Arranged marriages misunderstood in the West

Arranged marriage and Folklorama are two traditions not lost on Winnipegger Surekha Joshi.

The president of the India Association of Manitoba, which hosts a Folklorama pavilion every year, came to Winnipeg thanks to an arranged marriage.

"It's much more practical," said the widow with an adult daughter.

"Infatuation doesn't necessarily last."

She turned her passion into a successful business

She came to Canada from Pakistan in 1994 with her husband, three little kids and hope for a beautiful life.

"I wanted to do something but never got a chance," recalled Rahat Mirza, now the owner of Rahat Professional Skin Care.

In Winnipeg, the young mom from Rawalpindi got her chance. After her husband found a job at 7-Eleven, she pursued her passion, attended beauty school and worked her way up to owning her own salon.

"I thought I should start fresh," Mirza said. "Instead of staying home and being a mom, I thought I should start right away.

Something to talk about

Think two official languages are a lot? India has 15. To get to know Manitoba's 25,000-plus South Asian community, it helps to see where they're coming from:

India (pop. 1.1 billion)Language

Besides the national language Hindi and English, the language of commerce, there are 14 official languages: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Sanskrit and hundreds of dialects.

Recognize yoga’s Hindu roots

When it comes to yoga, there are lots of different kinds being practised by North Americans these days -- hot yoga, power yoga, prenatal yoga, Catholic yoga, restorative yoga, Christian yoga, Jewish yoga, and even naked yoga, to name just a few.

One thing you don't find is Hindu yoga -- which is strange, since yoga originated with that 6,000-year-old religion.

It's estimated about 1.4 million Canadians, and between 16 million to 20 million Americans, do yoga. Locally, there are over 40 places offering yoga classes. North America-wide, yoga generated about $6 billion in sales in 2008, once all the yoga-related clothing and other accoutrements were included.

For most people, yoga is a way to promote physical and mental health through stretching, postures and breathing techniques. Attaining moksha -- the Hindu ideal of liberation from worldly suffering and the cycle of birth and rebirth -- isn't usually one of the goals. In fact, many yoga practitioners might be unaware of its ancient religious roots.

India must get its magic back

India is a land of large numbers: a place of more than a billion people, a million mutinies and a thousand different tongues. But it is not too much of a stretch to say that since independence in 1947 there have only been two kinds of Indian economy.

The first produced slothful growth, mind-bending red tape and suffocating bureaucracy. The second revved up gradually after liberalization in the 1990s, so that by the mid-2000s India was a land of surging optimism -- open and full of entrepreneurs who overcame a retreating but still cranky public sector. The country seemed destined to enjoy a long spurt of turbocharged growth, thanks to its favorable demography, fired-up firms, gradual reforms and willingness to save and invest.

But lately, like a Bollywood villain who just refuses to die, the old India has made a terrifying reappearance. The main reason is the country's desperate politics.

India's acceleration in trend growth, from an average of about six per cent in the late 1980s to as much as 10 per cent (and, some hoped, beyond), may sound modest. But extrapolated over several decades it promised to transform the country and Asia.

He travels the world looking for Lost Prizes

Armed with three university degrees from India and years of teaching experience, the only job John Anchan could find when he arrived in Canada in 1987 was as a janitor mopping floors.

Today, he's the associate dean of education at the University of Winnipeg and reaching out to kids in India not reaching their potential.

"India has not given much focus to the at-risk kids falling through the cracks, but people are beginning to notice," said Anchan.

He just returned from Chennai, India where the U of W has launched the Lost Prizes program to help gifted and at-risk children missing out on an education.

Our City, Our World: South Asian equation

In the corner of a Pembina Highway strip mall, between a Value Village and a Domino's Pizza outlet, a Bangladeshi food store called Meghna Grocery stocks 192 varieties of spices.

There are rows of plastic bags containing cumin, coriander, fenugreek, chile and turmeric, the basic ingredients for what Westerners call curry powder. There are boxes of the fragrant mixtures known as garam masala and panch phoron.

There are also $8 jars of an oily paste made from the severely spicy Naga pepper, better known as "the ghost" or bhut jolokia, whose one million Scoville units of heat makes it half the strength of the industrial pepper spray used for self-defence.

"We used to sell it for less, but it costs more to get it now," said Nizamuddin Khan, the co-owner of Meghna Grocery, which set up shop 12 years ago in Fort Garry to cater to Winnipeg's growing Bangladeshi community.

Profiles of our South Asian community

Naranjan Dhalla

Dhalla left India for the United States in 1961, and came to Winnipeg from St. Louis in 1968, to join the University of Manitoba's faculty of medicine. Since then he has been honoured with the Order of Canada, Order of Manitoba, Order of the Buffalo Hunt by the Province of Manitoba and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He came in second to former Premier Duff Roblin in the Free Press's Greatest Manitoban contest. He was president and secretary general of the International Society for Heart Research, is executive director of the International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences, and is editor in chief of the journal Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry.

