Ode to My Favourite Black Music, Then and Now

27 Friday Feb 2026

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Black History Month, Dam Funk, Erykah Badu, Herbie Hancock, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Parliament Funkadelic, Robert Johnson, Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra

Before Black History month ends, I’d like to celebrate it by describing some of the Black musicians whose music has meant a lot to me. The idea to write this came weeks ago, then the holiday came up so I thought, why not get it done before February is over.

If I look back on my life and divide it into chapters, the headings would be musicians. Many Black. This music means a lot to me.

Some of my beloveds. Note the signatures on the De La Soul album cover. Dave signed the inside, too. RIP!

I’m not an expert on Black music but I know what I love. Here it is, in rough order of when I listened to it:

Childhood

I used to fall asleep to an MC Hammer tape, a little cassette deck beside my bed. Obviously Can’t Touch This was a jam, but I loved ballads like “Have You Seen Her?” too. He was on the original Ninja Turtles soundtrack, so I felt very close to MC Hammer.

Kriss Kross was big! I had no idea who Jermaine Dupri was then, but “Jump” is still a killer beat. It really is, play it now, I dare you. For Music Day at school in 1993, kids wore their clothes backwards. “I Missed The Bus” was another great track whose chorus is still with me.

One day, I found a Maestro Fresh Wes CD in the snow, dried it off and lo and behold, I was listening to a Toronto legend.

I heard Baby Got Back on a school bus, but didn’t know what the song was called or who it was by (Sir Mix a Lot). I loved it! I wanted to get the tape, but you couldn’t use Google to find out who sang it. At HMV I described the tune to the employee, who tried their best to guess what song meant, but got it wrong, instead recommending K7, an album which turned out to be very great—Swing Batta Swing! My mom and I listened to that a lot in the car, I’m not sure what she thought of it.

A lot of dance music is by Black artists and I had Dance Mix 92, 93, and 94. You can pop any of those albums on and they still hit hard. I actually got into PM Dawn a few months ago out of nowhere, Set Adrift on Memory Bliss.

Adolescence

My Grateful Dead phase was largely white, but not entirely! Some of my favourite Jerry is Legion of Mary and Reconstruction, which both featured Merl Saunders, a Black organist who also played with Betty Davis. Paul Humphrey played drums with LoM, Gaylord Birch with Reconstruction.

These were Jerry’s jazzier side bands. In 2000, Merl played the Comfort Zone. I was front row wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon Jerry playing cards with some cartoon skeletons, with the lyrics to Deal on it…Merl saw, pointed to me and started playing Deal. I was in heaven.

I had a tape of Miles at the Fillmore, which I understood then to be music fans of improvisation should hear and know. I didn’t get it. Then, but more on that to come!

The Jerry Garcia Band’s backup singers, the “Jerryettes,” were Black women who added such a beautiful element, often a gospel touch…I read somewhere that Jerry wanted to kind of stop playing with the Grateful Dead in the 90s and focus on JGB, but too many people’s jobs depended on it. If there was any band I loved more than the Dead, it was JGB.

Teenage Years

My guitar teacher rightly said I needed to know real blues musicians. I enjoyed BB King and Muddy Waters, but Robert Johnson floored me. I had no idea how he played like that and sang. I too was alone on an acoustic, and the idea we held the same instrument in our hands but he produced that…years later, I got a book of his tabs, learned to tune my guitar in open tunings, and I sat in my room until I could do a few of his songs passably well. Probably the most rewarding playing music has ever felt. I had the Eric Clapton Unplugged album on tab too, and learned a lot from the way he played covers.

I read books about Robert Johnson, watched that Crossroads movie with Ralph Machio, got the Clapton cover album of Johnson tunes. He really is the roots of rock and roll. I listened to a lot of Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, and Big Bill Broonzy too.

When Grateful Dead stopped being the entire basis of my existence, I got into hip hop. De La Soul was my absolute favourite. Saturday floored me, 3 Feet High was so much fun, so clever, and the beats just hooked me. Their first four albums were sacred. AOI has grown on me a lot. I met De La Soul briefly after a concert they signed my 3 Feet High and Rising album, and later that night I met the man who became my brother in law. I love that I met De La and Brad on the same night, both family. I’ve seen De La 5 times.

Tribe is inseparable from De La, for me and really for everybody. Midnight Marauders is very fused mentally to cherished summers. Beats Rhymes and Life to house parties. I could go on forever about Tribe. I saw Phife (RIP) at the Comfort Zone too in 2000, that energy was impossible to describe and I’m so glad I got to see him, somehow in such a small basement club.

Hip hop meant a lot to me. Roots, Talib, Mos Def, Fugees, Digable Planets, Pharcyde, Common, Gang Starr (RIP Guru), Wu Tang, Biggie, Snoop, Jungle Brothers, Outkast, Arrested Development, Souls of Mischief, KRS One, Nas. Nothing obscure, but all wonderful stuff.

20s

Jimi Hendrix I also went nuts on. I loved him from the first note, from the Forest Gump and Wayne’s World soundtracks. I played Purple Haze at my guitar recital in grade 7. When I got older I dove into all his albums, every song I could find. The videos of him playing Hound Dog and Hear My Train a Comin’ on acoustic inspired me so, so much. The Mt Rushmore of rock and roll guitarists is Jimi’s face four times. It kills me that he died before he could make an album with Miles. RIP, Jimi!

Jazz took over my life the day I heard Charlie Parker. It was a relatively corny record I still love, Charlie Parker with Strings, the track Just Friends. His solo killed me and I can play the whole thing in my head to this day.

I was taking a guitar course with a jazz player who gave me a hard drive loaded with 30+ Charlie Parker albums, 40+ Miles Davis albums, 40+ John Coltrane, all the Mingus and Art Blakey too. I was floored! Whatever musical epiphanies I’ve had since, I doubt any bowled me over like Charlie Parker. Dizzy Gillespie was his twin giant. I read his memoir and he really had a hold of me. Dizzy’s playing and coolness are so timeless.

Coltrane too, holy. Sometimes I think my favourite musician of all time is Elvin Jones. His polyrhythms…it was like I had never heard a drummer before. I listened to a lot of Eric Dolphy. I went deep and nuts and to this day that music will always be religious to me. Not in a figurative, abstract or joking way either. If I put on Love Supreme or Live at the Village Vanguard, it’ll be alone, or in company but in appreciative silence, and if we do talk, it’s about the music. Anything else feels sacrosanct.

I love Grant Green’s playing, a guitar player who plays like a saxophonist. No bends, alto scoops on the strings. I read that he didn’t cut his guitar strings because he thought it improved his tone, he just let them dangle, so for years I did that too. Not sure it worked for my tone!

I loved early Miles, with Cannonball and Coltrane and Monk, and of course Parker, with Bud Powell, Duke Jordan, and Tommy Potter. 40s and 50s Miles. I needed to digest Miles from the start, and when I was ready for new sounds, Miles had the new direction ready. Mellow Cool jazz. Pretty lyrical ballads. The second quintet with Tony Williams was pure fire. Williams too was maybe my favourite musician and I couldn’t believe he joined as a 17 year old. I was maybe 22 when I got into him and felt old. He and some other kid in the band, Herbie Hancock. Miles Smiles is still an all time favourite album.

I also listened to a lot of Oscar Peterson, a Canadian legend in jazz, in music, and just in general. The Stratford concert from 1956 was my favourite. He played with Joe Pass, who I love deeply too. When Peterson died, I attended a free tribute at Roy Thomson Hall. Stevie Wonder couldn’t make it in person but sent a lovely video tribute. Herbie Hancock performed and I was so touched he came to honour Oscar, nevermind delighted to see a musician I also loved.

Amanda and I went to 2025 Montreal Jazz Fest and saw a performance honouring Peterson in what would have been his 100th birthday. Beautiful playing and just delightful. His daughter MCed and his dear friend and bandmate, Oliver Jones, performed wonderfully. Still got at it 91.

30s

I knew about Erykah Badu and D’Angelo for years, but wasn’t hungry for them earlier. When I lived in India, for whatever reason Badu really hit there. Suddenly I got what she was about and was hooked. Aside from the hippie soul aura and cool feminine energy, the musicianship was just so killer. The beats and the playing. I didn’t know about the “Soulquarians” even if I knew most of the musicians in them. I didn’t know who Thundercat was and didn’t know Badu also had Roy Hargrove and Roy Ayers on some tracks, but that made sense. Such raw emotions, no artifice, pure art. Her concert in TO months ago was simply astounding.

D’Angelo…I played him at house parties in New Delhi and…they didn’t really take to it. They preferred Bollywood or rock. But I needed him there. I’m not surprised he distanced himself from “neo-soul” and preferred simply “Black music” to describe his music. In India, where the musical soundscape is very different, Black music felt like home to me. Tablas are very cool instruments and there’s a million traditional types of Indian music I couldn’t begin to tell you about, but I yearned for D’Angelo and Badu often. Neil Young and The Band too, but those two a lot.

I also got into earlier soul music in my mid-30s. I have a few volumes of that Atlantic 7-disc box set. I loved the Dead Presidents soundtrack as a kid, but listened to more Isaac Hayes and, of course, James Brown. Staple Singers too. I reconnected with Lucy Pearl in a big way too. I liked them in high school but hearing them again was like seeing a good looking person you haven’t seen in decades, and somehow they look even younger and hotter. Ali Shadeed Muhammed, Raphael Saadiq, Dawn Robinson. I just read that D’Angelo was supposed to be in it, but he was too busy recording Voodoo. Fair enough!

Curtis Mayfield floored me too. The music had more songwriting than jazz, but the chops were, if not as loose and exploratory, tighter. I love both approaches but needed the tightness and arrangements. Today I have I think every Curtis Mayfield album but Superfly, many Impressions albums too. I got into early Curtis first, actually. I read Traveling Soul, written by Mayfield’s son. I was friends in high school with a pair of twins, rad dudes named Curtis and Miles. Their dad is a drummer and I get why he named them that.

Tim Maia became huge for me, a giant in Brazil’s music. Not obscure here exactly, but not a household name. He lived in Detroit before getting kicked out of the US for weed, and brought US soul sensibilities to Brazilian music. This is my understanding, anyway. He also fell into a cult for years called Racional–he only wore white clothing and strained his neck constantly looking up for aliens–in which he recorded his best music. Maia tried to get John Lennon into the cult by sending him a letter about it, and Lennon wrote back, simply, “I don’t understand Portuguese!”

I did a proper dive into Stevie Wonder’s golden era. I love those albums of course. Hotter Than July is outside that era but I love it too. On a cellular level that man’s body is made up of music notes. No matter how great you think he is, he’s better.

