Emigrations part deux

Sometimes I think that there really must be somebody who’s monitoring my life and pulling the strings :p No sooner had I posted my entry yesterday about my thoughts of emigrating to Canada (incidentally, a great big thank you to all my Canadian friends who warmly welcomed even the idea of me coming over :p) than I received an e-mail from the consultancy firm which had originally got me started thinking about the whole Canadian thing … and they said that I wasn’t eligible to apply for permanent residency and that I could try for entry on a student visa if I wanted to. Bummer!

However, Kim was kind enough to point me in the direction of the Canadian immigration web site and I realized that the consultancy firm had simply taken my information to do the self-assessment test that the Canadian immigration site had to see if you qualified to enter the country under the skilled worker category. So, I did the test myself and found that I … failed :p I got 67 whereas you needed 75 to pass. I found out that my score would go up to 72 if I had family in Canada – I actually do in that there are some people related to my mother who are there but I’ve never even met them … The point at which I really failed was the employment part since if I had an offer of employment from a Canadian firm, I would have hit the 75 marks necessary to pass. Of course, this was just an online test and passing it would not guarantee that I’d really be allowed to enter Canada and I guess the converse is true too though I have a feeling that would be more unlikely :p

However, all of this has set me thinking and I am indeed considering Canada and thinking of looking at employment opportunities there too in the hope that I will actually find some employer who is willing to give me a chance if I am able to get to Canada. I’ve also decided to look at the immigration web sites for a few other countries that I’m interested in and see if they too have such self-assessment tests and stuff so that I can see if there is some other country which might be more amenable towards me being a permanent resident there. Guess it all helps to pass the time if nothing else :p

Of emigrations and migrations …

I’ve been considering emigrating to Canada recently 🙂 Like all things that I do, it was based on a sudden impulse – I saw this advertisement in a Sunday paper by an organization in Canada which was supposed to assist you to emigrate to Canada and would even do a free assessment to see if you qualify for emigration. They had a Sri Lankan address as well but since I am not too happy with people helping you to emigrate in Sri Lanka (there are way too many scam artists here), I decided to try their web site and fill in their emigration assessment form.

I filled in the form and a few hours later received an automated response which was (surprise, surprise) from a Sri Lankan who seemed to be the president of this particularly consultancy service. I was told that I would hear from them in a couple of days but that was it – I’ve heard nothing since then but my interest in Canada as a possible destination for me to go to has been aroused. I’ve simply been toying with the idea till now but the resolve is beginning to solidify due to certain other incidents which have taken place around the same time. I guess I should really do some research on my own and see what is involved in emigrating to Canada, what needs to be done, what’s the process etc. and I eventually will do that since I’ve started thinking about it but for that I need to be online and I’m not online now. So I guess I’ll put it off till later and see how it goes.

I really am not sure what I’m going to do at the moment – I feel aimless. I don’t think I want to be in Sri Lanka since there just is too much social pressure here to conform. While I don’t particularly care about the social pressures (I’ve always lived by my own rules), the fact that I am a non-conformist seems to affect my parents since at least some seem to feel that my parents are responsible for me being who I am and so my parents start feeling guilty and then trying to change me. I hate all of that. I just like to live in peace and attend to my own stuff. Since I had a life where I was perfectly content in the US, I’ve been thinking about returning there but then again, there are several problems with that at the moment – the looming war (and the eventual conditions in the US if a war comes to pass) being one of them. Canada (and Canadians) seem to be much more reasonable in certain respects than Americans and so the idea has slowly been germinating in my mind that that is where I should go 🙂 Yes, there are downsides to Canada too – the cold for one (yes, I know there are areas which are extremely pleasant but where I want to be or have to be will be cold <g>) and the higher taxes but I guess there are disadvantages to living almost anywhere :p So we’ll see …

Server trouble and other miscellanea

I’ve been unable to publish the entry I made on Monday for the last few days because my host has been in the process of upgrading their server. At first, it was CGI trouble in that I could not execute any CGI at all and then it was the inability to access mySQL from Perl. I did some investigating yesterday and discovered that they didn’t have the DBD::mysql module (which allows you to connect to mySQL databases via a Perl script) was not installed. So I let the people at the hosting company know and it turns out that they’d overlooked this particular module – so I guess it was a good thing that I mentioned it to them instead of waiting patiently for a few more days for the problem to go away by itself :p Anyway, it all got sorted out and I was able to finally publish my entry from Monday, yesterday.

