The Game Changers brings us the stories of two men, born just a few years apart, who came to Canada under very different circumstances and who both built hugely successful business empires, starting from scratch. First we hear from legendary broadcaster and publisher Moses Znaimer. The man who brought the music video to Canada. Along with so many more media innovations. Back when most Canadians had access to only a couple of TV channels, Moses Znaimer saw a future filled with channels--each catering to a small slice of the market. And he began launching networks that would do just that. He founded CityTV, and then MuchMusic, Fashion Television, Bravo, and many other networks too. “I always, always preferred being intensely relevant in the lives of two percent than being vaguely of interest in the lives of twenty percent.” Narinder Dhir was a successful young businessman in Punjab who gave it all up to come to Canada in 1969, where he started over and met with more success than he could have imagined. Narinder founded a company called Twin Brooks Developments, which has been the foundation of his success. “My first job I got on Burrard, Vancouver—Burrard Street. They were opening Vancouver Auto. They asked me to wash cars, clean floors, but I have a feeling inside, very much ashamed that I belonged to a very good family. What is happening? But the owner advised me, he say, “I came to this country. My wife was working in a rich man’s house, I was going to university, I’m a German, I learn lots of English here, and I work hard. I’m a mechanic, now I’m a partner of this company. If you want to succeed in Canada, everybody’s equal, you are to set your own goal. You have to work hard and no shame, nothing.” So I took a lesson from him.”
Countless Journeys
Game Changers
Paolo:
There are those who have come to Canada with nothing…
Moses Znaimer
When girls first began to express some interest in me, they would say to my mother, when was Moses born? And she’d say, “It was war time.”
Paolo: Maybe not even knowing when they were born..
Moses Znaimer
And they’d say, Well, was it the morning, or the afternoon, or the evening? And she’d say, “It was war time.” Winter? Summer? Spring? “It was war time.” But the documentation that we eventually arrived in, says ’42. It’s okay with me.
Paolo: Others may have been more established… but still found themselves starting over in a new land.
Narinder Dhir
I was disappointed with my qualifications and I could not get any job.I talk to my brother-in-law. He said, “Look, when you go anywhere, whatever job you get, you get it. First job.And do not feel shy, whatever job you get.”
Paolo:
No matter where you come from, or what your situation is, immigration is a new start. For many, a time to dream. And our dreams are as unique as we are. They might take years to come to fruition, but our vision for the future helps sustain us… keeps us moving forward.
Today on Countless Journeys, the stories of two different men, born just a few years apart, who came to Canada under very different circumstances… and who both built up hugely successful business empires, starting from scratch.
First, you’ll meet broadcaster and publisher Moses Znaimer… the man who brought the music video to Canada. Along with so many more media innovations.
Back when most Canadians had access to only a couple of TV channels, Moses Znaimer saw a future filled with channels--each catering to a small slice of the market. And he began launching networks that would do just that. He founded CityTV, and then MuchMusic, Fashion Television, Bravo, and many other networks too.
Moses Znaimer:
So, I always, always preferred being intensely relevant in the lives of two percent than being vaguely of interest in the lives of twenty percent.
Paolo: You’ll also meet Narinder Dhir, who was a successful young businessman in Punjab… and then gave it all up to come to Canada, where he started over… and met with more success than he could have imagined.
Narinder Dhir
My one property became twenty-two lots, so I started building there, and now, touch wood, I am again very well-to-do. I’m playing in the billions.
Paolo: The stories of Moses Znaimer and Narinder Dhir… coming up.
TAKE OPENING MONTAGE
FADE OUT
Paolo:
Welcome to Countless Journeys from the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. I’m Paolo Pietropaolo. Great to have you with me.
One of the great resources at Pier 21 is its Oral History Collection.
The museum’s oral historians speak with Canadians from all kinds of backgrounds, and record interviews with them on their life stories and their journeys to Canada.
Both stories you’ll hear today come from this collection. Moses Znaimer was interviewed in 2016, and Narinder Dhir in 2014. His son and daughter-in-law also gave interviews to the museum, recorded in 2018. We’ll hear a little bit from his son Robin later in the show.
