I missed the event! Nice to see the photos. It appears that it was a very useful meeting and well organised.

Congratulations.

Any chance of scheduling a meeting in Winnipeg ???

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Jai Hind .....

Dear Canadiandesis,

Thanks to everyone who came to the meeting and made it such a big success. It was a pleasure to meet everyone in person and discuss issues that concern immigrants the most. It was also fun to get to know you all on a personal level and I really had a good time, hopefully y’all did too.

For those who were not able to attend, following is a summary of the meeting we had last Saturday, the 5th of June.

We were supposed to start at 3:00 p.m. however got delayed by about half an hour because of two reasons.

1) Some last minute glitches needed to be fixed with setting up the Webcam for members to view the meeting over the net. (I believe we weren’t able to get the audio going, but at least we did have the video. Thanks to Garvo and Manjeet for working so hard to set this up.)
2) Not enough members had arrived by 3:00, so it made sense to delay it a bit.

Other than these two things, everything else was ready to go as far as the meeting was concerned and all credit to Biomed and others for doing such a fantastic job organizing. When I arrived around 2:30 p.m., the registration table at the point of entry was set up very nicely with two young ladies poised to attend to arriving guests. A special thanks to both (sorry, their names escape me). Neatly organized folders containing the meeting agenda and identification stickers for members welcomed everyone at the door. The snacks table and the main stage were also already set up quite neatly and I have to admit, Biomed’s backyard was a pretty good venue. This time around, we were also fortunate to have wonderful weather, it really was a perfect setting to meet and greet.

So we got underway at around 3:30 p.m. First off was a brief speech by the organizers (Bio, Chandresh, Garvo and myself) introducing themselves and outlining their thoughts on what they hoped to achieve via the meeting. This was followed by a few lines from each member introducing themselves and their association with CanadianDesi. I was pleasantly surprised to see quite a few members who had just arrived in Canada recently and it was quite interesting to hear their experiences. We also had members who’ve been in Canada for a long time and it was good to hear their side as well. All in all, it was a pretty balanced session, I felt. And quite inspiring too.

After this we split up into 5 smaller groups to discuss people’s concerns and suggestions on how to address them using CanadianDesi as a common platform. I will be posting the detailed outcome of those discussions as I receive more feedback from the moderators of those groups, however the overwhelming majority of people agreed that CanadianDesi should now gradually move into volunteer services where we can help newly landed immigrants physically along with helping them via the web. Suggestions on how to achieve this were quite varied and innovative and I will post them a bit later.

The group meetings were briefly interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Gurbax Mahli, an M.P. from the liberal party whose presence we were fortunate enough to have at the meeting. Mr. Mahli met with all the members and gave a short yet encouraging speech for us to do more as a group. It was inspiring to hear from a prominent member of our community who has achieved so much and hopes to do more for the community.

After Mr. Mahli’s departure, we broke for a few snacks. Mouth watering samosas were accompanied by chips, cookies, Timbits, tea/coffee and soft drinks. (I should mention the samosa-chutney combo was fantastic, I loved it. Need to know where you guys got it from). Also worth mention is a special CanadianDesi Cake that Chandresh had brought along with him, with the CanadianDesi tricolor maple leaf painted on it. We cut this cake prior to having the snacks and it was delicious.

After snacks, we resumed the group meetings for a bit and discussed further individual concerns and ideas. Once this was done, everybody returned to their seats and the group moderators outlined the points and ideas discussed in their groups. As I mentioned before, some very innovative ideas were mentioned and I will detail these in a separate post soon.

Finally it was time to wrap up the proceedings and we did this with a short speech from Garvo. We all dispersed afterward.

I think overall, the meeting was great success. It really is heartening to see that there are so many desis willing to volunteer their time for the community. I’m not sure of the official headcount but there were around 60 people present at the meeting which is almost twice that of the last meeting. And I have no doubt that there will be even more people at the next one. Cheers!

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Are you there?

Guys I missed the event ... my bad !!!

But anyways, I am looking forward to next get together ... which I guess is Picnic ... I hope you guys have talked about that ... and if not man, Summer is here & not for long.

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Mumbai Maazi Ladki ...

Go Flames Go!!! Hope y'all will watch the game later today (Monday).

Hello Friend's

Meeting was a grand sucess. Many thanks to Biomed, Garvo, BL, Chadresh and all other involved to make it a grand success.

Friend's I noticed two types of desi, first having spent considerable long time in Canada i.e. established desi, and the other new babies for Canada i.e very Jr. desi. If the younger ones had came than we might have got more diverse picture/situation.

Once agian Many cheers for Biomed, Garvo, BL, Chandresh, ........... ( Too long list to type)

Dipak

Hi all,

Being a new member to Canadian desi it was my first meeting to attend. I was so impressed to see a big number there extending a helping hand not only to new immigrant fesies but to those who haven't settled yet after a long time.

Special thanks to Biomed who contributed a lot in arranging such a wonderful meeting at his home. Mr. Chopra deserves all praise for offering (almost finalize) a job offer to Mr. Bharat.

Please keep it up.

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