Journey After Midnight- A Punjabi Life From India to Canada

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UJJAL DOSANJH was born in the Jalandhar district of Punjab in 1946. He emigrated to the UK in 1964 and from there to Canada in 1968. He was Premier of British Columbia from 2000 to 2001 and a Liberal Party of Canada Member of Parliament from 2004 to 2011, including a period as Minister of Health and Minister Responsible for Multiculturalism, Human Rights and Immigration. In 2003 he was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honour conferred by the Government of India on overseas Indians.

I was born in Dosanjh Kalan, a dusty village in Punjab. I exited my first home, the womb on October 14, 1946-exactly ten months before Pakistan was tragically partitioned from India, its mother, and exactly ten months and a day before India's Independence at midnight on August 15, 1947. That makes me, almost, a midnight's child.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life in India, fled briefly to Britain, and then came to Canada, where I have remained for close to five decades. I am indebted to India for giving me its ancient civilization as a birth gift and for nurturing me before I fled as a fugitive from its battles. I am grateful to England-which I despised as a former colonial power, until I landed in London-for what it taught me during my short sojourn in its embrace, though I felt like an interloper there. Afraid to go back to India as a failure, I embarked for Canada, where I was able to drop anchor. Together, these three countries have given me a life filled with more victories than defeats, more joys than sorrows. The world has done much to help make me a better man, and some may say I haven't done too badly.

Why should my story matter? It does not seem important in the larger scheme of things. But our own stories always matter to us, and to the generations that follow. Merging with the stories of so many others, they give meaning to our lives and to the lives of nations.

Everything may not have happened exactly as I recall it in these pages. Memory is a magician that plays tricks on us. We remember the mundane but often forget the profound. Memory saves pleasures past but deletes many episodes of pain. Nonetheless, I have remained faithful to the truth as I see it and have done my best to make this a fair accounting.

As I approach my final years, I am impatient with life, but also at peace I am content, but still in search of the next challenge. I come by my activism honestly My inner determination is fuelled by what I learned from my heroes, the fighters for freedom I most admired my father, Master Pritam Singh Dosanjhy my maternal grandfather, Jathedar Jarnail Moola Singh Bains, and Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation I deserted to make Canada my home.

My father used to say, "One may walk fewer steps in life, but one must always walk with dignity." His personal credo has sustained me on this journey after midnight, from the dusty roads of rural India, that so vividly remember, to the full life I continue to enjoy. The inspiration I draw from my heroes is responsible for any good I may have done. For the mistakes in my life, more than a few, I alone am responsible.

**Contents and Sample Pages**