Countless Journeys producer Tina Pittaway joins me now, to tell us a little bit more about Moses and Narinder.
Welcome Tina!
Tina Pittaway:
Hi Paolo! Great to be back with you, and so glad we can share these stories.
Paolo:
Moses Znaimer and Narinder Dhir… They have very different backgrounds, but there are some real similarities to their stories too, wouldn’t you say?
TP:
Yes there are.
As you heard, Moses was born in 1942… or at least that’s what he thinks… and Narinder in 1939.
Moses and his family were displaced persons, who were taken in by Canada after the Second World War.
Narinder has a much less dramatic coming-to-Canada story, but he also had to start from nothing.
And the two of them built remarkable businesses through a combination of vision, tenacity, and timing.
Paolo:
Let’s start with Moses Znaimer. He may not know exactly when he was born, but I assume he knows where he was born.
TP:
Yes, and that’s a pretty interesting story on its own.
His parents, Chaia and Aaron met while they were on the run to safety as the Nazis swept across Europe.
Chaia was from Poland and Aaron from Latvia.
They were trying to make it to Shanghai, which at the time was a safe haven with a substantial Jewish population.
Paolo:
That's a whole remarkable story in its own right, many top notch Jewish musicians made it to Shanghai and that's made it to Shanghai. And that's one way that European classical music started to become popular in China. It's an amazing story.
TP: I had no idea
PP: There were some pretty amazing cultural exchanges that went on in Shanghai. But - what about the Znaimers - did they make it all the way there?
TP:
No. Not even close. Chaia got pregnant…
PP:
Oh, I guess life has to go on even if you're on the run, but that must have complicated things.
TP:
It did. Obviously, at a certain point it was hard to keep running, so they stopped in Tajikistan, where Chaia gave birth to Moses.
PP:
What an incredible odyssey. Does Moses have many memories from that time?
TP:
He says he has a few memories of his early life in Tajikistan.
MZ: Um, I have memory of a kind of sun-baked pretty primitive place, village, that would be appropriately Tajikistan, and the summer. I have memories of a kind of mangy scrappy little dog, that I adopted. I have memories around food, because food was not plentiful, and so these are little fragments. By the time we get to the DP camp, though, I’m a little mature adult, and then I have clarity and certainty about my different memories.
PP: Wow, now Moses says DP Camp DP stands for Displaced Persons, this camp that he talks about. Where was that?
TP:
That was in West Germany. Moses’ parents embarked on what he calls an epic journey back across Europe...
PP: More travelling.
TP: yeah, yeah. and they wound up in a camp which he thinks may have been a former barracks. Here’s one of the stories he remembers:
MZ
Yeah, it had been a military barrack of some kind, that was the configuration. There were, uh, billets where people slept. There was a communal rec hall, where people would meet and have their meals. Um, there—there was a little river running by it, in which some retreating army or another had abandoned a fair amount of ammunition, and one of my sharpest recollections had to do with, we retrieved some of these shells, and I was holding one, and it was fairly sizeable, so it must have been, like, a Howitzer shell, or something, and I was banging it against a rock, to do fireworks or something, and some adult saw us in the distance, and began to run, (laughs) hollering. He was obviously trying to save me, but it spooked me, and the kids scattered, and I ran. Eventually, I dropped this thing, but ran into an abandoned or bombed out building or something. And went up one flight, and a second flight, and then there was no flight left, and I jumped. And I kind of woke up afterwards. And this was shortly before we were supposed to board the boat that would take us to Canada.
MZ
PAOLO:
Whoa, that's just a crazy story, I mean, to think of a kid walking around with a shell, first of all, but then he did he say he jumped out of the building?
TP: He did. I mean, it's incredible, it's like a scene from Michael Ondaatje novel.
PP: Totally, but but more importantly, was he hurt?
TP: Yes, not badly, but enough to cause his parents a lot of stress. You heard Moses say it was just before they were set to leave for Canada. Well, he had to pass a medical to get on the boat.