It occurred to me Ray Charles had a cool disco era. For years I looked for the 1980 album Brother Ray Is At It Again!, where he covers The Band’s classic song, Ophelia. Which is nice, because my dear Richard Manuel loved singing Ray’s songs and did them wonderfully. I had to order it from Florida. The record was $3 but shipping was $20. Amazing stuff. When the movie Ray came out I really fell in love with his music, too. Impossible to describe his greatness.

Herbie Hancock…I knew Headhunters as a teen and from his playing with Miles, but Thrust and Fat Albert Rotunda are very, very dear to me. Sly Stone I also listened to at different points when I was younger, both as a kid and teenager, but my deep dive was richer than I could have imagined. Reading his bio last year was beautiful and bittersweet, poignant.

Finally, I was ready for Miles’ 70s fusion and funk eras. In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, On the Corner, but also Agharta and Pangaea. Live at Fillmore, east and west. Big Fun. Live Evil. I was ready for the music to revolve around groove, instead of soloists taking turns overtop of a rhythm section, even playing melody and rhythm together interchangeably. It wasn’t chaotic to me, it was even, in a way, more democratic or ethical—there was no hierarchy, with soloist on top, rhythm players below and subservient to the musician in the spotlight. Sometimes I wonder if changes to my politics mirrored changes in music. Probably!

In India I found Alice Coltrane, fitting because of her Eastern leanings. I love her! I joke that I used to think John Coltrane was the best musician in music history, now, I’m not sure he was the best musician in his marriage. Journey in Satchidananda and Ptah the El Daoud have some of the nicest sounds I’ve ever heard. I heard Turiya and Ramakrishna in Delhi and it’s just wave after wave of pure ethereal beauty.

Pharoah Saunders I also came to really love. Several abums. Thembi, but especially Karma. You can feel the philosophy and love in his playing. This kind of music, to me, transcends the physical instrument. It’s really special!

LA legend, DāM FunK, a producer, ambassador and a true curator of funk…he means the world to me. I got into him in Delhi, and he had a way of introducing me to decades-old music that felt very familiar and homey. In the way that a best friend laughing at something automatically makes it funnier, his approval of a tune is authoritative. He knows the coolest tracks, song I feel like I know, but have never heard before. I introduced a buddy to DāM FunK’s music and changed his life–we saw him together in Toronto years ago, a sacred day.

Nightmares On Wax, some of his DJ sets and albums like DJ Kicks have given me priceless moments. Actually, I learned about him in 2001 from the buddy I showed DāM FunK to.

I also fell in love with a contemporary singer-songwriter, Michael Kiwanuka. I have all his albums and saw him live twice. Getting to see him months before lockdown…many times I told myself, say what you will about all the fuckery of 2020, at least that didn’t get cancelled.

Kiwanuka really does have a foot in a lot of worlds. Beautiful acoustic guitar songs, crunchier rock tunes, hip hop production at times, strings. All with sensitive, emotional, raw lyrics sung tenderly, sweetly, and often with pain. When Amanda and I got married, our first song was Rest by Kiwanuka.

In my late 30s I had two major musical epiphanies:

Parliament Funkadelic

Like everyone, I had always known about Parliament Funkadelic. Their hits were enormous. Atomic Dog. Flashlight plays at Leaf games. They were in the movies PCU and even Good Burger. They were everywhere.

Sometimes you assume a band’s most famous songs are their best. Then you listen to a couple albums and think, OK those must be their best. For years I had their first self-titled album and One Nation Under a Groove. I loved them.

But one night in 2021 I put on a P Funk concert on YouTube, thinking I’d pass out to some tunes…I was up for 2 hours, jaw on the floor. It was the Houston Halloween 1978 concert and it blew my mind. I’m still not over it.

I went nuts for every single P Funk album. I listened to them one by one, certain whatever I had just listened to couldn’t be eclipsed. Their 10 year run in the 70s is unmatched. P Funk embodied the freedom of hippie psychedelia, rock and roll energy, the tightness of funk, and Black freedom in a political sense. They were serious but with a goofy exterior. Not militant, they were having a lot of fun. But they were so tight and disciplined amid the raunchy whacky collective.

Speaking of weddings, my wife and I walked back up the aisle to P Funk, Motor Booty Affair. I bonded with our wedding DJ over P Funk–we were supposed to talk for an hour or so pre-wedding about the music he’d play and not play for the party, but we mostly talked about P Funk. As an extremely nice gift, he gave me a beautiful OG pressing of Hardcore Jollies. I coudn’t believe it. Thanks, General Eclectic! Great album, especially the B side.

Suddenly I understood Bernie Worrell’s role with Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense, along with P Funk singers Lynn Mabry and Edna Holt. I also got into Brides of Funkenstein albums, with Dawn Silva. I realized a funny thing: every P Funk solo project also has more or less the entire band playing on it, so they’re all basically P Funk albums.

Biological Speculation is the kind of song you’d never guess they could write from their hits, but it’s top tier Funkadelic. I love My Girl, too, and that they were recorded in Toronto.

Me and an online buddy (who writes wonderfully about delicious, high-quality but affordable food in Toronto…read it for free) tried to get Toronto to rename a laneway off Parliament Street “Funkadelic Lane,” so we’d have a Parliament-Funkadelic intersection, but the city rejected it. Even though P Funk recorded here, and Cordell Mosson, George, Bootsy and Bernie lived here, and bought much of their iconic stage wardrobe on Yonge Street stores, P-Funk’s TO epicentre was adjudged too far away from the laneway on Parliament Street to warrant the name change. Mikey even got in touch with Prakash John, the P Funk bass player on America Eats Its Young and a TO music legend, to send a note to city hall to help it along and still, no. Dorks.

In the darkest hours of early pandemic, P Funk was for me pure sunlight. It changed my life and others. One day I called my old high school friend who I used to spend hours listening to Dead tapes with. He returned my call days later, wondering what made me phone him after years of not really speaking.

“I need to know, what do you think of Parliament Funkadelic?”

“Is that why you’re calling?” he asked, cracking up. It was! I assured him I didn’t care about anything going on in his personal or professional life, just this music. I told him P Funk was kind of like Black Grateful Dead, in that they’re both psychedelic bands, but rhythm plays the role in P Funk’s music that Jerry’s wandering guitar melodies do in GD. It’s an oversimplification, but anyway he came over a lot, it totally rekindled our friendship. He came to our wedding, where he met a really good friend of mine, and now they’ve been dating for over a year, so we can all hang and listen to music together. I love P Funk so much and P Funk is love.

Funkentelechy Versus the Placebo Syndrome is, for me, their best. George Clinton agrees. It’s maybe anybody’s best. I also love Clones of Dr Funkenstein. I have 20+ P Funk records. You won’t really appreciate their range unless you listen widely. They’re nasty rock and roll, doo wop, gospel (Glen Goinns, RIP), funk of course.

Their deep cuts will reward you. They tie up so much Black music that came before them, and launched what was to come. I doubt any band is sampled more in hip hop

Sun Ra

While my life has been a succession of musical phases, Sun Ra might really be the final one. Music’s final boss: The Arkestra. In the way part of me believed maybe Robert Johnson did make a deal with the devil, maybe Sun Ra truly is from Saturn.

P Funk salutes Sun Ra for getting to space before they did, calling him an “apostle.” I sense Ra’s having a moment now. Either that, or I see him everywhere because I’m newly attuned to his influence.

I heard of Ra from Grasshopper and listened to Jazz in Silhouette after finding a cheap repress. On Twitter one day in 2023 I heard the Arkestra was doing a free workshop in Regent Park. It was a mini concert. They explained the music of Ra and jazz history between songs. Their music, what they stood for and what they were…I’ll never forget it. Afterwards, the band was chilling in the lobby, talking with people over free samosas and other food. Next night they played a proper concert around the corner from me and I’ve never been the same since.

Nobody encompasses more moods, styles, and sounds than the Arkestra. Not just music genres, but sounds. Ra plays within and outside every type of music, experimenting with harmonies, rhythms, instrumentation, instruments, recording techniques.

He wrote charts for his hero Fletcher Henderson, so he knows classic jazz inside out. Sometimes his music is very accessible, sometimes not at all. Sometimes it’s too much for me! He has 200+ albums and the “out” playing isn’t always what I need, but sometimes the weather is bad, and that doesn’t make me love nature any less.

When Ra is lush and calm, it’s so serene and warm. He can be challenging and make me uncomfortable but still hold me in awe. There’s a lot of humour, love, deep wisdom. Daring, over decades he never played a note he didn’t feel, no matter how shockingly unconventional. The stage incorporated so many dimensions of not just music but art, with wild costumes, dance, crazy lighting and sometimes even pyrotechnics and controlled explosions, always in a DIY way they budgeted on a shoestring out of love. These dimensions could appeal to people outside the music, but they were never gimmicky, always one with the core of the band.

In a world where fake mimemetic hacks with no imagination or integrity are a dime a dozen, Ra embodies the ultimate antithesis of that. A real one. Coltrane and Miles will be listened to in hundreds of years from now. There will be Ra fans in the year 3,000. He’s already played Disco from that century in 1978!

Reading his song lyrics in poetry form reinforced for me how Ra’s words, philosophies, and music are one and the same

I read all the Ra books I can and have his collected poetry in a nice facisimile reprint I found. I’ve watched every doc I available and live performance on YouTube, spellbound. If you’re trying to listen to Ra and think it’s a bit much, and it can be adventurous and unnerving, one trick I’ve found helpful is to home in on one instrument. Some performances have a key which you mentally turn and suddenly they unlock and open up, and what sounded like cacophony or disordered noise has a secret structure that turns out to be extremely beautiful and ordered, or based on feel and spirit, rather than what can easily be transcribed on paper.

10,000 words on Ra wouldn’t be enough and this is getting long, so I’ll end here. Except to say I’m excited to see the new PBS documentary on Sun Ra. Also, here are some Ra recommendations for what can be a dizzying, intimidating band to check out:

I love the early “in” albums: Jazz In Silhouette, Supersonic Jazz, Jazz. The disco-ey funk classics that are most people’s entrypoint to Ra are truly outstanding, Lanquidity, Sleeping Beauty. These two are all-time favourites of mine. Haunting, shimmering, ethereal, and just so cool and gorgeous.

Also On Jupiter, Cosmos, Night of the Purple Moon, Planets of Life or Death Amiens ’73 (side A) are outstanding. Fate In a Pleasant Mood, Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra, Mayan Temples, Blue Delight. Nuits de la Fondation vol 2 (side A), Of Mythic Worlds. Of course, Space is the Place, not just the famous title track but the B Side.