However, since a few days ago, my e-mail volume has suddenly and strangely dropped. Granted, most of the e-mails I’d receive in the morning when I checked e-mail for the first time was spam, I still think that I’m suddenly receiving less e-mail. Maybe they set up a spam filter while they were at it – I hope not since I hate spam filters because they don’t let me decide what is spam and what is not and stops everything before it even gets to me. I guess I’ll need to look into that some time soon but not today since I’m going to be particularly busy (and out of office) today.

So where am I going? I’m going to do a story about what we in Sri Lanka call a “communal” incident – basically an incident involving two or more ethnic or religious groups. This particular incident is interesting in that it happened in a majority Muslim fishing village (Muslims are generally a minority in Sri Lanka since they constitute about 8% of the total population) where there was one lone Sinhala family (the Sinhalese are the majority in Sri Lanka since they constitute about 70+% of the population). There was a dispute about land which escalated to violence and the end result was that the Sinhala family was driven off from the village. They went to their relatives in a neighbouring Sinhala village and the people there got agitated at what happened and they came back to retaliate. There were clashes and the end result was that three Muslim youths were killed. This happened over a year ago but the anger and the hurt is still there under the surface.

I’ve talked to both sides and as is usual in such a situation, I get conflicting stories from each side which puts the blame on the other. However, both sides blame the police saying that the police was on the side of their enemies and that if the police had done their duty, the problem would not have happened in the first place. Reading between the lines, it seems to me that the whole thing is mostly political since the mayor of the city (as well as the MP – Member of Parliament – for the area) is a Muslim. The whole land problem seems to have started because he was being a typical politician and told both sides what they wanted to hear … plus, the man who seems to be mostly involved in this all from the Muslim side on the scene, seems to be a major supporter of the mayor. There is more to this and I’d like to write it all down at my leisure when (or should that be if?) I get back from the shoot.

Is there some doubt as to whether I will return from this shoot? Probably not but then again you never know since it is still kind of touchy situation and it is possible that something I say and do will set things off :p I do intend to push this as much as I can to do a story which shows the sheer stupidity of such a situation where people think it’s a religious or ethnic problem and blow things out of proportion when it actually is just an altercation between two individuals. But I guess we’ll see how it turns out …

When philosophies wage war …

I was sent for a workshop on peaceful co-existence by work day before yesterday. I was sent not because I was involved in any project about peaceful co-existence but because my boss had been invited but had to leave early whereas they wanted the participants to be there till the end of the day – so I was the chosen one to provide cover for my boss when she left :p I think I did a pretty good job since I infused my own brand of philosophy in to the discussion and was so in their face, questioning their methods that they probably will specifically ask my boss not to send me there again in the future <vbg> Be that as may be, there were some interesting points of note to the whole experience.

They started the workshop by telling each one of us to write down four words that came to our mind when you said peaceful co-existence. Then they had us get into pairs and combine our two sets of four words and come up with a list of four words that we felt best described peaceful co-existence. The first person I was paired with was a girl who believed that non-threatened (her word) was a better choice than understanding (my word). We had a fairly long discussion on this and in the interests of peace, I agreed to combine non-threatened, understanding and another word which I can’t remember to come up with non-threatened. However, by this time it was dawning on me that this exercise was a better way to discourage peaceful co-existence than to foster it :p Everybody gets hung up on "their" words and it becomes contentious – at least, it was so with all the groups I was involved with … so maybe I was the negative link in all of these but I believed that I was trying to compromise as much as I could – so maybe it’s an aura around me or something :p

Anyway, they had the groups of two then combine into groups of four and again combine the words to come up with four again. This time, the other group had understanding and we were back to the impasse about understanding and non-threatened. Honestly, I felt that understanding describes peaceful co-existence better than non-threatened but to simply trample all over the other person even though there was now a majority of three speaking for understanding, didn’t seem right to me. So I proposed a compromise again where we kept both understanding and non-threatened. They then made up groups of eight to again come up with a list of four words. We were put with my boss’s group this time and she’d noticed that our group took a long time to deliberate over matters and she’d decided to show her leadership skills – or maybe she was just tired of all the arguing. So she just got very bossy, challenged people and basically bullied everybody into agreement quickly <g> But understanding still survived.