MZ:
MZ: So, it was a bit of a disaster for the family, because I woke up with a hernia, and uh, and—I had yet to pass my final medical. Uh, eventually they had to like, strap me down, and—because, activity agitates that kind of injury, and, uh, that was part of, uh, (pauses) my very vivid memories of trying to qualify for Canadian immigration. I didn’t know it was Canada. I knew we were going to make a trip. Eventually I learned there was some test that had to be passed, so, there was a lot of concern because of that incident.
TP: Not only did he have the injury to hide, he'd also contracted tuberculosis as a child in Tajikistan.
PP: Oh, my goodness, and and was that problematic for the medical as well?
TP: Yes, but his parents found an ingenious but kind of dubious way to deal with that.
MZ: Obviously, I survived, and I think I was inoculated in a way—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But I carry the trace, to this day, of the TB. And there are certain tests, if I remember the popular test in the fifties. The sixties, was called a patch test, and on a patch test, I always show a positive, which would alarm everybody within a large distance, and eventually, if I could get to an x-ray, and they could see I was okay. But, in any case, at that time, there were fewer x-rays deployed, and my parents were deathly afraid that I would fail that final test, because I carry this trace. And I would have never told this story before, but they hit on this ingenious way of dealing with the problem, and that is they borrowed the next door’s kid—they just substituted a different kid for that particular part of the exam, and you know, it was pre-internet, and not everybody had a camera on their phone, and photographs weren’t actually that plentiful, and one child looks like another. And, um, so. With the truss on my hernia, and another kid substituted (laughs), we passed the medical and got on that boat.
PP: That's kind of amazing. And so obviously it worked.
TP: It did. Moses’s father had thought about trying to get the family to Israel, but instead they ended up in Canada.
PP: Now, how did how did that come about?
TP: Well, it basically came down to what options were available to them in the fall of 1948. Moses’s father, was a Zionist and his first choice was to board a boat to the Middle East, even though he knew others who had tried this head wound up in concentration camps in Cyprus.
PP: Oh, I didn't I did not know that was going on, wow, but what about his mother? Was was she on board, so to speak, with that notion or did she want to come to Canada?
TP: Well, Moses isn't really sure. He says he thinks his mother would have preferred Canada because she was basically done with war and hardship at this point, but the question became moot because, Aaron, his dad couldn't actually get the family a spot on one of the boats heading to Israel. So Canada it was.
PP: So the fact that I spent hours and hours and hours of my teen years watching videos on much music is the direct result of this Znaimers not being able to get passage on a boat to Israel.
TP: Exactly.It's a it's a weird and winding world we deal with.
PP: Yeah, and just it's amazing to think that these almost arbitrary decisions or arbitrary, arbitrary events that happen to people back in those fraught times, you know, ended up having such an impact on, say, the culture of this country halfway around the world. It's amazing. Does, does Moses have any any memories of the crossing from Germany to, well, where did the boat arrive in Canada?
TP: Well, one guess
PP: Pier 21.
TP: You got it. Now Moses does have memories of the journey, which took two weeks. There were 800 people, in fact, aboard this old troop carrier. It was called the SS Marine Falcon. His parents were seasick much of the time, which gave him actually a lot of freedom to roam about the ship.
PP: Oh, OK, yeah, I guess so, I guess that that would probably be pretty amazing for for a kid in a way like who gets that kind of unrestricted movement and lack of supervision anymore.
TP: Exactly. Now, here's how Moses remembers the trip.
MZ: And, uh, this was like a two-week crossing, so this thing was a slow putt-putt kind of thing, tossed around. And the voyage was wild, as I recall, or at least my parents were deathly ill through the whole thing. And down below. And while I grew up not to have a particularly terrific stomach, in fact, I don’t—well, if I’m at the controls, I’m in good shape, but if I’m a passenger, um, and someone is attempting a fancy manoeuvre in an airplane, I would feel seasick, but in any case, during this trip, I roamed free around the boat, for the two weeks. I’d bring my parents food, whatever they could hold down. But it was in that two weeks that I learned how to speak English. That’s—that’s what happened. I hung out with the sailors… but anyways, we got to port, I had a passable amount of English.
TP: So they arrive at Pier 21, and this is a funny thing, but it kind of haunts Moses's family. When he checked the archives years later, there was actually no trace of the ship he arrived on. It was part of a series of ships and their monthly arrivals are recorded for every month except for the one in which his family landed.
