Holiday Special: Of Birthdays, Reunions and an always Olympian Identity  

By Arundati Dandapani

I spent some illuminating few weeks of my latest Birthday and New Year holidays in India, where I hadn’t visited in a decade, now catching up with many I hadn’t met in several years including classmates, colleagues, friends, family, etc. I visited familiar places, and not so familiar places in the National Capital Region and nearby areas in my country of birth and homeland with the goal of truly understanding what had changed and what had not in the past ten years, as an #IndigenousForeigner. I saw movies in the theatre and in the bedroom, sang to old tunes, and even performed onstage with my high school band at our batch’s two-decade long reunion in Sanskriti School and the school’s own silver jubilee celebrations.

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That was the very stage on which the universe’s conspiring forces and I had catapulted myself to national and international fame (or notoriety) if you will, releasing my first book before a packed amphitheater with the remarkable founding principal Mrs. Gowri Ishwaran, students across junior, middle and high schools, faculty, staff and everyone braving the resplendent Indian sun on my own red-letter day. Chief guests had included the ambassador of Kazakhstan and his office delegation, my proud parents, and two of my brilliant classmates Aditi and Kartik who I invited to dissect my work before the school with their extremely thoughtful literary and critical analyses that played a huge part in getting the student communities interested in buying my books. You can see some of the photos below. As a commerce student, my storytelling found exciting new outlets with doting audiences in school, and some of it was covered by local, national and global media and organizations including the British Council Library and city and national bookstores that often invited me to conduct writing workshops for their members and audiences.

On this particular trip back home after a decade of having been out of India at a single stretch, having moved around a lot since graduating from school and after through my profession mostly, peers, friends and colleagues asked me a lot about my identity, lifestyle and values in Canada and North America, “In Canada, do they really treat you as Canadian, or do they think of you as Indian?”

This is an age-old question, and an important one. It’s one of the many reasons why I founded Generation1.ca. I replied, however, “I have represented Canada (and North America) often in my profession where I have achieved recognition by leading with impact, so for those reasons and more, I’m definitely seen as Canadian from an economic and sociocultural standpoint. However, racism and discrimination exists everywhere, and the very fact that immigrants and new Canadians are an underserved market in North America, in terms of the barriers they face in navigating new terrain with their lack of connections or even local market opportunities, is the problem I have taken on through my platform to really help them succeed when the cards are stacked against them, as well in connecting more newcomers to data and insights careers.”

“Do you plan to stay there forever or come back?”

“I plan to come back every birthday in December during the holidays.”

I must share some broad observations about what I think has changed and what has stayed the same in the world’s largest democracy.

What has changed:

• School students appeared to speak Hindi more (even in English medium schools), and dress more traditionally than before.
• Air quality (smoke, dust, smog, etc.) has become a serious cause of discontent, conversation and regulation. We grew up with water purifiers, but this time homes had air purifiers too.
• Population has grown (in a nation where over half the population is under 25 years old and more than 65 percent of the population is below 35 years of age) and so has the traffic! As someone who has driven on some of Delhi’s most dangerous stretches at all odd hours (including graveyard shifts) over my long work commutes, I can take solid refuge in the “been there done that” mindset, than try to take on those risky roads again as a Delhi/NCR driver. Plus, my motor skills and habits have changed with more automation permeating North American automotives, the absent stick-shift, and a driver-sits-on-the-right orientation.
• The rise of OTT streaming platforms has disrupted the superstar syndrome or the Bollywoodization of Indian (or any) entertainment. Real-world ordinary people are preferable over supermodels in these everyday movies or television series created for real audiences by real people. Even the mega-blockbuster directors of before, have leaned in to changing tastes and created experimental new-age cutting-edge work that is filled with common-sense appeal and wisdom to move today’s consumers. I saw a bunch of school reunion peer pressure and social media themed movies – Three of Us, 12^th Fail, Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, Sajni Shinde ka Viral Video.
• People are talking more openly about sex, LBTGQ+, cyberbullying, workplace harassment, marital conflict, abuse, and similar issues. Helplines and special cells have also emerged in resolving these issues, but bureaucracy persists, as it would, when the scale gets bigger, or when the will to effect change isn’t guided by experience and understanding.

What has not changed:

• The expectation of calling everyone “Ma’am” and “Sir”. It creates a kind of level ground of baseline respect for all actually! It’s also why I appreciate how my own students preface conversations with me as “Professor Arundati” or an equivalent, versus just first name (no matter their nationality). It’s different in the United States where calling people by their first names are the norm no matter your relationship to them.
• Indian food, especially home-cooked, is still the world’s tastiest and healthiest cuisine; just look at the diversity of delicious home-cooked food from all corners of the nation. Everyday meals at home, and a delightful pre-birthday invite to lunch with the leading data and insights legend Sharmila Das and her Purple Audacity creation and colleagues in our neighbourhood was a lot of fun. Dwarka’s neighbourhoods had however grown immensely and have become a key area for growth like never before attracting new settlers by the droves in recent years leaving it abuzz with the energy of well-inhabited suburbs on the rise.
• Bargaining for your vegetables and other goods or services remains the playful norm, even if a lot of payments have gone cashless.
• The plurality and coexistence of many Indias reflecting diverse cultures, languages, habits, lifestyles, values and desires all just blend in both incongruent and ebullient ways as ever before and I only keep hoping people’s social circles and professional circles continue to reflect such rich diversity of thought for years to come.