Nothing Is has some of my favourite moments of hard bop. John Gilmore is such a legend. The song To Nature’s God from the album Nidhamu, recorded in Egypt, is priceless to me. Marshall Allen’s work leading the Arkestra today, decades later, and releasing his first ever solo album, which is very beautiful, at the age of 101 is simply inspiring. Music isn’t just a thing to hear with this band, but a thing to do and be. Allen was in the US army band in WWII stationed in Europe, and he released that album in 2025.

Discipline 27-ii is perhaps my #1 ultimate Ra album. I love many of his albums…this one’s essential. Pan Afro is for me the perfect sweet spot of “in” and “out.” June Tyson is in amazing form. The B side is something everybody should experience in their life. I’ve listened to it over 100 times.

To wrap up this article, peace and love to all my cherished musicians and all of their fans, whatever skin colour. And also to all the many beautiful musicians I didn’t write about here. RIP to those who’ve passed, let’s celebrate the living legends now. My feeling is any time you’re engaging with a culture outside your own, you should show the respect, courtesy and appreciation you would when being welcomed inside another people’s temple, because that is in fact what’s going on. Happy Black History month! May this music live forever, I’m certain it will.

Demonetization and the 2016 US Election

06 Friday Feb 2026

Posted by jdhalperin in Uncategorized

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2016 US elections, Demonetization, India, Malana, Pushkar, travel, trump, WION

You already know the results of the 2016 US election but I promise you, my perspective on it was entirely different. Most North Americans don’t know what “demonetization” in India even was, which began that very night. These are really two interconnected stories, both of which were shocking.

In 2016, I was the lone North American on the WION web desk, so it fell to me to write about the US election for the site. The week leading up to the election, I volunteered to work the graveyard shift, 10pm-7am, to be in synch with North American time. 11pm Delhi time is 9:30am in North America. That way, the website would have news as it unfolded.

The evening of the US election, the entire team volunteered to stay up all night on the graveyard shift. As major as that US election was, that wasn’t the major news story of the evening: at around 9pm, without any warning, the Modi government announced that 87% of the paper bills in circulation would suddenly no longer be accepted as payment, starting at midnight. This was known as “demonetization.”

People’s cash wasn’t suddenly valueless, but they had to swap their old 500 ($10 Cdn, roughly) and 1,000 rupee notes ($20) to their bank, and if the total money was over a certain amount, explain how they got them. But people couldn’t use their old bills to make purchases.The government issued new 500 notes and phased out the 1,000 rupee bill altogether. 10, 20, 50, and 100 rupee notes would still be acceptable.

Nobody in a country of 1.3 billion people saw this coming! People panicked. A lot. Whatever the rules were for what to do next, they weren’t immediately clear to all. The justifications for such a massive, drastic policy also kept shifting in the days to come.

First, demonetization was to crack down on terrorism. Supposedly, terrorists would have all these old bills they couldn’t launder, couldn’t explain to a bank how they got them. Next, it became about cracking down on black money and tax avoidance. Shady industrialists were supposedly the target.

Then it became about transitioning people into using the banking system and digital payments. When Big Business comes to India for its enormous middle-class, they expected people to pay via tap, rather than submit crumpled rupee notes. Along these lines, in addition to a new 500 rupee bill, India issued a brand new note of a higher denomination, 2,000 rupees ($40 Canadian).

The web team’s all-nighter to cover the US election was thrown for a loop, as this mammoth national story overtook it. That wasn’t the last surprise of the evening.

So maybe around 6am, my editor and good buddy Tathagata and I went down to the caf to get the team some snacks. Of course there was a problem; we had invalid bills! Right.

We had been covering demonetization for hours, but what was happening didn’t really hit until we went to pay for something and it affected us. I scrounged up my last hundred rupee notes to buy some egg bhuji, shaking my head. Suddenly I was living in a very different world.

Then minutes later I got upstairs and they announced Trump won the election. Suddenly I was living in a very different world. Holy shit. This is 2026 now, we’ve all lived through some truly shocking events, but right then, I’ve never had the rug pulled out from under me like that. It was a double whammy, back to back shots, each punch seismic.

Colleagues wondered why I looked so devastated. I wasn’t crying, but I had been following Trump closely from the start of his campaign, and frankly you didn’t need to to know the world would never be the same again. Anybody could tell Trump was a cerified fascist just from the way he decorated his living room.

I couldn’t take it and left the building. I really couldn’t be there anymore, writing stories like things were normal. It had been the end of a very long week and I was heading into a couple days off and decided I absolutely needed to take them now.

Grim news aside, working from 5am-2pm in one rotation, then 2-11pm, only to work the graveyard shift will turn anybody’s circadian rhythm upside down at the best of times, especially because my friends and family back in Canada were 10.5 hours behind me at any given moment, adding another dimension of disorientation.

I needed to get away. As it happened, I had recently gone out with a sweet girl I met on Tinder who told me she also wanted to get away for a bit, to Ajmer and Pushkar, Rajasthan. It was the Camel Fair, an enormous annual festival where people from across India assemble with their livestock and camel decorations and much else. It was settled, we’d go together.

One practical question first though was, how to get money? India relied overwhelmingly on cash, which meant vendors couldn’t necessarily accept debit or credit card. I only had so much cash and getting more was the question of the day.

In the first days of demonetization, everybody was desperate for cash. No joke, people lined up for days at ATMs, there were reports of some people even dying right there in line because they had medical problems but couldn’t leave their spot–they needed money. It was desperate. You might wait for hours for an ATM to get cash, but the government limited how much you could withdraw at a time to 2,000 rupees. When an ATM did finally get cash, in places, the rush was like those old clips of Black Friday at the mall.

An Uber might be way more expensive than an auto rickshaw, but you could pay through the app, not cash. It was worth spending more money if it meant keeping cash on hand for essentials that required cash. This was a privileged position, a very rarified adjustment compared to what other people in India faced, but it’s what I was navigating.

Anyway, Gopika told me she was starting to kind of date somebody and was it OK if he came on the trip too? Sure, I told her I didn’t care. We had been on one date I enjoyed, but that was fine with me. When you’re working abroad it’s nice to hang with non-colleagues and get away from office gossip and shop talk, especially then. Companionship aside, it’s also nice to travel with people who speak the language and know the deal.

But when that dude found out I was coming too, he didn’t want to anymore, so in the end it was just the two of us.

First Escape: Rajasthan–Ajmer, Pushkar

I met her in Gurgaon, (“Gurugram” now, since Modi de-Islamified the names of Indian cities,) and we took an overnight bus to Ajmer. Walking around that place in the morning was wild! When you touch down in India, you equate the first place you land as “India” because it’s your first exposure to the country, but India’s impossibly vast, places are radically different from each other, and they’re all “India.”

Rajasthan was so arid, the animals felt closer in the streets and different. I didn’t realize that I had a grasp on what kind of cows Delhi had until I saw the strangeness of other cows and bulls here, and one really gnarly wild boar just walking around. It was November, so it wasn’t hot out. Winters in India are what summers are here, the pleasant time to be outside.

I also laughed seeing a dude wearing a “Bury Me In My Ones” t-shirt with a Nike Swoosh, which a curated vintage store here could sell for $100+. It’s hard to explain this and I don’t mean to sound judgey, but I sensed this fella was not a hip dude aware that he was rocking vintage 90s streetwear. I doubted that he knew what Air Force Ones were. He just had a killer North American t-shirt that somehow ended up in India, like a lot of clothes. Western clothing brands get recontextualized there in a way I really like. Once I saw a woman on the Delhi subway with a bag bearing Prada and Gucci labels.

Anyway I loved Ajmer and was quite in awe. We went to a famous, beautiful mosque. You feel the hum that comes with being in an old, sacred place where people do today what they’ve done for many years.

You don’t always need a detailed history of what you’re looking at it to feel this hum. I’m not excusing ignorance, just you’ll never understand everything when you travel, and succumbing to the pressure of trying to is futile. I’ve learned to just enjoy it without needing a tour guide type of explanation for it all. The musicians in the mosque playing the harmonium and percussions were really cool.

We got to Pushkar later that day and stayed at the Pink Floyd hotel. It was a rock and roll themed place with none of Delhi’s buttoned-up culture. Things were loose, very loose. I explained to the proprietor that because of demonetization, I didn’t have much cash, but I was on the lookout for more. “No problem,” he replied, “we’ve got lots of hash here, man.” That was like the one time in my life that really wasn’t what I meant.

We checked out the famous lake with god men and babas around. Just walking around there was like a miracle. So invigorating and stimulating. The markets were bustling, but there was also a real calm. The calm wasn’t entirely healthy: demonetization had put a damper on things. There were fewer camel merchants and business in general was slower than usual.

You see things that you just don’t see here. I probably saw 100 things that day that all seemed unforgettable, and they merge together and now I feel the impression they made, even if the particulars are foggy. But going to rooftop cafes for a cold beer, some nice food, and incredible views in every direction was great.

The next day we went on a brief camel ride through the nearby desert dunes. I had never been on a camel, and the clothing these camels wore was truly incredible. Vibrant and bold funky ass camels, cooler than that 90s rare gear copper! Gopika and I were having a really good time, just talking and stuff. If there was anywhere to get your mind off the rest of the world, it was here.

A carnival was in town with the Camel Fair. People selling wares, young girls tight-rope walking with bowls on their heads, that sort of thing. We went on a cool Ferris wheel. We smoked some hash and watched a really exuberant, short gentleman outside the circus tent dance and hype everybody up. Inside the tent was a sketchy, eyebrow raising performance.

You know those old roller coasters that aren’t particularly big or fast, but they’re scary because they’re old and rickety and may collapse at any second? That was the vibe of these daredevil carnies. Juggling fire was fine, but they balanced on bikes high up on small supports and did other jaw-dropping stunts without a net.

The scariest thing was the finale, a man throwing knives at either side of a blind-folded woman’s face, into a wooden board behind her. That cool thing where the knives whoosh and spin and become embedded in their targets mostly didn’t happen. Instead they hit with a clunk and fell to the floor. It didn’t inspire confidence and I was so relieved for that woman when it was over.

In a metaphor extremely on the nose, that threw in my face what I tried to forget, the roof of this crazy circus comprised entirely of upside down US flags. Honestly, what are the odds? The Pushkar Camel Fair circus may have been a bit dubious here and there, but it was America that was upside down.

That day in the market we had ran into a couple friends of mine from WION, Nagen and Ashish. Small world! They weren’t just work colleagues, they were with me in the early days before the station launched, and we’d go for beers together and hang outside work. They made documentaries and TV programs for WION. They both loved to laugh and had a good artistic and political bent. Great people to talk to and it was really nice to see them. It’s funny to think that if I hadn’t come all that way with Gopika, I still might not’ve been alone in the end.