PP: Wow, that's so weird. Does he have any idea why?
TP: No he doesn't. The family got on a train to Montreal where they had a relative, a great aunt of of Moses's who was sponsoring them. But just as he got off the boat, a photographer took his picture. And I e-mailed you earlier a link to a photo. And I’d just like for you to to open that link up.
PP: OK, let me let me go grab this right now. OK, here we are.
PP: Oh, my gosh, wow, what an image. It's totally wild he's wearing this kind of almost tartan kind of hat and this plaid jacket is the cover of a magazine, The Standard Review. And he's with a little girl who's also wearing quite an interesting outfit on her dress. There's some pattern that's hard to identify. It almost looks Georgian or something. And wow, it's a total photo from a whole other time. Obviously a whole other world. Adorable too.
PP: Wow, wow, that's that's amazing.
TP: that's just before he stepped onto Canadian soil for the first time.
MZ: So, this was the weekend insert to all the Saturday papers across the country. It was called The Standard. It was black and white but it was the largest circulating Canadian magazine of the time.
TP: Here he is with the story of his arrival in Canada and the moments at that photo was taken actually, and you'll also hear Emily Burton from the museum. She's the one who conducted the oral history interview.
MZ:I remember a big shed. I don’t remember whether or not we had to stay overnight, or whether it was another case of a string of beds, or whether we were processed immediately, I don’t—what we have is remnant of this whole passage is shots of me, cute little plaid jacket, and a Red Cross tag. Um. And that’s what I was wearing when we came down the gangplank and that picture was taken which ended up on the front cover on the largest circulating magazine in Canada at the time. I had this little girl by the hand; people say, prophetic.
EB: And, uh, the photograph said, “displaced person with a future”?
MZ: Yeah, DP with future, yeah.
EB: Yeah.
PP: Oh, wow, prophetic indeed, and a media star already. So the family settled in Montreal then.
TP: They did, living for a while on St. Urban Street, which had a thriving Jewish community.
PP: And that that street will be familiar to anyone who's read Mordecai Richler’s book.
TP: That's right, St. Urban's Horseman. His dad had dreamed of being an opera singer. Moses remembers him singing in the shower, but he got a job as a shoe salesman and his mother became a waitress at a steakhouse.
PP: So did Moses settle in? Did he did he go to school? Did he did he feel like he belonged in this new world?
TP: Well, at the time, Montreal had Catholic and Protestant school boards. If you weren't Catholic or Protestant, you were out of luck. But Moses's parents, they saved up and sent him to a private Jewish school where he developed good study habits. Good enough, actually, to get him into McGill.
PP: Hmm, impressive.
TP: And you asked about fitting in. Moses says one thing he resisted from the start was anglicising his name. Now, that's common for a lot of immigrants, of course, but he wasn't having it.
MZ: You know, one of the first things that people tried to do when I arrived at the Talmud Torah was to Anglicize my name. And so, they attempted to turn me into Milty, or a Michael, or a Morris. Even Mickey, they tried Mickey, and Max. But I refused them all. So, that’s a moment where you make a stand, you know, you’re just a kid, but no, my name is Moishe, that’s the Yiddish version of Moshe, which is the Hebrew original version of Moses. Moïse in French, Moisés in Spanish, and so—I insisted on Moishe, which was my diminutive Yiddish, and I actually spelt my name M-o-i-s-h-e, until I graduated high school, and I remember the day I went down to McGill to start enrolling for all of those classes, I thought, Nah, I’m a grown-up now, and I began to sign Moses.
PP: Now, well, good for him, I mean, I can relate, I have to confess to to that story I'm kind of glad he stuck to stuck to his beliefs there that he wanted to had to be known by his birth name. Good for him. So. So he graduated from McGill, I assume.
TP: He did, and then he went for what he describes as the most glamorous degrees which was at Harvard.
PP: That's that's pretty glamorous in the world of academia, so this would have been in the 1960s, right?
TP: That's right. After and after he graduated, he went to Ottawa, thought about the foreign service.
PP: The Foreign Service, for real, that's pretty different from where he ended up.