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Years ago in conversation with the former late Indian president (and renowned space scientist) Dr. Abdul Kalam, when he was still in office, following my book release and book signing session between the two of us, I asked him what his views were on brain drain and specifically what he thought about people migrating to other countries and making those countries prosperous. He had replied with his trademark humility, “Achieve what you want for yourself, succeed in the way you want, and the good you achieve for yourself will automatically come back to your homeland (or source country.” Having spent by now a big bit of my life outside of my nation of birth, leading change through my work and profession, I can really see the power of his words shine through in surprisingly tangible and intangible ways.

Holiday Episode of Leading by Association – December 2023- January 2024

To celebrate growing old(er), I put together a holiday podcast episode of Leading by Association featuring former high school batchmates and myself, as members of our alumni association instrumental in the success of our reunion and in continuing to give back to today’s high schoolers and beyond through our wide-ranging global careers and professions. Generation1.ca is already a handy resource for guidance and mentorship for newcomers to North America specifically immigrant professionals, and casting this net wide helps us reach others seeking advice and new connections as well in immigrant source countries. On this episode, we discussed our life paths, and how society and youth had evolved since we last attended school.

Please tune into this special holiday episode below – A 12-minute trailer followed by the full 2 hour recordings and shoot as I dove into a pool of happy, thinking, feeling Sanskritians that are also changemakers, and reconnected with several of my batchmates on my trip.

High from the holiday vibes I probably ended up speaking Hindi to the surprisingly quiet cab driver when I returned from the airport to my Toronto residence after the long overnight flight from Delhi, who only asked me as I left, “Are you Indian?” I just replied, “I’m from here, and I go back too.” Because I worked so hard in making all my dreams come true, I can’t bear being asked what I am, when I expect celebration. Questions that are asked in haste, can be replied to with equal brusqueness. The quick truth is it doesn’t matter where I’m from, here or there, or there or here, or here and there as an Indigenous Foreigner in relation to my countries of birth or legacy; but what I value in relationships, civil society and the greater good impacts my own and society’s progress and well-being.

The slower lifetime realization is that the world is bursting with far too many pluralities for you to not be distinct enough. Did I take the right path? Obviously! Half my life might be nearly over for me to not look at half-empty glasses as glasses half-full, and I relish in all my identities. I raise the flag or a toast when it helps societies thrive, and it’s only natural that I have learned to create and celebrate culture, foster belonging and inclusive leadership wherever I go. The ability of “movers and arrivers” to hold “more than one” identity can often seem “immoral” to parochials (in either society) who can’t conceive of such an enriched hard-won existence, but the love of labour and dangers that have been braved in sculpting who I am today has been all-consuming and at the very essence of all my leadership philosophies and actions.

A brilliant former high school principal who had once so encouragingly co-hosted my first book release function in school along with my publishers and me during an extended morning assembly, had years after my book launch jokingly remarked to me (with mock-disappointment), on learning of my very predictable –mind you, not without its own roadblocks—success in what I called the McDonalds of global textbook publishing in the National Capital Region, “But I always thought you would do something dramatically different or radical!” Fast forward to today, if she meets me now, I know she would approve of the global citizen I have become in fighting the good fight and making my own industry and communities insanely proud of all I do in truly “breaking the back of culture” with Generation1.ca and also empowering data and insights leaders globally.

Arundati Dandapani, MLitt, CAIP, CIPP/C, is the founder of Generation1.ca, a social enterprise and community that empowers immigrants in North America, and a Professor at Humber College’s Research Analyst Program and Longo School of Business. She leads on the certification advisory board of the IAPP,  is part of the ad-hoc strategic planning committee of AAPOR, and was named by ESOMAR and Insight250 as one among the world’s top 75 data and insights legends at ESOMAR’s 2023 annual conference in Amsterdam, with her name raised in a star in their Avenue of Excellence, our industry’s equivalent of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. She has also served as an Insight250 Judge and a Judge of the Canadian Marketing Association’s Annual Gala Awards. Arundati is an author of two published books, author and editor of several other publications, and has presented at, chaired or reviewed several presentations for AAPOR, WAPOR, ESOMAR, Market Research Institute International (MRII) and University of Georgia (UGA) among other industry forums and you can find more information here