Next day upon leaving, the hotel POS terminal was down. I tried to wire money to pay for our room but couldn’t online bank through my phone. Nobody had cash, the story across the country. I explained the situation to the gentleman and promised I’d pay him when I returned to Delhi, when I had my laptop and bank login info. Thankfully, after a while, he trusted me and that’s what I did.

Sunday night, we took an overnight bus back to Delhi and I returned in time for my Monday afternoon shift without missing a beat. True, Trump was slated to be president and Indians across the country were up in arms about demonetization, but the acute, crushing doom the immediate aftermath of that night was somewhat softened. Thankfully, instead of overwhelming me, it’s slowly rotted my brain every day since for the last decade.

As for demonetization, the uproar from different segments of Indian society was in stark contrast to my station’s all but official position: WION released a shameful TV commercial praising demonetization so gushingly, it would have been an embarrassing thing for the government to release, never mind a news station that was supposed to report objectively.

But then again, Zee Media had an ATM machine inside the security gates that only people with a media pass could withdraw cash from. Once when it was empty, I lined up for cash at an ATM near the office, open to the public, and the picture was very different. I waited for maybe two or three hours, and when the guy finally came to load it up with money, the pushing was real. Nobody got crushed, it wasn’t a herd, but it couldn’t have been easy for women, seniors, or infirm people.

Demonetization continued to ravage India and my privilege didn’t end. It got comically worse.

Second Escape: Himachal Pradesh–Malana, Challal, Kesol

The next week or so, I went on another trip with three good friends (Kandarp, Laden, Varnika, miss you all!) to the breathtaking Parvati Valley in Himachal Pradesh. To Kesol, Challal, and Malana, the latter a small remote village where the inhabitants believe they descend from Alexander the Great and don’t consider themselves Indians, really. They avoid touching any outsider, not even to exchange money, whether from India or anywhere else, not just with white people.

I was told their justice system works as follows: if two people have a dispute, the judge will instruct them to each poison their goat, and whoever’s dies first is in the wrong. To me, this is a smart way of avoiding litigation altogether; it’s a coin toss and your goat will die regardless, so figure it out on your own and don’t burden the courts.

Malana also just so happens to be home to world-class hash. I was told the Italian mafia imports it. For a time, Malana Cream was Amsterdam’s most expensive hash. Children rub the plants in “rubbing season” because their hands are smooth and don’t have lines or creases yet, which isn’t an excuse for child labour, I’m just reporting how it goes there.

Before departing for that trip, I went to a bank in Connaught Place to get more cash than the 2,000 rupee limit ATMs could dispense. The lineup was enormous and wasn’t moving. I had a bus to catch and after a couple hours of waiting I doubted I’d make it. People there needed cash for real problems. This was mine.

Somehow, a bank manager saw me waiting, literally the only white person in line. He asked if I had an ICICI account. I said yes, then he personally escorted me ahead of everybody and two minutes later I left the bank with all the cash I needed. I walked past people sheepishly, apology written all over my face. I didn’t ask for this treatment, but I wasn’t going to say no. Would you have, in my position? And the strange thing was, nobody was remotely upset: The same attitude that told the manager to let me skip the line also made everybody waiting there resigned to it. At the very least, they didn’t seem like they wanted to kill me.

The overnight bus drops you off at 7am for a two or three hour trek up a mountain to Malana. The Rockies and the Alps are pebbles compared to the Himalayas. On a mountain path I saw a sheppard guide maybe 200 of the wildest animals I’ve ever seen, no two coats or sets of horns alike. That trip was truly wonderful too.

Demonetization didn’t accomplish any of its stated aims, which, again, kept changing weekly. There were a few reports of people who misunderstood the news when it broke, and, fearing their life savings suddenly vanished, they killed themselves.

I don’t mean to make light of the enormous problems demonetization needlessly caused. I’m just contrasting my experience with other people’s as much to shine a light on what they went through as what I did. The real point is the discrepency. I suspect the people who pushed demonetization had an even easier time than I did. The thing about privilege is that I never had to lay my claim to it. It was just there, waiting and ready. If you need to assert it, you don’t have it.

I still think demonetization was all a sham and a cover to shock a coveted cash-reliant market at gunpoint into transitioning to a digital economy and digital banking. Whatever benefits from online banking were offset by the many drawbacks and the acute crises people suffered. There were major protests and lawsuits. But soon enough, I’d see vegetable wallahs in Delhi with signs on their carts advertising that they accepted Paytm. Indians are an incredibly resourceful, adaptable, ingenious people.

10 years later, it’s Trump’s second term and he’s threatening to invade Canada, waging economic warfare against us and traditional Western allies, and even deploying his secret police force to attack Americans in Democratic cities. While life goes on and all things do pass, eventually, you need to face reality and can’t keep running away to the desert or the mountains forever.

The Warmth and Weirdness of Being a White Guy in India

04 Wednesday Feb 2026

Posted by jdhalperin in Uncategorized

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India, Jeff Halperin, New Delhi, Red Fort, Taj Mahal, travel

As a white guy in India, I experienced things that’d never happen to me in Canada, things I’d never dream possible. Some small, some big. Some very nice, others…weird and not so nice.

Let’s start with the fun innocent stuff. My local grocer in Lajpat Nagar II added me on WhatsApp and over the next few weeks and months sent me pictures of textiles and pillows made by his daughter, festive messages on Hindu holidays, and poems written in Sanskrit. I asked a dude in Defence Colony for directions once, and he told me to just hop on his scooter and took the time to drive me all the way there himself.

There’s a warmth and simplicity that’s refreshing and genuinely lovely! People in Toronto, like many big Western cities, cannot be counted on to be so effusive and kind. We’re nice here too, but busy and stressed and sometimes appear cold and distrustful.

But when you look closely under the hood at the favourable treatment I got, it’s not always healthy. I have one such example I still think about a lot, and regard it differently now than I did then.

I visited New Delhi’s Red Fort in 2016, a UNESCO World Heritage Site for being the historic seat of power for about two hundred years when India was ruled under the Mughal Empire, before the Brits. That day was amazing. The architecture was thrilling, you could feel and walk through the history, and it had the same architect as the Taj Mahal, though there’s way fewer tourists, so being there is very chill and relaxing. You have more space and time.

But here’s where it gets weird. While there, for no apparent reason and very much without my asking for it, something incredible happened: a stranger handed to me the most precious thing in his life–his child.

He didn’t speak English, so I’m still not sure what this was all about and I’ll never know.

*Weirdest picture I have…the child is not smiling, and I don’t blame him*

As I type this in Toronto in 2026, I struggle to believe it really happened. It seems so far fetched. This sort of things just doesn’t happen to me here! I don’t think I’d truly believe it without the picture.

Why did this happen? I have some theories.

Maybe I was the first white person the man ever saw, and a novelty. That’s happened to me before. One time, driving in South Delhi, a hijra asked to touch my face because she had never touched white skin before, so I obliged. When she asked if I’d marry her, I had to let her down easy. (I was in the car with my friend who speaks Hindi and translated all this.)

Anyway, the New Delhi metropolitan area has about 33 million people and its fair share of white ones, but they’re not evenly distributed geographically. As the capital of India, there are posh areas where local politicians, foreign diplomats, tourists, and immigrants (excuse me, “expats”) hang out. It’s not surprising to see white people in places like Paharganj, Hauz Khas, Khan Market, Lutyens, or Connaught Place, and Indians there didn’t usually seem visibly excited to see me, which was fine by me.

Maybe tourist sites like Red Fort were different because they attract rural Indians who haven’t seen many, or any, white people. I did get hit up for rupees more in places like Qutb Minar in Delhi or the Taj Mahal in Agra.

Strangely, even the street kids who swarmed my car window for rupees stopped doing so after a few months in Delhi, as if they somehow knew I was no longer the naïve target most white people are upon arriving in India. (Not only will giving them money attract more kids asking for money, which then becomes a scene, but it was explained to me that the kids don’t keep most of the money; it goes to a handler, who in turn gives a cut to politicians…apparently, this thing goes all the way to the top.)

But to return to the point, what does it mean that a stranger gave me his child?

One thought I’ve had a lot since is, “If this man ever came to Toronto, I know that no white person would ever give their young child to him.” Of course, not handing a stranger your child is perfectly understandable! That this is a one-way street says something though. The thought I had was true in 2016, but it’s even truer in 2026, as Canada has seen a sad, despicable surge in anti-Indian racism and anti-immigrant sentiment in general. But that’s another, larger topic.

In my mind, I was just a dude walking around seeing the sites no different than anybody else, but let’s be real: I was a white guy walking around India. Of course I was different. It doesn’t matter what was in my head: race and racism reside externally, they’re in the world. There’s no way I could have conceived of my skin colour that would have changed how everybody else did, or how they responded to me.

The attention, the reactions I’d get in tourist spots and elsewhere in India from total strangers could be so bonkers that pretending whiteness didn’t matter wouldn’t just be wrong, it’d be silly. The very idea is laughable. It’s just so in your face and inescapable.

Maybe you’re wondering, what’s so wrong about showing kindness to a stranger, even if in an extremely mind-boggling way? In a vacuum, nothing. I joke, or half-joke, that to understand what it’s like to be a white guy walking around certain places in Delhi, you need to walk around anywhere in Toronto with a dog. Strangers fete and praise you, speaking to you in that excited high-pitched voice people speak to dogs in. They trust you automatically and assume you’re wonderful. In New Delhi, as a white dude, you don’t need the dog. In a way, I was the dog.

At first I thought my whiteness merely signalled to Indians that I was a foreigner, which activated people’s innate sense of hospitality. Maybe! Indeed, strangers I met were extremely nice, and no doubt they could tell I wasn’t from there. I’m sure many were just lovely, warm people.

So at first I was baffled and amused. But I’ve come to see this child-posing as a kind of darker thing a, negative image and reversal of the cruelty non-white people may receive in India and elsewhere.

Attributing the excessive, effusive warmth I enjoyed to people’s hospitality is a much less weird and more pleasant thing to believe in. Maybe that’s why I instinctively reached for that explanation, though I genuinely didn’t understand how rampant racism was in India, nevermind how caste worked.

I played with it in my obliviousness.

Sometimes just to mess with people for fun, when an Indian (usually a cab or rickshaw driver who spoke some English, much better English than I spoke Hindi) asked me where I was from, I’d reply nonchalantly, “Tamil Nadu.” At the time I just meant to name a different Indian state, as if despite all appearances I was from India, not Canada or The West. In my innocence I didn’t realize the implication, that Tamil Nadu is a Southern state where people generally have darker skin.