TP: Yeah, absolutely. It sure is. And he talks about meeting people, kind of getting passed around from kind of one contact to the next. And after a bit, he realised that the foreign service was really not for him. Too slow and stodgy is kind of how he saw it. But he landed an interview at the CBC and he got hired and he was on his way.
MZ: Broadcast, relatively speaking, even radio was new, and TV was really new, and so eventually, that’s where I landed.
PP: The start of an incredible story in Canadian media history. Now we know that he founded CityTV in 1971, so I'm guessing that he didn't last long at CBC.
TP: Yeah, well, he got into trouble almost immediately, a couple of things, but the one that we'll mentioned is he did a call in show on whether Canada should get rid of the monarchy, which was a real no no at the time.
PP:
But they didn’t fire him?
TP: No he said the only reason he kept his job was that if he'd been fired, a whole bunch of other people who were supposed to be keeping an eye on him would have had to lose their jobs as well. So he got another chance. Moses says that autonomy has always been really important to him. And he's a guy who who he likes to make things happen, obviously.
Meanwhile, he was working at the CBC, which was very much pay your dues, bide your time kind of place.
PP:I can see that I can see how that might not be a good fit for somebody with that kind of personality.
TP: Well, here's Moses on why he left the CBC.
MZ: And eventually, this one fellow, who was fairly high up in the current affairs, public affairs department, took me out for lunch, and basically said, “What’s all this striving?” And, “Just mind your Ps and Qs, you’re doing well, and in five or ten years, you can have my job.” And I remember thinking, Imagine that, I can have his job in only five or ten years. And I quit the next day, yeah.
PP: Yeah, well, in that story, you can you can really get a sense of of the type of personality had almost almost the type of personality to take to take a bunch of risks in order to go down the road that he went down.
TP: Oh, sure, like not the kind of guy that fills out time cards! Now soon after he got a jobin financeand then he heard that a bunch of broadcast licences were coming available, which doesn't really happen much anymore. And and so he decided to apply for one.
PP: And then that became CITY TV and then a whole bunch of other channels. He really changed the world of broadcasting in Canada, wouldn't you say?
TP: Oh, absolutely. I studied radio and television back in the 80s at Ryerson, and I've been in media my whole life and and it's not an understatement to say that Moses Znaimer is an icon in Canadian broadcasting like he was so forward thinking and he really changed the landscape. Now, he was a pioneer of the multichannel universe as we've as we've touched on. So it's interesting that later in his life, he also started up a print venture, especially since when he was younger, he found print really too hierarchical.
PP: You did you did say he likes autonomy.
TP: Right. But in 2008, he founded Zoomer Media and its flagship publication is Zober magazine. Now, today, a lot of people use Zoomer and Generation Z GenZE interchangeably for younger people. But for Moses, Zoomer was a play on Boomer, as in baby boomers, people who were older, active, but who most media just weren't catering to.
PP: It's kind of funny because when he started that magazine, it's almost like an invisible demographic, even though those were people who were probably the peak of their careers at the time.
TP: Yeah, that was his thought. Exactly, I mean, in a way, he's been catering to this audience for his whole life. They've just gotten older.
PP: Interesting, you know, Tina, I want to go back to one thing you said a little bit earlier.
TP: OK. Uh huh.
PP: It's about the ship that Moses and his family came over on to Halifax, the fact that it wasn't registered in the pier. Twenty one archives. You said his family was haunted by that for a bit. What did you mean by that?
TP: Well, it's tied in with a fear of being undocumented. Remember, Moses, he doesn't know exactly when he was born. So it's like this shadow hanging over his family, this fear that they could be sent back because of someone accusing them of not being here legitimately.
MZ: So, at this point, there is no birth certificate for Moses Znaimer, and as far as I understand there’s no record of the boat landing, so probably there’s no record of me landing. I kind of like that idea, but—but, you should know that until the day she died, my mom was really concerned that the knock would come on the door. And the authorities would say, “Tsk, tsk, tsk. You didn’t quite tell the whole truth on that medical exam” or “The papers are a little dodgy.” And that they would send us back. So, that’s a testament to Canada, that I feel perfectly calm telling these stories. I don’t think—I hope no one’s going to send me back.