Now they combined the four words from three different groups of eight people each to come up with one final four word list. Understanding still was there (why do I keep on repeating that? Because to me understanding is very important for peaceful co-existence but that is something for another day again …) and then we had this huge argument for "tolerance". A lot of people seemed to think that tolerance was alright but I felt that tolerance implied some negativity – that you didn’t really agree with the other person but were willing to tolerate them for the sake of harmony – like I’d done with "non-threatened" <g> and that really is not healthy since you do have some (maybe a very minute amount but yet some) amount of resentment which can over time grow into a problem. We finally agreed to drop tolerance and came up with our list of words – which I now totally forget except for understanding and harmony.

Another exercise that they had us do provoked even stronger emotions from me. They had us divide into ethnic groups and come up with stereotypes for other ethnic groups as well as stereotypes that the other groups had for us. Now I was the only Muslim there and while the following might sound like a cop-out, it wasn’t – I basically did what I believed in :p I’ve always believed that our basic problem here in Sri Lanka is that we cling to our ethnic, racial, religious differences than to embrace the fact that we are all Sri Lankans. I wanted to represent the Sri Lankans and not the Muslims but since I also have this strong urge to follow rules (not the implied ones of society but rather the rules laid out in a classroom situation or basically any rule that is explicitly laid down I guess :p), I decided not to. However, one of the others at the workshop had joined the Muslim group – her name is Veronique and she changed my mind for me. She said that I should do what I was comfortable with and not what was forced upon me and I saw that this was right and so simply wrote down stereotypes about Sri Lankans. It was interesting to note the comments of some of the others at the stage when they didn’t know what I was doing but only saw this long list I had – they would say things like "you are a single person and yet you have such a long list about *our* group?" It was very much evident that group feelings were pretty much at the forefront and I was beginning to dislike this particular exercise very much because it seemed to engender hostilities rather than to foster peace.

I remarked on this later when we’d read out all our lists of stereotypes and was told that we had to see the differences before we can understand each other. While I subsided at that point, later reflection has shown me that this was wrong. We already *know* the differences, that’s why we have conflict. The point is to let us *understand* the differences and to learn that we are not really that different after all. I really don’t think that the workshop did anything towards that – it was so busy highlighting differences that they forgot that what they had to do was to let people reconcile these differences. In fact, when I spoke in support certain people in another group, I was told that I was to remain silent while that group sorted it out themselves. This to me sounds like segregation and demarcation and that’s basically what brought us to the present crisis! Ah well … even the teachers sometimes need teaching methinks …

Of Life, philosophy, idealism and other asbstracts …

I’ve not been at my computer much the last few days – the day before because it was one of the two festivals of the Muslims – the Haj festival – and I was with my family in Kurunegala and yesterday because I was at a workshop about peaceful co-existence for work. Both days provided me a lot of fodder for thought and obviously, I’ll be sharing some of that here :p

The day before yesterday, quite a bit of our family gathered together for the Haj festival and as is usual we had a group discussion going on various topics ranging from politics to cricket. Eventually of course, the talk turned to the current situation with Iraq and one of my cousins made a comment that set me off <g> He said that the world fears the Muslims and that’s why they are persecuted – incidentally, I should mention that a lot of Muslims believe/fear that they are being persecuted by the rest of the world because of their religion – and I said that the only reason the world fears the Muslims is because we are fanatics and that that is our own fault because some of our people kill others in the name of God when just that act proves that they are not Muslims nor have they understood the teachings of Islam. So the fault lies with us to a great extent – not the rest of the world. Then my cousin said something to the effect "but look at Israel and the Palestine. Israel gets everybody’s support".

Somewhere around this point I had an epiphany – well, maybe not really an epiphany since I think I’ve known this before but it suddenly became crystal clear to me as a fact and has since become part of my philosophy about the world and humanity. My response to my cousin was based on this insight – I said that most of the conflicts in this world are not based on religion but on politics. America does not attack Iraq because they are Muslims – it attacks Iraq for various political reasons, the fact that they have oil not being the least of them. Israel and Palestine are not engaged in a religious struggle – it’s purely political. Man is a political animal and while we would like to put the tag of "religious struggle" on a conflict, it is almost certainly not about religion but about politics. The Islamic fundamentalists who claim to wage a war in the name of God are also not in it because of God but because they want power – again politics.