What’s confusing about all of this is that of course you get a sense that something’s off, that things are different, but that doesn’t mean you really understand what’s going on. On one hand, you’re a white person new to India—the smells and sights and sounds are all extremely different and impossibly stimulating, and you’re constantly bombarded by, among other things, a palpable sense of privilege because people beg you for money and sometimes even hand you their children. But on the other hand, you also genuinely don’t really get how things work.

As a visitor, you’re instantly wowed and sometimes disturbed by things you see, but it takes months to begin to grasp the dynamics at play. Your heart feels a lot of things before your head gets it. Much of it I still don’t get!

Maybe that guy had a different reason altogether for handing me his child, some plausible sensible reason I haven’t considered. I can’t imagine what it would be.

Over time, I’d file stories for WION about Nigerians being chased and beaten by Hindu mobs in a Greater Noida mall, I believe only kilometres away from our Uttar Pradesh newsroom. White and dark skin may both signal that a person is from out of town, but the treatment couldn’t be more different.

This is only one example, but it’s illustrative. For one thing, millions of Indians pay good money to literally look whiter. In a society characterized by caste, having light skin can practically determine your destiny. No wonder skin whitening cream is not just a product but a multi-billion-dollar industry.

There is no skin darkening cream, for obvious reasons.

The same force, or a similar one, that encouraged a man to briefly hand me his child also encouraged a mob to assault innocent Nigerian men. Thankfully I was never beaten, and while it’s a weird thing to do or have happen, I doubt Indian locals ever give their children to Nigerian tourists for any reason, however briefly.

That so much wonderful warmth and friendship I experienced among people in India is sullied by this dynamic sucks, but of course the racism sucks more. So much easygoing kindness I encoutnered genuinely filled my heart and 10 years later I still feel and cherish it! It’s not always possible to distinguish between nice-niceness and weird-niceness. India has so much to be proud of, it’s an impossibly rich culture, more like a continent than a country. And while racial dynamics can often be less subtle there, we’re anything but free of them here.

Anyway, while I seriously doubt he’ll ever read this, I hope that child I very briefly held is doing well today.

Toronto to India and Back to Toronto In a Day

31 Saturday Jan 2026

Posted by jdhalperin in Uncategorized

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India, Uttarakhand

Everybody says that the second you get off the plane in India, you know you’re somewhere different. The heat, the air. You feel it. My first time in India was my first time in Asia and the first 24 hours was an amazing joyous culture shock.

First I got picked up from the Delhi airport in a car sent by my news station. My friend and editor in chief Rohit made sure I landed softly. In fact I was staying at his home for the first few weeks of my stay. I owe him so much!

The cab ride from the airport to his home in Vasant Kunj was unbelievable. I looked wide-eyed at everything I saw, stunned. You see people. People around fires in the streets. The space between Pearson to downtown Toronto is filled with fields, parking lots, cars, strip malls, empty expanses. There, there’s stuff and the character and density shocked me.

I reached his home by midnight, and by 4am we woke up early to beat traffic en route to the Jim Corbett Tiger reserve, where Rohit owned land on which he was building a facility for researchers. The drive there was unbelievable. Emerald rice fields, banyan trees shocked me and evoked remote jungles. It was the jungle. It’s hard to state how different everything looks and feels because it was hard to process at the time. Looking out a car window was a constant rush, I couldn’t look away.

On the drive we stopped to wait at a train crossing. While our jeep blared Justin Bieber, Tanya’s music, Rohit’s daughter, a gentleman stood beside me with his cow, which suddenly started urinating in a thick stream right all over his ankles and feet. The guy didn’t move a muscle. I could hear it but it’s like he didn’t even feel it, or simply didn’t care. Hearing Bieber play while watching that felt like straddling two very different worlds.

The natural landscape was awe inspiring. We drove through dry river beds, where the traffic was quite different than I was accustomed to.

We drove through small Muslim villages on the way to Uttarakhand and even seeing things that would be common later, like tea stalls or whatever, blew my mind.

At the tiger reserve, men with very simple tools were building. Ladders of bamboo. No power tools, no electricity, I don’t think. Language barriers prevented communication. But they had a kind of small tree fort where, from that height their phones could get some reception and up there was a solar charging station. This level of old school resourcefulness for modern technology was new to me and impressed me. The funny thing is, unlike me, these humble Uttarakhand builders had data plans on their phones–I hated smartphones, still do, and never wanted one. I only got a data plan for my first time in the upcoming months, in Delhi in 2016.

The charging station and my bed for the evening

But even the construction site was nothing like it would have been in Toronto. It was less a construction site than just…people building. No signs explaining the project’s scope, approvals displayed for inspectors.

We went on a “safari,” ie a drive through the forest looking for tigers. We didn’t see any but the possibility was real, if remote, and that alone was exciting. Nearby some nomads lived, gypsies. Most of them were in the mountains then, except for one woman who spoke to Rohit and seemed friendly. They lived just a few minutes walk away.

The gypsy’s home

I had a bottle of single malt I picked up from the duty free. To add, Rohit said, “Oh, you like hash, don’t you?” Yes, I’ve been known to inhale. So he muttered something in Hindi, which to me sounded not only like a language I couldn’t understand, but like a language nobody could understand. I realized, I had never heard it before. Two seconds later a gentleman builder handed us a big hash joint. Potent, too!

Now I grasp that a bottle of Indian booze, say Old Monk rum, went for like 300 rupees, or roughly $6 Canadian. Scotch is a luxury anywhere, even duty-free, but there, imported to India, it’s coded as “Western” and the subtext of the luxury is on a higher plane.

That night I played some Bowie tunes on my travel guitar by the fire, passed the Laphroaig around, smoked some hash which I was told simply grows everywhere there like weeds. I hope the labourers liked my songs. I think they did.

It was a very cold February evening sleeping on a charpoy outdoors under an open-sided thatch hut, all snug under very thick blankets. The night sky was not only extremely brilliant and crystal clear but the stars even seemed to be positioned differently from the stars I normally saw. Imagine how strange it is to look at the countless stars in the sky and think, “these aren’t the stars I’m used to, every star has changed its position.” That I could be so far away from home that even the heavens looked and was different transcended cultural differences.

A family of elephants sometimes pass through that area, but sadly they weren’t there the next morning. Still, the possibility excited me and made me feel like I was somewhere special. We woke up at probably 4 or 5 am to beat traffic back into Delhi to witness a creature even rarer around those parts than any elephant or tiger: the premier and leader of Ontario’s Liberal party, Kathleen Wynne.

Rohit interviewed her at the Taj hotel, a posh 5-star hotel in South Delhi. I showered quickly and tried to trim my beard to look more appropriate because we weren’t in the jungle anymore, but of course the voltage was wrong and my trimmer got fried. No worries: Suhail, Rohit’s assistant, a friendly young man who I was told could shimmy up a coconut tree and split a coconut open with his bare hands, was also trained to be a barber and trimmed my beard with a comb and scissors. We’d become buds despite not really being able to talk to each other too much.

Before the interview, sitting there in the Taj, I was chewing the shit with one of Kathleen Wynee’s aide, a Toronto guy in her retinue. We talked about restaurants on Dupont Street, probably tacos at Playa Cabana or some Anthony Rose spots. Going to about the other end of the world only to come right back that quickly was super weird. Whiplash.

In hindsight, I was in a class bubble that was very hard to perceive at the time because I had in fact travelled very far and things around me were in fact very different.

Landing in India, you think you’re in “India,” and of course I was, but more specifically I was based in New Delhi, or just outside Delhi in Film City, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, working for Zee Media to launch and work for the country’s first-ever English language global news TV station and website, World Is One News. WION.

I might have seen Muslim villagers in the foothills of the Himalayas, a gypsy woman, and Uttarakhand labourers after driving through a dry river to get to a teak jungle, but I couldn’t talk to them. The people in India I could talk to were much less exotic.

Such were my first 24 hours or so in India.

Amulet: The Companion to Bolaño’s 2666

27 Tuesday Jan 2026

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2666, Amulet, Roberto Bolano

I just finished reading Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet, and my god is it the book I’ve been looking for. I love 2666 a lot, and since reading it I’ve read some other Bolaño novels, and while they were quite good and at times great, they didn’t seem linked directly to 2666. Thematically, perhaps in tone and subject too, but they could have been written by different authors.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is a profile of, you guessed it, Nazis (ordinary people who supported the Nazis, not politicians in the Nazi party) who could have been friends with Haas, but then again maybe not. The Third Reich seems even less connected to 2666. Of course Nazism is very present in all these works, but that’s a surface similarity.

Amulet is different.

To me, reading it, I thought it was the inverse of 2666 and in a type of secret dialogue with it. The imagery is not just similar, but linked, as if there’s a portal from one work to the other. The most obvious link between the two works is that the year “2666” is only mentioned in Amulet, not the actual novel 2666. The longer work gets its title from the shorter one. That’s what pushed me to read this one, but before reading I wondered if that’d be the only link. Thankfully, it isn’t.

My copy of Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

In Part 1 of 2666, the Critic Liz Norton is in a St. Thersa hotel in Mexico looking at the mirror and sensing a type of portal to an eerie dream world, which is later echoed in Part 4, when the congresswoman is in likely the same hotel room and feeling the same creepy sensation. In Amulet, the narrator, Auxilio Lacouture, has the same sensations when looking at a vase in chapter 1. She describes it as a window to hell and wonders if poets ever see the bottom of it. “Do poets have any idea what lurks in the bottomless maws of their vases? And if they know, why don’t they take it upon themselves to destroy them?”

If this was the only parallel I’d probably shrug it off but the connections felt deeper and linked throughout the work. Auxilio felt to me like the patron saint and protector that many, many characters in 2666 needed but never got. The epigraph of Amulet, to me, supports this reading: “In our misery we wanted to scream for help, but there was no one there to come to our aid—Petronius.”

Auxilio renders service to poets, inspiring their work, attending poetry readings and poetry parties and being one of those indispensable people who fuel culture without getting a byline or credit, but in a more basic sense she sweeps their floors and cleans their homes, just because she wants to, not for pay. She identifies as the mother of all poets repeatedly, and she very well could be.

Lest things seem too abstract or speculative or grasping, as always with Bolaño, he brings us down to earth. Auxilio survives a coup, as the army patrols the campus she works on looking for radicals, taking away students and professors, by hiding for 13 days in a bathroom stall. She survives the violence, the haunting shadows and encroaching darkness, by reading Pedro Gafias’ poetry and eating toilet paper until the hunger disappears. This becomes her time-ship, as she remembers and hallucinates things in different directions in time, but the experience is her “amulet,” which she draws on throughout her life for protection.