PP: the incredible story of Moses Znaimer. Tina, thanks for sharing the story of Moses Naimer.
PP: Next, we're going to talk about another great immigration success story from the other side of the country, the story of Narinder Dhir.
Today, Narinder is a very successful developer who lives in Burnaby, B.C. After coming to Canada from India, he founded a company called Twin Brooks Developments, which has been the foundation of his success. Today it’s run by his son Robin.
Tina what was his childhood like? Did he experience violence and conflict in his childhood the way that Moses Znaimer did?
TP: Well, indirectly, because his parents kept him at home to shield him from the violence around them, his his family wasn't wealthy, but they were landowners. They had agricultural holdings. Now, when Narinder was just eight years old, British colonial rule in India ended. The British partitioned the region into India and Pakistan, a huge amount of violence and turmoil and death. I mean, it was it was horrendous and mass migration ensued.
PP: Yeah, truly one of the 20th century's most insane events. How did that affect Narinder’s family?
TP: Well, he was eight years old at the time, and as I said, his parents shielded, him from much of what was going on. But the workers in the family's fields were mostly Muslim. So one immediate after effect was that they left for Pakistan and that had a huge impact on the business. You know, you lose your labour like your you're in trouble. So when he got a bit older, Narinder had to find his own way. He got a job in Assam, a state in northeastern India. And then he started his own business. And one of the signs of his success was that he bought a car, the first car in town.
ND: So, I just, uh, was able to buy a Jeep, for my travelling there, and there were only three Jeeps in the town. Then I happened to buy a car, to take it back to my place in Sultanpur, where I see that we were looking to a poor side, so I wanted to show my community, my relatives, everybody, that if you work hard, you can achieve. So, I brought that car and—at that time there were no car in my town. That was the first car—I still remember 245—N—NK–NLK 245, from Nagaland.
PP: That's that's crazy that he still remembers the licence plate number. I mean that must have caused quite a sensation in town.
TP: Yeah, exactly, and do you remember the licence plate of your first car?
PP: I certainly do not. So so Narinder was doing well in business. Why did he give it all up to to come to Canada?
TP: Well, immigration wasn't originally on his mind, he just decided to come visit a sister here, actually, in 1968. She had married an Indian man living in Vancouver and she said she loved the city, but she was feeling lonely because Vancouver, well, it was a very different place at the time. There were not as many South Asians or people of South Asian descent around as there are today. So in 1969, Narinder came to visit and he liked it.
ND: Yes. She was—She came here, and she was missing her whole family, and she—actually she cried, she say, “I miss my whole family. There’s no one here I can talk to them, my language even—” because at that time, in
Vancouver, hardly you can see people from India. But there were some Sikh peoples they were living in, uh, villages, and where there are mills, they used to go and work in the mills. But hardly you’ll find anybody, your friends, here in Vancouver. So she cried a few times and, uh, she say, “Why don’t you come and meet me?” So I decided to come here. So when I came here, I was astonished to see that Vancouver is one of the best cities. I have never imagined that I—I can be in this city.
TP: so he stayed with his wife, Prem, and their five month old daughter, but it wasn't easy in the beginning. He really struggled on the work front.
PP: Tell me a bit more about that. Why couldn't he find a job? I mean, I know it's harder sometimes for I mean, I know it's harder sometimes for new Canadians to find jobs. And I imagine in Vancouver in 1969, that was probably much more the case even than today. But were there other reasons?
TP: Well, Narinder says he thinks he was overqualified and that in some of his early job interviews, he talked about having been well-established in India. And so he took his brother's advice and he got a job at a car dealership, essentially as a jack of all trades. Here's how he describes it.
ND: So my first job I got on Burrard, Vancouver—Burrard Street. They were opening Vancouver Auto. First Mercy-BMW car agency in Vancouver at that time. So I started my life there. They asked me to wash cars, clean floors, but I have a feeling inside, very much ashamed that, uh, I belonged to a very good family. What is happening? But the owner advised me, he say, “I came to this country. My wife was working in a rich man’s house, I was going to university, I’m a German, I learn lots of English here, and I work hard. I’m a mechanic, now I’m a partner of this company. If you want to succeed in Canada, everybody’s equal, you are to set your own goal. You have to work hard and no shame, nothing.” So I took a lesson from him.”
