Chandigarh, September 17, 2016:
Journey After Midnight: India, Canada and the Road Beyond’ an autobiography of Ujjal Dosanjh, a Punjab origin Canadian lawyer and politician, will be launched in Chandigarh Press Club on September 20 at 4 pm. Dosanjh will be in conversation with author and journalist Nirupama Dutt.
Journey After Midnight is the compelling story of a life of rich and varied experience, and also of rare achievement and conviction. With fascinating insight, Ujjal Dosanjh writes about life in rural Punjab in the 1950s and early ’60s; the Indian immigrant experience—from the late nineteenth century to the present day—in the UK and Canada; post-Independence politics in Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora; and the inner workings of the democratic process in Canada, one of the world’s more cosmopolitan and egalitarian nations.
He also writes, with unusual candour, about his dual identity as a first-generation immigrant, and the feeling of being a fugitive from the many battles of the land of his birth. And he describes how he has felt compelled to campaign against discriminatory policies of his adopted country, even as he has opposed regressive and extremist tendencies within the Punjabi community.
Ujjal Dosanjh’s outspoken views and courageous work against the militant Khalistan movement in the 1980s led to death threats and a vicious physical assault, and he narrowly escaped becoming a victim of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985. Yet he has remained steadfast in his defence of democracy, human rights and good governance in the two countries that he calls home—Canada and India. His autobiography is an inspiring book for our times.
About Ujjal Dosanjh:
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.
Ujjal Dosanjh emigrated to the UK, alone, when he was eighteen, and spent four years making crayons and shunting trains while he attended night school. Four years later, he moved to Canada, where he worked in a sawmill, eventually earning a law degree, and committed himself to justice for vulnerable communities, including immigrant women, farm workers, and religious, racial and sexual minorities. In 2000, he became the first person of Indian origin to lead a government in the western world when he was elected Premier of British Columbia. Later, he was elected to the Canadian parliament.
Comments
"From freedom at midnight in India to the triumph of conviction in Canada, Ujjal Dosanjh carries us on wings of courage and achievement across a life well lived and a nation well served, in a remarkable and authentic memoir that is insightful, inspiring, and thoroughly inimitable."—Shashi Tharoor
“A journey of a lifetime, one that crosses oceans and cultures. Ujjal Dosanjh’s memoir is personal and political, but above all else, an inspirational story.”—Rajdeep Sardesai
“Reading Journey After Midnight was a deeply moving experience. Its compassion, its honesty and the poetic nature of its prose will haunt the reader long after the final page has been turned. One sure path to a saner world is to continue telling stories about ourselves to reach ‘the other,’ realizing that in the particular lies the universal. Ujjal Dosanjh’s memoir has done this in spades.”–-- Deepa Mehta, director of Fire, Earth and Water
“What a journey! Up from the mud of rural poverty, a Punjabi peasant strikes out for the new world, then defies terrorist death threats to become the leader of Canada’s third-largest province and the only federal cabinet minister with eighty-four stitches in his skull. Following Gandhi all the way, Ujjal Dosanjh is still an Indian–but he tells a crackling, only-in-Canada story.” – ---Terry Milewski, CBC News