Thematic similarities to 2666 are numerous, but in many ways the works aren’t just different but opposite or inverted. 2666 has an omniscient third-person narrator (in interview, Bolaño says the narrator is Arturo Bolano, Roberto Bolaño’s alter ego, but we don’t know that just from reading the book), whereas Amulet is a first-person narrator, told from a woman’s perspective. Amulet is centred with a female perspective, whereas in 2666, women are literally missing from the book. Amulet is very short, while 2666 is a tome.

The Critics in 2666 travel from Europe to Mexico looking desperately for a poet they’ve never met, who it turns out under a different name fought for the Nazis in WWII and is the uncle of a suspect in the contemporary killings of women haunting St. Theresa, whereas Auxilio came to Mexico from Uruguay to fulfill her destiny as the mother of all poets. She travelled from afar to her spiritual home, while the Critics, at the end of that section, are stuck abroad in a hotel, sensing Archimboldi (Hans Reiter) is nearby but they’ll never actually meet him.

I could go on, but I think I’d need to reread Amuelt or mark up passages that for me felt similar, or echoed 2666. Auxilio Lacouture is in Bolaño’s other major, long novel, Savage Detectives. Honestly, I read that years ago and the specifics aren’t fresh at all. I could do a reread of that. I suspect it’d read differently to me now, knowing more about Bolaño, his world, and his fictional worlds. I’m going to reread Amulet too at some point, because it was a lovely lighter read that pointed to darker themes without wallowing in them. If reading 2666 is disturbing but raw and important, this felt like the negative image of that but no less raw and important. It is filled with poetry-prose and beautiful images, one that stuck out to me were eyes like a lake at sunset, but whereas 2666 had some light amid the craziness and the darkness, in Amulet these proportions are reversed. If surviving the coup is Auxilio’s amulet, or protection, she provides the bohemians and artists she encounters with the same type of protection, and maybe even for Bolaño’s readers too.

ICE is Executing Innocent Americans in the Streets…Now What?

25 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by jdhalperin in Politics

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Alex Pretti, philando castile, Renee Good, trump

It feels like we’re at a turning point now, with many MAGA sympathizers and even MAGA supporters finally realizing that Donald Trump is the straight up fascist his critics have always said he was.

I’m not going to recap the two recent ICE murders because they were captured on multiple videos from different angles which you’ve no doubt seen already. They’re straightforward snuff films, with government agents playing judge, jury and executioner for people who very, very clearly are 100% innocent.

What is there to say, exactly? Between Trump threatening the US’ historical allies, like Canada, Denmark and Greenland, and him launching lethal attacks against American citizens, not to mention the ongoing Epstein cover-up, people who have railed against things like “wokeness” have finally found their red line. Good! That should be welcomed.

In one sense, the ICE murders are a shocking escalation, but they resemble police murders we have been seeing footage of for years. In 2016, Minnesota police murdered Philando Castile, who like Alex Pretti, also had a license for the gun he had on him. During his interaction with the cops, Castile calmly made police aware of the licensed gun he had in his glovebox, and the cops murdered him right in front of his girlfriend and 4-year-old son. We know this because the whole sequence is also on video.

So what’s different about this, ten years later? Trump increased ICE’s budget exponentially last year, from the $10-billion range to about $75 billion. It’s true that Trump is recruiting new ICE members from MAGA gangs like the Proud Boys and other violently deranged anti-woke January-6 militia, but the two agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti were members of ICE for 10 and 8 years, respectively.

Obama increased ICE’s funding and Biden didn’t abolish ICE when he had the chance, so why is this different? Because judging from the way Trump and his sycophants have not just excused the murders but praised them, framing this as Ameican authorities valiantly defending the heartland against terrorism rather than murderous hooligans satiating their bloodlust, this is clearly what Trump wanted to happen. He has been stoking violence for years, from famously attempting a coup and orchestrating an attack on the Capital to praising dozens of his voters for violently attacking democrats and critics.

Minnesota is in a state of siege, with even everyday, non-political residents hunkered down in terror while Trump’s militia goes door to door looking for non-white people. “Ghost cars” are a thing now, empty vehicles on the roads, left stranded there after ICE kidnapped the drivers’ and took them to god knows where. Residents with citizenship are trying to help immigants, who are too scared to leave their home to buy food, by buying the food for them, but ICE are following their movements. ICE are also circling schools, locking up students and even children as young as five, using food as bait to lure hungry people they can then kidnap. Despite what ICE says they’re doing, they’re using facial-recognition Palantir technology, partially to create a database of activists and designate them all “terrorists,” and to hunt non-white people.

Minnesota has been on Trump’s radar for years because it’s a progressive city, whose senator is Democratic rival and 2024 vice president nominee Tim Walz. There’s a community of established anti-MAGA activists, but this is radicalizing people in real time.

ICE is disappearing and murdering people. White Americans. This is important, because while absolutely nobody should be treated this way, it’s very telling that MAGA goons think they can simply kill or kidnap any American they want to. They’re not even pretending to follow their stated beliefs. Trump has given them impunity, and they very clearly want to kill and kidnap people. They don’t show remorse after killing innocent people, they seem proud and threaten to do it again. They’re not following any laws whatsoever. Nobody is safe, and it’s beyond naive, just extremely stupid, to think that MAGA will limit their reign of terror to the people they say they’re pursuing. That’s already been proven false.

People are noting how hypocritical libertarian don’t-tread-on-me types seem right now; their entire persona was based around owning guns to defend themselves from government tyranny. Many are watching their president’s paramilitary hooligans kidnap and kill people and responding, “Comply!” “Be servile!” “Do what the government tells you!”

Whatever your stance on gun ownership is, Alex Pretty, like Philando Castile, broke no laws. Renee Good clearly was unarmed. And they were murdered all the same. That they were murdered by lavishly-paid government agents who say they oppose Big Government and government tyranny would be ironic, but only if you expected the murderers to be coherent and logically consistent. Murderers usually aren’t.

“This is what people voted for!” is one excuse some Republicans are making now. It’s moot and frankly silly: there’s no rule saying that something can’t be fascist if people voted for it! I don’t need to remind you who else was voted in.

And yes, this is Project 2025. This is precisely what Trump critics said was going to happen. Most people criticizing it now criticized it right from the start. Now it’s here and it’s terrifying. Minnesota looks like they’re going to simply respond to this by going on a general strike, with nobody showing up for work until this stops. Because this can’t continue. On Friday, tens of thousands of protesters already braved freezing temperatures to denounce ICE in the streets and this will likely only grow and get worse.

MAGA’s prime directive–their stated support for rights relating to liberty, freedom, and gun ownership–has been shown to be a complete sham. It’s not that I personally think these beliefs were right or that these beliefs are wrong, it’s that all this time MAGA never believed in them. Even if it was extremely obvious that this is where things were heading, written out in Project 2025 and forecast for years by Trump’s words and actions, I hope his supporters can finally accept that he was lying and this can’t continue and they stop supporting him.

ICE needs to be abolished, yesterday, and all the people responsible for this should be held on trial. This is the moderate position.

I worry that, while typing safely on social media from my hometown of Toronto, I will encourage somebody to join the protests, and that person will be murdered by ICE. I want this violence to stop and I want people to stop it, but that’s the whole thing. If unarmed, innocent people can simply be murdered by the state in their own neighbourhoods, what are hopeful words going to achieve?

Parallax For Time, or Measuring Infinity

08 Thursday Jan 2026

Posted by jdhalperin in Uncategorized

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Jeff Halperin, Lauryn Hill, Marvin Gaye, Mats Sundin, Nabokov, Parliament Funkadelic, Proust, Sun Ra

When I was young my father explained the “error of parallax” to me and today, though my memory is total garbage, that stuck with me for some reason. The error of parallax occurs when you observe something from a skewed angle and misread it accordingly. The simplest example is to imagine yourself in the passenger seat of a car, unable to gauge the speedometer accurately because you’re looking at it from an angle, not from the driver’s seat.

So that’s how parallax works in terms of physical space. I’ve been intrigued lately about how this same bias works in terms of time. When are you really looking at a moment, square and dead on? During it, or some time after?

Adults know how weird it is returning to places you spent time as a kid which seem much smaller than they used to. Physically, you were smaller too. These places were bigger, relative to your size then. I think as a person grows physically, maybe the world around them shrinks.

But also things take on mythical proportions when you’re young, and the passage of time evens this out. That’s why pro athletes seem not just like adults when you’re a kid, but giants. Men. When I was 13, nobody could have been older or more of an adult than Mats Sundin. He was 26. Now, I’m 41.

This is one way I think parallax works in terms of time. But there are other similar distortions too on different scales.

It’s common for every generation to think they had it hard, they were hardcore, and today’s contemporary whippersnappers are soft. We used to walk five kilometres to school in snow this high. There’s always some reason why adults had it rough and kids today are soft. Today’s soft kids will have had it hard as youth, but only once they grow up and see a new crop of young indulged kids.

There’s always some problem society gets fixated on solving, and people are soft because back in my day nobody cared about it. Today we have mental health diagnoses for problems nobody knew existed. This language gives us a framework for understanding behaviour previous generations lacked. Frankly, sometimes I think pseudo-psychology gets tossed around casually, and people sling therapy language around willy nilly, but by and large we understand that conditions people have can sometimes account for behaviour that would otherwise be difficult to us to understand.

This affects how people see a past time and their own. Everybody in their 40s today lived through the 80s, but not as adults. Their perception about what the 80s or 90s were like is no doubt shaped by their age. Is their sense of time skewed by their age? What exactly is the right age to perceive an era?

Today’s adults don’t know what it’s like to live in 2026 as a child. That’s how parallax works in terms of time. It’s unavoidable.

That’s why all those fiery op-eds about what Millennials or Gen-Z or Gen-X are like seem silly to me. People are always the same. Technology changes, economic conditions change, and people adjust to this matrix of things accordingly.

Baby Boomers shat on social media when it came out, believing you had to be a vapid idiot to use it. Now it’s a cliché that they’re the first to believe the most outlandishly fake crap posted on Facebook. They were never above using social media, it just wasn’t aimed at adults initially. (Originally, you needed to have a university email to use Facebook). People didn’t use a social media platform invented in 2004 back in the 1960s and 70s for obvious reasons.

With physical space, it’s easy to understand what a straight-ahead perspective is and look at something dead on. With time, this is much less clear.

Sometimes, you don’t understand just what you’re looking at until you get a broader context than is immediately apparent. Maybe you need time to process what’s going on. That’s what the phrase “hindsight is 20-20” means. It suggests the moment itself isn’t the best time to accurately grasp what’s going on.

That’s why parallax is different for time. Novelists love thinking about this kind of stuff. This is Proust’s subject, and he called his famous novel, In Search of Lost Time. As Nabokov elegantly describes it, “it’s a treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place is the past.”