"I remember thinking, 'This is a very clean and calm city.' I was delighted. All these years later I've been offered jobs around the world, but I've never wanted to leave Winnipeg." |

It’s an Indo (hyphen) world

Manitoba is home to more than 15,000 people who trace their roots to India. Many of them are happy to call themselves Indo-Canadians, but others, like me, find the term a little restrictive. After all, I was born in India, grew up in Zambia and spent a couple of decades in America before coming to Canada. Shouldn't that make me an Indo-Zam-Ameri-Canadian?

I might be the only Indo-Zam-Ameri-Canadian in Winnipeg, but the city has attracted hundreds, perhaps thousands, of immigrants of East Indian descent who were born or raised outside India.

The search for better opportunities has taken Indians all over the world, creating a diaspora that's so large, you'd cause a riot in many cities if you banned cricket or curry. (Actually, many of us can live without cricket, but heaven help the person who messes with our curry!)

About 2.5 million people of Indian origin live in Africa, mostly in South Africa and Mauritius. Over the last few decades, scores of Indo-Africans -- as you might call them -- have sought greener pastures in Canada and other western countries.

Bollywood ending

To jaundiced western eyes, the classic Bollywood movie is a frivolous thing. If you've seen a few films, you would think all of the cinema of in Mumbai (the most productive movie centre in the world, and the second most lucrative), was frozen in a 1950s-era Hollywood stasis in which every film is a musical.

Irrespective of subject matter, story, or genre, there will be a romance and it will be expressed in lavishly produced musical numbers replete with echo chamber voices and precision choreography on visually lush landscapes.

The appetite for those films transcended national boundaries. That is why, a decade ago, most Indo-Canadian grocery stores, convenience stores and even fabric shops used to display a Bollywood video section. Indian cinema has always been a key cultural link for immigrants who came to Canada from India with a persistent craving for the kinds of familiar films they knew and loved.

Joe Gupta, 62, is a local expert on Indian films (of which Bollywood is one significant component along with other films from other production centres, including Punjabi cinema). He estimates an inventory of about 100,000 movies on sale in his two India Spice House stores at 66 Mandalay Drive and 1875 Pembina Highway. Gupta also hosts a weekly AM radio show on CKJS devoted largely to music from Indian cinema.

Finding Ganga in the Assiniboine

Immigrants who arrive in a new country are also emigrants who have made a decision to leave their native country. The decision to leave could stem from a combination of various and varied factors. Some come to seek better financial opportunities, others to join families or husbands who came here earlier, still others fleeing a war-torn country.

For some, like me, and thousands of others who are young and optimistic, the decision was made out of a sense of adventure, that the world was there for the taking.

The world had started contracting even then -- 45 years ago -- and the Prairies, of which I had heard only in geography school texts as the "wheat granary of the world" were next door to the United States, which I knew well, having studied there for two years. I had gone back to India thinking I would live there happily ever after. But the larger world beckoned, and the regional and caste politics in the environment where my husband and I were employed played a part in our decision to emigrate.

Trying to move away from workplace conflicts and knowing of the racial conflicts in the U.S., we chose Canada.

Faith, family, football: Bombers’ Khan has his priorities straight

The sport he plays, the one that's positioned him as somewhat of a trailblazer in the Pakistani community, is not what defines Obby Khan.

Football means a lot to him, don't misunderstand that, Khan quickly points out, it just isn't his everything.

"My faith and my family are the two most important things," the veteran Winnipeg Blue Bombers centre said.

Khan, 31, is a practising Muslim and the only Pakistani-Canadian player in the CFL. Per his faith, the hulking lineman prays five times a day -- at sunrise, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and in the darkness of night -- and visits one of the handful of Winnipeg-based mosques at least twice a week.

Portage dentist sends SOS to rescue India’s wildlife

As a boy growing up in a crowded city in India, the sight of dancing bears on leashes did not amuse Sanjeev Reddy.

"I always had a fascination with wildlife," said Reddy. Seeing the torment and suffering of black bears on the streets of Bangalore scarred him.

"You had a 300-pound animal parading around the streets with a muzzle around its nose, and you could see its festering wounds," Reddy recalled.

The image haunted him through his adulthood and all the way to Canada, where he immigrated in 2004.

After more than a decade, Punjab Cultural Centre to open this fall

It's taken more than a decade, a few trips to the drawing board and a major move but the Punjab Cultural Centre is expected to open this fall.

"It took so long because we wanted to do it right," said Amarjeet Warraich, president of the Manitoba Sikh and Cultural Seniors Centre Inc. "This is a community project, so we have to listen to everybody."

People didn't like the original location, a lot near Sisler High School the city gave them for $1 back in 2001.

"The community was telling us that, for the amount of money we're going to have to spend, it wouldn't be a good site for this purpose."

Sisters make traditional dance relevant

In the early 1970s, two little Winnipeg girls -- three-year-old Sowmya and four-year-old Shyamala -- learned their first Indian dance steps from their mother in the family basement.

The Dakshinamurti sisters were soon part of a small local group of second-generation Indo-Canadians who trained rigorously in Bharatanatyam.

It's the 2,000-year-old classical style from southern India that uses stylized steps, gestures, poses and facial expressions to tell stories based on Hindu mythology. The barefoot dancers traditionally wear bells around their ankles.

In 1991, after the Dakshinamurti girls and about five others completed their highly disciplined training, they formed a dance theatre company, Manohar Performing Arts.