A new way of life in our 'Global Village'.

Last night there was a documentary on CBC about cricket , and a large part of it focused on Trinidad, the country where I was born and raised, the funny thing is that I hardly recognized the country. The doc explored how playing cricket transform the lives of these young men, but as the narrator was originally from India, he discussed a lot of the similarities between the 2 countries, making it look almost exactly like India so that someone like me had some difficulty believing that this was Trinidad. However, I did appreciate the fact that the stereotyped view of Trinidad was avoided, as it is not always about Carnival.

It has been my experience living in Canada (at least the greater Toronto area) that most people have heard about Trinidad, but it is a little known fact that the country is populated by East Indians as well as Africans. (plus Chinese, Caucasian… etc, but that’s not the point) Most times I tell someone that I am originally from Trinidad (after the get over the initial shock) the response is “What? I never knew that there were Indian people in Trinidad!” Yes… hard to believe that we live in a ‘global village’, yet our knowledge about other cultures appears to be quite limited.

When I was in my last year of high school we had some well defined cliques, it seemed like the Africans all ended up together; it was a gradual occurrence… girls who had been in inter-racial friendships at the start of high school, were now hanging out with their ‘own kind’. As I reflect upon it, even now I wonder what happened in those 5 years that separated us like apartheid hitting a nation…

Now that my son is getting ready to meet new people and form his own friendships for the first time, I am wondering how his peers would interact with him in our Canadian home… Not wondering so much because we are Indian, but because we are Muslim, and the often erroneous views that are allowed to grow in society today prevents people from looking at us as the individuals that we are, but to look at us as the mass media has stereotyped us as being.

Now, I hope that my son can overlook race, religion, and cultural differences in this multi-cultural land, and form friendships with individuals based on their personalities, and I hope he tries to find similarities instead of differences, and I hope that he and his new classmates can succeed where we failed, bringing us closer to ending all forms of racism.