In a way, the idea of involuntary memory, where one sudden whiff of a tea biscuit can summon core memories long thought buried, contradicts the idea of hindsight being 20-20. It’s not hindsight that makes the memories come alive, but olfactory stimulation. ie, a smell. Then again, eye witnesses for crimes often remember things they witnessed very recently very incorrectly. Memory and time and perception are funny things!

People talk about the relativity of time, how it can move quickly or slowly depending on what’s going on. One new theory I semi-believe is that everybody is every age at once. Seniors carry with them many things from childhood, and have carried their childhood with them constantly, every day of their life. On the flipside, the way you treat a child today is something that can stick with them for decades, so in a way, you’re interacting with that future self too.

It’s not that they’re literally every age at once, it’s that time is only alive in memory. Sometimes people make up a memory, or misremember something that they genuinely think is real.

One funny thing people post online about macro time, epochs, is that we currently live closer to Cleopatra’s age than Cleopatra was to the Pharaoh Cheops, of Cairo’s Great Pyramid fame, Cheops. That’s how long the Egyptian dynasty was.

On the flip side of this grander scale, in music, I’ve become a much keener appreciation of rhythm. Time can be measured in millennia or measures, bars. Everything is on the one. Some jazz and hip hop beats have a lazy behind-the-beat feel I just love, a type of drawl. A hiccup. The P Funk album Funkentelechy Versus the Placebo Syndrome takes part of its name from the Greek word, entelechy, which is concerned with a being achieving its fullest potential. The way I understand it, P Funk is trying to ask the listener what the state of their funk is now, in the moment that just elapsed, and the next one, and the one after that. Are you realizing your full funk, now, and in the constant now-ness? That’s where the Funk is. It’s on the one, and it’s now. That’s one micro perspective on music I think is cool.

Some musical ideas I’ve had consider time on a small and larger scale at the same time. There are Sun Ra records where the A and B sides are from completely different sessions, perhaps years apart. Maybe this was done unintentionally, as they pressed their own albums and recorded their own music constantly and could have simply lost track of what session was what. Their discography is notoriously challenging. I prefer to think of it as Ra playing with time in a micro and macro sense. Side A is from 1962, side B from the 70s. Greatest Hits albums arguably do the same thing.

What does it mean to have an “old soul”? Usually it’s when a young precocious person likes older, more cultivated art, or seems philosophical beyond their years. But even the way we understand art is influenced by time in a major way. For one thing, older books, movies, or songs have had years of scrutiny, and if people still love them after decades, that’s a test new art can’t possibly get to take, let alone pass. It might pass that test later, but not today.

It’s not just that grandparents aren’t impressed by the music their grandchildren listen to. Louis Armstrong had nothing great to say about bebop, and today, jazz standards written by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are a bedrock part of the jazz Canon.

It’s possible to get swept up by music because it’s current, because it responds to current events or the current moment, but this currentness can also obscure perceptions. Sometimes, topical art speaks to a moment, but isn’t remembered much after that current moment passes. Even that word, current, is great because it invokes water moving in this or that direction, just like the passage of time.

I saw a post on twitter recently, where someone was lamenting how today’s youth are nostalgic for the 90s, which have passed. Give it up, they’re gone! That was the message. In response, a gentleman I follow posted pictures of 90s albums harkening back to music from the 70s. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill took her cover from Bob Marley’s Burnin’. Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You was the basis for Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night.

Being nostalgic for a time period you didn’t live in is timeless behaviour, if you will. Musicians have always mined the past for sounds and feels, because what else can a musician know but music they’ve heard before? Norm Macdonald made the joke, that “this is a picture of me when I was younger” should be followed by “every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger.”

Musicians can’t be influenced by music that hasn’t happened yet, so the past is the only place to look. Novelists, same thing. It’s a question of how far back you go, and in which directions. Any new art has something of the old in it too, and this is how time moves in two directions at once.

Parallax for space rightly assumes that there is one central point from which a perspective is centred, the correct one to look and measure from. This doesn’t exist for time, or if it does, it’s not straightforward. In a sense, we live in every time that has ever occurred, even if the past is buried somewhere and yet to rise, awaiting for whatever will excavate or summon it.

What is Technology For, Exactly?

11 Thursday Dec 2025

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Blue Jays, Bo Bichette, Digital technology, Jeff Halperin, Kyle Tucker, Rogers

One idea I cannot get out of my head is the notion that our technology-driven society is falling apart and technology gets none of the blame. Instead, the solution posed is always more, more, more technology!

Groceries are unaffordable and the response? Dynamic pricing, where automated technology recognizes who can afford to pay more and charges them more for the same product. This is something to celebrate?

This is one example, and I doubt the creators of this technology would frame dynamic pricing as a response to the soaring price of groceries. But that’s how I see it and don’t really care how the grocery tycoons caught red-handed colluding to raise bread prices for 1.5 decades want people to see it.

From where I’m sitting, digital technology only exists so its creators can become middlemen taking a cut from every purchase. It’s like this in every industry. I don’t see how life has improved from decades ago in any meaningful way.

Obviously we have phones now and before we didn’t. So what? Now you can tap a screen and send an errand boy to courier food to your door. Great. Increasingly, with digital culture and xenophobia on the rise, the food courier’s a young South Asian man who can’t afford city life delivering food to someone who wants them deported. Every digital service pitches itself as modern magic, when really it is just a system for dispatching disposable butlers to your door, making them deal with the horrors of traffic so you don’t have to. It’s so hard to find good help. That’s the problem digital technology answers.

Of course digital technology is interwoven through every industry, not just groceries and restaurants. There are a million digital apps for banking and commerce, and what’s the result? Service deteriorates and executives pocket money laid off employees once got. Maybe it goes to shareholders, or it’s used for stock buybacks.

Put another way, given how everybody technology famously drives our society, and how much people love technology, you’d think that society was going well! It’s broken. Totally broken.

Everyone’s miserable and many are poor. The left know this is true because they’re the ones who are poor, and the right and far right know this too because the wealth is mostly transferring from everybody else to them. Frankly, they’re miserable too. Everyone is. The mood is very bad right now, everywhere.

The fascist right definitely knows society is hopelessly broken, they campaigned on it. Even back in 2015, Trump ran on “Make America Great Again,” the again screaming the US was no longer great. US presidential hopefuls traditionally wrap the flag as tightly around themselves as possible and campaign on three things: U-S-A, U-S-A, and U-S-A. Running on “America is not great!” is a euphemism for “America is fucked.”

Which is true, but sounds like bullshit coming from a mega-corrupt oligarch who as much as anyone else on earth represents what broke America and works everyday to break it further.

It feels like technology once served a clear cut purpose. Phones let us speak to people, they were undeniably, plainly good. Planes make travel easier, or possible. That’s good. What is all this for?

There’s a circularity to it. Technology creates jobs! OK, but what is it all for? All people want is their basics met and some time to relax with friends and loved ones without feeling like making ends meet is hopeless.

Phones make people miserable, depressed, anxious, and for this, people pay out of their own pocket! If digital technology keeps us so connected, as people assume, why are we all so disconnected? Technology is the force atomizing people, keeping us sequestered and separated. It feels to me like people are subsidizing the tech industry, keeping it afloat, with their money and misery, all to keep the economy churning without no other real benefit. The costs are numerous and enormous, the perks are mostly, at best, vulgar distractions. At worse, horrors.

I don’t see how technology helps people.

For what it’s worth, there are certain forms of technology I love. Sun Ra experimented with every new synth and keyboard he could get his hands on. He played with all kinds of strange recording techniques.

I resent that broadly criticizing Silicon Valley can be construed as being opposed to the very idea of innovation. If you want innovation, read James Joyce! Listen to John Coltrane! Those gentlemen innovated. These modern digital putzers are all looking to make money and invent pretexts pitched with elaborate marketing budgets for why their useless creations are not only useful, but essential, revolutionary. The glowing terms they use for this crap are in proportion to how useless it all is.

There’s another cycle worth describing here too. In the way that laundry machines are an unbelievable technology that save people time…OK, but where exactly does that time go? I struggle to reconcile this. It feels like anything that really does save a person time, the person never gets to keep that time. It gets allocated elsewhere before they can blink. Given all the technology surrounding us, you’d think people have nothing but spare time! They don’t.

If technology was merely useless, I could cheerily laugh at it from a distance and go on with my life. But we’re invading countries to take their minerals to keep building this stuff. The labour exploitation, the climate and ecological destruction…all of that is horrible. And on a basic level, it all strikes me as useless and profoundly boring. On a purely aesthetic sense, it’s all dogshit.

Things were fine before digital technology took over. Better! Now every company is looking to be the Uber of whatever, when really the best way to get around a city is walk or take transit or bike, and Uber’s model was only sustainable because it coasted on vast private funding from Saudi Arabia, and operated with impunity facilitated by ultra-elite lobbying (within like three days of living in New Delhi, I met ex-Obama aide David Plouffe at the Habitat Centre at a talk he was giving about Uber in his capacity as a lobbyist…he didn’t answer my question about Uber operating in legal grey zones to my satisfaction, but tried to), and for years never turned a profit.

I just want to play guitar and read some books and listen to music with people. Watch some movies. Digital technology brings nothing to my life. There are some excellent YouTube breakdowns of music and stuff like that. Of course these platforms support cool cultures: anythign that connects people is cool, because people are cool. But overall, the costs greatly outweigh the benefits. I really think it’s healthier for people to get their life’s satisfaction from artists, not the self-interested leaders of boring exploitative corporate junk. Check out Tolstoy and Gogol, not Mark fucking Zuckerberg, Peter fucking Thiel, or any of those titans of dorkdom.

I don’t care which streaming platform offer movies someone else made years ago, before Netflix even existed. For people to act like these platforms created the art, when really they’re just digital middlemen, strikes me as sad and even pathetic. Worshipping Netflix instead of people like Scorsese is like loving Fender, not Jimi Hendrix. (Actually to be fair, Fender contributed much more to Hendrix’s music than Netflix does for cinema, and I do respect and love that company. But it’s not Jimi!).

Maybe some cultural snobbery is bleeding into this, but if so, it’s because the digital world only has room to promote itself and leaves little space for others. The digital kingpins like ruling the roost, they make the country’s policies. They believe, with justification, that presidents and prime ministers work for them, and a world where people are fulfilled by something they have nothing to do with is not a world they want us to live in. And sure enough, we don’t.

So it’s hard for me to get behind digital technology. There isn’t a perspective where I care about it or respect it even a little. Nobody needs a fucking smart fridge! It’s all just excuses to increase our exposure to advertising and mine our data. Frankly somebody needs to put these fuckers in their place. If anything, I think Rogers should pay us to suffer the burdens of phone ownership, though if the Blues Jays sign Bo Bichette and Kyle Tucker I could change my view on this.