I’ve been thinking about this after the fact and I realized that we find it easier to talk about religious struggles or to feel as if we are being persecuted due to our religion than to realize that it is all politics – so we turn a blind eye to the facts. We feel comfort in a way in thinking that all insert-racial-or-ethnic-grouping-here are persecuted because then we belong to a group and can feel safe and secure while we think about the persecution we face. It also makes sense from the other side. Would many people support the US government if it simply said, "we need Iraq’s oil. So we are going to war"? Hardly likely. But you say "we are going to war against terror. Support us" – can anybody refuse? Of course, the Muslims perceive this as a direct threat on "their" religion and that sparks a new wave of fundamentalist terrorists and so the business of politics keeps on rolling … sad …

I think I got a little bit carried away there and since the stuff about the peaceful co-existence workshop would probably take just as much space as this, I’ll reserve that for tomorrow 🙂

Under the weather …

I’m not feeling too well – both my parents are sick at home and I think they’ve passed on the virus to me too :p My parents left for the other house in Kurunegala on Friday and I’ve been fending for myself over the weekend <g> They’ll be coming back today though and I will probably take the next few days off from work and stay at home since I have a feeling that I’m going to be even more sick than I am already. Ah well – this is the problem with not being sick more than about once a year – when it hits you, it hits you bad :p I am hoping to get some work done while I’m at home – either on the layout for The Developer’s Corner or on the freeqboard project (which is an opensource project at SourceForge) since I’ve been asked to come onboard as a developer for the project. I’ve not done much PHP and mySQL development work (except to do the usual hacks to pre-created scripts to get them working) and I’m looking forward to seeing if I can do something there. There’s so much work to be done in this world that it’s simply amazing that I get anything done at all 🙂

Hardware error – user not found …

Yesterday was the kind of day that always seems to come around when management is unhappy with my work. Now I must say (and this is not a phoney disclaimer just in case somebody from work is reading it :p), I have done nothing nor have I incited somebody else to do anything which resulted in the following set of events. I come to work in the morning and I’m told that one of the editing suites is not working and that it was imperative that we get it working since the program was supposed to go out yesterday for broadcasting and as luck would have it, the guy who normally does the hardware troubleshooting and maintenance (whom my friend Robin and I sort of co-manage) was on leave. So it was up to me to get it working since I was the only other computer hardware guy (supposedly – since I have never really been taught anything about hardware by anybody) around.

It was just some sort of voodoo since all I did was remove the Matrox card in the machine, put it in a different slot and restart and it worked! This kind of thing happens to me often and I have no idea whether I really did anything or if it really was voodoo :p A couple of hours later, the other editing suite breaks down – this time it won’t play sound. I remove the driver and reinstall it but nothing. So I open up the machine, remove the Matrox card and put it in a different slot and again it works! By this time, my stock among most of the people in the company has risen sky high since I’ve been performing miracles :p Of course, it would make no difference to my boss since he wants me out anyway but basically everybody else now have a justification as to why I should be kept around 🙂

That wasn’t all that happened yesterday though – for some reason work kept on pouring in – all sorts of weird stuff. The last one being writing a VBA script to do some data juggling in Excel. So I’m at work today getting ready to do that since that’s supposed to be "urgent" – ah well 🙂

And it goes on …

Yesterday was full of meetings again. My boss (the managing director) doesn’t want to have to fire me I guess (since that would still make him look bad) and so handed it over to my other boss (the editor-in-chief) and I guess basically asked her to evaluate if I can fit in or not. Now she does not want to be a bad guy and so she was basically putting it up to me as to whether I wanted to stay or go. I said that I was doing the best I can under the circumstances and would be happy to do better if somebody can tell me something specific about what is wrong with the newspapers. Of course, got no answer to that. but she basically handed all the newspaper work back to me and asked me to be in charge of them again – plus two other papers that I hadn’t been in charge of before. In addition to that, she wanted to get me involved in some new programs that the company is producing and we had a few meetings about that too. So yesterday was full of meetings and I still am not sure that the axe will not fall after all this since it has not gone back to the big man yet :p He might decide that I have to go anyway or something. Oh well … I’m getting tired of all the rigmarole.

