well said Protia ,

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Kaho,Piyo,Jiyo aur Maze se Zindagi bitao. ,Keep networking , CD's are doing great job !

Perfect! Couldn't have said better than this. One of the most sane and sensible post on CD. I agree with you word by word.

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Originally posted by Portia

It's understandable and admirable that you want your children to keep their Indian cultural identity. It would be ridiculous however to think that they won't also have a Canadian identity. They are living in Canada as a result of your deicisions and actions. Pitting old country vs. new country is bad for your children. You don't have to make the two into two extremes and force your children to chose sides.

The values that some people are suggesting in this thread as Indian values eg. honesty and integrity, are not values that are held solely by Indians. Many Canadians of all backgrounds find honesty and integrity important and behave accordingly just as there are also dishonest Indians. Learning more about other cultures and about your non Indian neighbours in Canada may help demystify them for you. I understand you do not sound very interested in doing so but as a European descended Canadian I find it sad that you assume non-Indian Canadians pose a threat to your way of life. We are more similar than different and need to focus on what we all have in common. Who does not want the best for their children, their neighbours, their community and their country? I guess you do not see Canada as your country despite your decision to seek Canadian citizenship.

I hope your children will integrate well, my experience is that most children do. There is an equally negative myth among long time Canadians that the children of immigrants will be disloyal to this country and/or racist. I find this is not true at all, young people for the most part do a great job of co-existing and managing complex multi-cultural identities.

About people who think their success is linked primarily to their skin colour -I am white and my boss is Canadian born of Indian heritage and our head boss is a more recent Indian immigrant with the VP being a Hungarian immigrant and many of the workers are young people from so many backgrounds and everyone gets along as well as any homogeonous group would. Yet someone applied recently and called in to find out why they did not get hired, when I informed them I was not privileged to information on hiring but that I knew the position had been filled, they said they were as well qualified as possible and that their not being hired was racisim. They were making a really inacurate assumption about our workplace (and also demonstrating really poor judgement in venting their fustration to the person answering the phone). I do think language skills and (WRONGLY!) accent are barriers for newcomers. While poor language skills are a big problem for employer and a fair reason to not hire someon, an accent is not evidence of poor language skills and I do agree that anti-accent hiring is discrimination.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic, best wishes for you and your family. I hope you find your way and come to realize it is not Desi VS. Canadians there are many who happily embrace their identity as Canadian Desis.

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