Doug Ford Scandals: Skills Development Fund, the Family Dentist

02 Tuesday Dec 2025

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david piccini, doug ford, Doug Ford Corruption, Doug Ford's dentist, Dr John Maggirias, Jeff Halperin, skills development fund

Last week I wrote about Doug Ford’s Development Skills Fund scandal, mostly a brief outline. To quickly recap, Doug Ford’s $2.5-billion “Skills Development Fund” is ostensibly meant to help Ontario residents get and retain jobs by boosting their skills and training. Nobody denies that’s a good goal, not even partisan critics.

Except it’s gradually being revealed how many recipients were Doug Ford’s friends and donors, and whose applications were low enough to be disqualified, but were approved nonetheless by a hand-picked minister citing “minister authorization”, David Piccini. In October, Ontario’s Auditor General found that Ford’s political staff chose recipients in a way that wasn’t “transparent, fair, or accountable” more than half the time, concerning grants worth more than $750-million.

The latest scandal is a doozy: Ford’s family dentist received $2 million from the Skills Development Fund fund.

The relationship here is unusually close. A November 29 CP24 article noted that Ford’s dentist boasts of being the Ford’s dentist on his website. “We want you to feel as comfortable and relaxed as the Ford family has during their visits with us.”

While the wording didn’t mention Doug Ford by name, there are multiple direct connections between Doug and the primary dentist at the practice that received $2 million, Dr. John Maggirias:

The Conservative party posted a photo of Doug Ford and Dr. John together at an event in 2023
Dr. John donated just over $20,000 to Doug Ford and his candidates
CP24 reported that Dr. John posted photos of Rob Ford on his website (Note: it’s Dec 2, I can’t find any photos of Rob on the site)

Actually, to write this post, I clicked the link inside the CP24 article to find the dentist’s website itself, and noticed the sentence directly mentioning the Ford family had been removed, which was confirmed by Jon Woodward from CTV, the reporter who wrote the original article:

Here is how Dr. John’s website looked before media reports connected the dentist to Doug Ford, as per the Wayback Machine (which pulls up how websites used to look):

For himself, Doug Ford denies ever being there! He issued a firm denial. As of last Friday, November 29, the premier’s office didn’t say whether any of the Fords had been there. Doug said that he’d ask his family if they had, but he insisted his dentist is in Scarborough. On the opposite end of town. OK.

We have several direct connections between them, and explicit denials. Maybe they don’t know each other, maybe they do. Who can say?

Well, here is a video from a 2022 fundraiser of Doug Ford together with Dr. John, telling the audience, “I have a 1-800 number…my 1-800 number is, 1-800-CALL-DR-JOHN.”

It’s amazing how openly chummy the two were before $2 million in taxpayer money changed hands from Ford to Dr. John, and how, once this $2 million transfer was reported on, suddenly they don’t know each other.

Ford’s government has already had to refer a forensic audit about one of the companies he gave SDF money to over to the OPP, to see if a criminal investigation is warranted. He’s currently being invetigated criminally by the RCMP over the $8-billion Greenbelt scandal. Red flags abound, an MO has been clearly established, and the opposition smell blood, as they’re still calling for David Piccini to resign.

This is not the first Doug Ford friend, donor, or ally to receive millions from the Skills Development Fund, despite several of them submitting mediocre to poor applications. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence and it feels like this will get worse soon.

Doug Ford Caught Giving Your Money to Insiders

18 Tuesday Nov 2025

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david piccini, doug ford, Jeff Halperin, skills development fund

Doug Ford’s latest scandal is a doozy! Ford’s government has been caught red-handed giving millions away to unqualified personal friends and relatives of government ministers.

The Skills Development Fund, a pool of $2.5 billion, is ostensibly meant to support worker training in in-demand sectors. Ford is using this lots of this money as a slush fund, handing out millions to people only because they have personal connections to the party.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Companies submit applications for funding, then the government ranks these applications internally according to formalized criteria, and funding is doled out based on these scores, which the companies never see. The higher the ranking, the higher and likelier the funding. Not complicated.

Except the Toronto Star acquired the government’s own data they meant to keep secret, covering the first four months of the SDF, and the picture is ugly. 26 recipients who scored 50% or lower on their application received over $36 million. Any grant over $5-million needs to be personally signed off by the Labour Minister, David Piccini, who the NDP is pushing to get fired for his role in this. When a dubious application got funding, the reasoning provided was “minister rationale,” so in their mind, Piccini owns this.

Sometimes the applications weren’t even submitted with detailed plans or budgets, but Ford’s government still approved their funding requests anyway. Let’s look at some of the dodgiest applications to get a sense of why this seems like pure, outright corruption scandal:

The church that married a Doug Ford cabinet minister received more than $2.8 million from the government, including two SDF grants.

The gurdwara that endorsed Ford in the election received $950,000. Three high-ranking members of the gurdwara supported a PC fundraiser months before the election.

Postmedia, the parent company of the National Post and Toronto Sun owned by a US-hedge fund, received over $1 million, supposedly to train staff in Artificial Intelligence

A Brampton e-scooter company, Scooty, whose application received a failing grade of 42, also received $1 million to teach 100 workers about the “transformative impact of AI in fintech.” Scooty hired David DiPaul, a former Ford staffer, as a lobbyist to “identify and assist Scooty in navigating various grant and funding opportunities that may be available for a growing Ontario business.” Sure enough, even though ministry staff said the company has “no prior experience,” a budget that “needs to be reexamined,” and that their application has “more risks than strengths,” the government still approved the funding.

The Carpenters’ Council of Ontario supported Doug Ford last election, and they received $14 million though their proposal score was only 52%.

The International Union of Operating Engineers also openly supported Doug Ford last election, and they received about $7.5 million, though their score was 43. The union denies there was any quid pro quo, and said they received the funding before endorsing Ford.

Ontario’s auditor general has called this process “troubling,” noting that as many as 64 projects ranked low or medium that the government chose to fund had hired lobbyists, creating the appearance of “real or preferential treatment.” No kidding.

Ontario used to leave impartial civil servants to allocate this funding, not a hand-picked MPP who has “minister’s rationale” authority. This very much creates the impression of a system where Ford’s government is giving money to friends and relatives and those with inside connections. It’s the same MO as the greenbelt scandal and Ontario Place.

The SDF scandal started weeks ago after a couple of high-profile incidents. One Ford-connected lobbyist for Keel Digital Solutions, which has received SDF funding twice, had a very expensive wedding in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe attended by Labour Minister David Piccini, the same duo pictured together sitting front row at a 2023 Leaf game (Willy Nylander scored a beauty in OT to help the Buds win 6-5 over Florida).

Doug Ford’s Skills Development Fund Giveaway and ‘Minister’s Rationale’

Doug Ford’s latest scandal is a doozy! Ford’s government has been caught red-handed giving millions away to unqualified personal friends and relatives of government ministers.

The Skills Development Fund, a pool of $2.5 billion, is ostensibly meant to support worker training in in-demand sectors. It appears that Ford is using this lots of this money as a slush fund, handing millions out to people only because they have personal connections to the party.

Except the Toronto Star acquired the government’s own data they meant to keep secret, covering the first four months of the SDF, and the picture described here is ugly. 26 recipients who scored 50% or lower on their application received over $36 million. Any grant over $5-million needs to be personally signed off by the Labour Minister, David Piccini, who the NDP is pushing to get fired for his role in this. When a dubious application got funding, the reasoning provided was “minister rationale,” so in their mind, Piccini owns this.

Sometimes the applications weren’t even submitted with detailed plans or budgets, but Ford’s government approved their funding requests anyway. Let’s look at some of the dodgiest applications to get a sense of why this seems like pure, outright corruption scandal.

The church that married a Doug Ford cabinet minister received more than $2.8 million from the government, including two SDF grants.

The gurdwara that endorsed Ford in the election received $950,000. Three high-ranking members of the gurdwara supported a PC fundraiser months before the election.

Postmedia, the parent company of the National Post and Toronto Sun owned by a US-hedge fund, received over $1 million to train staff in AI.

A Brampton e-scooter company, Scooty, whose application received a failing grade of 42 also received $1 million to teach 100 workers about the “transformative impact of AI in fintech.” Scooty hired David DiPaul, a former Ford staffer, as a lobbyist to “identify and assist Scooty in navigating various grant and funding opportunities that may be available for a growing Ontario business.” Sure enough, even though ministry staff said the company has “no prior experience,” a budget that “needs to be reexamined,” and said their application has “more risks than strengths,” the government approved the funding.

The Carpenters’ Council of Ontario supported Doug Ford last election, and they received $14 million though their proposal score was only 52%.

The International Union of Operating Engineers also openly supported Doug Ford last election, and they received about $7.5 million, though their score was 43. The union denies there was any quid pro quo, and they say they received the funding before endorsing Ford.

Ontario used to leave it to impartial civil servants to allocate this funding, not a hand-picked MPP who has “minister’s rationale” authority. This very much creates the impression of a system where Ford’s government is giving money to friends and relatives and those with inside connections. It’s the same MO as the greenbelt scandal and Ontario Place.

This started weeks ago after a couple of high-profile incidents. One Ford-connected lobbyist for Keel Digital Solutions, which has received SDF funding twice, had a very expensive wedding in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe David Piccini attended, the same duo pictured together sitting front row at a 2023 Leaf game (Willy Nylander scored a beauty in OT to help the Buds win 6-5 over Florida).

The NDP is adamant that they believe in the idea of the program, which is meant to help retrain, retain, and generally help businesses grow. The NDP have called Piccini a “dark cloud hanging over the Doug Ford government.” True, but Doug Ford is the weather system. I’m not sure why they’d target Piccini, not Ford, especially considering that Piccini’s predecessor Monte McNaughton also doled out millions in Skills Development Funds to dubious people close to him, including his wife’s colleague, before ducking out of politics.

David Piccini isn’t the mastermind behind this.

Even this Skills Development Funds scandal comes amid the wake of another possibly larger scandal. Doug Ford’s office referred a forensic audit to the OPP over concerns that a company, Keel Digital Solutions, received millions in public dollars from more than one ministry.

The OPP Anti-Rackets Branch is assessing it now to determine whether a criminal investigation is warranted. Note, the OPP recused itself from the ongoing criminal investigation into Doug Ford’s handling of the Greenbelt scandal, passing it onto the RCMP instead.

Doug Ford has been caught giving government money to weak applicants with inside connections. That’s not in dispute. Whether Ford can outrun these scandals, and whether these scandals are actually crimes, are the only things left to determine.

David Piccini isn’t the mastermind behind this.