PP: Huh? Wow, that's that's fascinating. Narinder did take the first job that came along as his brother suggested, washing cars and that kind of job, and then when his boss recognised that he wasn't particularly pleased, his boss shared his own story for encouragement.
TP: Yeah, that really resonated when I when I heard this for the first time, too, and, you know, Narinder didn't spend a whole lot of time washing cars.
PP: What did he move on to next?
TP: Well he worked for a series of companies, wound up in a quality control position at a global pharmaceutical firm. Narinder had taken English lessons in night school and Preme signed up for free lessons provided for the government. She also got a job as a seamstress. Meanwhile, Narinder started buying and selling some land, and in 1972 he bought a place that turned out to be of historical significance although he didn't realise it at the time.
ND: And later date, when I went to the community, I met the peoples, hardly there was anybody else to talk over.
Then I met few peoples in my community, and start getting together and meeting together each other, and talk about our culture, and start thinking about to get together place, so we start renting a place for fifteen dollars. (laughs) And get together. Then we decided to buy a place for our cultural and, uh, religious praying place. Which we bought, I think, in 1972.
It was in Burnaby. On, uh—in Burnaby. 3885 Albert Street, Burnaby. This is the—now this is said to be the first temple in—Hindu temple—in Canada. As far as I know.
TP:So you can see Narinder has a head for numbers,
PP: No kidding.
TP: he remembers he remembers the licence number of his first car, the address of the building.
PP: So so he helped open what would become the first Hindu temple in Canada.
PP: Is he a religious man?
TP: He says is not particularly religious. He takes a very broad view of religion, sees it as an important part of his culture, and he believes that all religions essentially are about helping others and allowing people to flourish in their communities.
PP: There's really no denying the incredible role that religion can play in knitting together a community.
TP: Yeah, absolutely, and now in this interview, Narinder didn't say much about how he built his business success. He's a really modest guy. He says he bought and sold some land and then he started buying commercial properties and apartment buildings and developing subdivisions. He ran into some trouble in the 80s when interest rates really spiked. But he's done very, very well since he's more interested in talking about his family's charitable work, though.
ND
helping Child Foundation I was first director to serve on the board, and now they have collected over 30 million dollarsto assist children health. But I have now, due to my eyes and due to my age, I'm seventy five now, so I am not helping them, but helping Children’s Hospital with my son. He's the first Asian gala dinner, a black tie dinner and collecting five million dollars for a children's hospital. And now they appointed him as the board of governors because he's very hard working to assist this cause.
PP: So Narinder was born in nineteen thirty nine and he's now retired and his son is the one who's actively running the business today. Those kinds of generational transitions and family businesses can sometimes be hard. Did Narinder talk about whether they faced any of those issues.
TP: He didn't. But I would assume it's all good because Narinder and Preme, they live in a multigenerational household, actually, with Robin and his wife Rena and with their three kids.
And the reason for that is largely cultural for the grandkids. Here's Robin
Robin Dhir
RD: Yeah, so it’s the Dhir family home. My parents, Narinder and Prem, and the five of us, with our three kids, we live together. It was a decision, something we talked about originally, and that we talked about, of how we would like to progress and move in life. What we did want is the kids to be able to grow up with that culture, the language, the history. And learning about the different days, and special days, that come within the year. And so call it selfishly or call it because we wanted it, we did do that. Her parents live very close too, now that they’ve retired and they’re just in Surrey here, not too far away. But we wanted the kids to again, have that familial understanding, and that culture, and language, and everything else. And it’s great now, because perhaps if it was just us living on our own, we typically communicate in English. Maybe the kids maybe wouldn’t have picked up as much of that. But now, the kids, when they’re speaking with us, they’ll typically speak in English. But when they’re talking to the parents, even though my parents speak English, they will talk to them in Punjabi.
TP: I love that what a what better way to maintain culture and tradition.
PP: And close family ties to Tina, thank you so much. Hearing these stories has been great.
TP: Thank you, Paolo.
OUTRO Credits