up with useful information, and an utter nuisance if they come up with reasoning to make their new country worse off.

Immigrating is never an easy choice--relationships get broken and it takes years to get assimilated in the new culture and system. Such a difficult choice would not be taken if the lives at home were all hunky dory. But some immigrants soon forget this and somehow the life from back home starts to look romantic, something they think their new country should emulate.

Rini Ghosh, President of the Student’s Council at the University of Toronto and my co-national, who immigrated to Canada five years back, for sure, belongs to this group. In Toronto Star of March 24 (Plan given mixed reviews), she criticizes lack of government funding available to her to meet her aspirations. For her life in India had to be utopian. Why did she move to Canada? I don’t know, but there is certainly one reason why she should have gone back to India for the time being: free education. Why she did not make this choice is not what she talks about when she compares Canadian educational system with that of India’s and how the latter’s is better. When she moved to Canada, she was "stunned by the cost of higher learning in Canada, and particularly in Ontario."

She accepted a situation that brought her a debt of $30,000 from her undergraduate studies. Not satisfied with this she chose to join post-graduation in Political Science at the University of Toronto to make this debt worse. Her position gives her the foundations to fight for her special interests.

For sure education in India is mostly free. School education gets a very small proportion of the educational funding. When government schools exist, teachers mostly do not attend schools, neither do students. a lot of schools exist only on the paper. Middle level students are known not to know the alphabet. My maid in India, who earned a salary of about $60 (yes, 60 dollars) per month preferred to send her children to private schools. Government funding goes to technical and management education. and a lot of educated in these areas, like myself, then move to greener pastures abroad. a little money goes to non-technical education and those who know anything about it know that most of this education is close to garbage. It is considered a miracle to get jobs based on such education. It is common for students not to know the physical location of their universities until the start of the final examination. Some do not need to do even this.

"Rini Ghosh says high tuition fees have derailed her law school plans." I also had lofty plans when I moved to Canada. Many have gone unfulfilled. Is anyone listening?

Jayant Bhandari, a recent immigrant from India, has developed subsidiaries of two European companies in India. He currently works as a business development consultant in Vancouver.



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