In the mean time, I’ve received a tentative job offer from an outside source. Since that is not concrete yet, I will not talk about it or tender my resignation here either. In a way, I feel that I should simply hand in my resignation and leave but that would be a form of giving into all the intimidation. So I guess I’ll hang in there for the moment … Fun, fun, fun :p

The year begins :p

First of all, a very happy New Year to all who read this page – all three of you :p My New Year has really started off nice – NOT! Yesterday being the first day of the New Year, my boss wants to have an executive committee meeting and I am a member of the executive committee (or the EXCO for short). The EXCO is basically a set of people who are supposed to be the top-level administrators in our company and all of us report directly to the managing director – who will be referred to as "the boss" from now onwards.

Of course, here I have to step back a bit and recount something that happened last year for it any of what will follow to make any sense. Last year, around the time I was trying to get to the US, the boss and I had a major row. He has this habit of trying to get people to do their work by intimidating them and while I normally simply ignore his tactics, he got to be be a bit obnoxious in his verbiage in front of others and I simply retorted back. So basically, we ended up screaming at each other back and forth in front of the whole office for a few minutes. I did apologize to him before I left for the US and he seemed to be OK at that time. On my return however, he calls me into his room and I realize that he’s been brooding about the whole thing and that he wasn’t happy with what happened. I was proven right because he tells me that because of what happened, that he’s losing his authority because he feels that anybody will think that they can scream at him now. But actually what it boiled down to was the fact that he was afraid that nobody would be afraid of him now since I showed that I wasn’t really scared of him or of him firing me. So I told him that if he wasn’t happy with what happened, he could fire me and that I would leave. Of course, he didn’t like that either since that would make him look like a petty, vindictive guy. So he basically told me to be careful and it seemed to end at that.
However, it looks as if it hasn’t ended there after all – did anybody think it would? :p He starts talking about performance reviews at the EXCO meeting yesterday and tells me that I have not been doing too well with the newspapers. So I asked him what was wrong. He says that the page that we are doing is not interesting enough. So I tell him that it is about the (now stopped) war and the peace process and it was hardly possible to jazz it up since that would trivialize the issue. To which he responds that he is more aware of the seriousness of the issue than I but that I’m not doing a good enough job. So I asked him what I could do to make it more interesting as he claims. Of course to that there was no answer. He did take away responsibility for the newspapers from me (leaving me with no defined job for the moment) and gave it to somebody else. The meeting ended there but it looks to me as if the writing’s on the wall since he was also talking about letting people go since the company has too many employees :p

I’m waiting for his next move to see what it will be but my friend Robin and I discussed it yesterday after the meeting (Robin is part of the EXCO too incidentally) and he wanted to know if I wanted an educated guess as to how soon I’ll get fired and I said that it would probably be within the week and Robin says maybe sooner :p So that’s where it stands at the moment. I’m not really worried about it except to wonder about the level of professionalism in the company when the boss acts like a little spoilt kid. Oh well … stay tuned for the next episode I guess :p

Sons and relationships …

I really hate talking about other people and/or washing my dirty linen in public but I guess sometimes you have to do what you believe is right and this is one of those moments. Jen has seen fit to comment on something which involves my son in response to something my ex-wife posted on the tagboard. Yes, Jonathan is not my birth-son but I’ve known him since he was about six months old and I am the only father he has ever known. I’ve seen him grow up to be a four year old and I’ve washed him, fed him, taken care of him, played with him and comforted him when he was sad or hurt. (OK, my ex- will say that I did none of these enough but the fact remains that I did do all of these things :p) Through all that time, I was the only father he knew and still I am the only father he knows and the fact that I am his Dad will never change because *he* considers me to be his father. The day that he says "you are not my father" then maybe it will change but even that I am not sure of because to me he probably will always be my son even if he doesn’t consider me to be his father.

So that might bring up the question as to why I left him if I consider him to be my son and he thinks of me as his father. I guess I can give many answers but none of them would really make any sense to anybody at all without all the background information and the background information cannot be given because it involves too many people and too many of their own stories that they might not be willing to have me reveal here. Suffice it to say that I felt that the reasons were justified at that time … But just because I left him does not make him not my son – he still is my son.