Remember when you were a kid and everybody asked you what you would be when you were a grown person? It was also the same thing when your teacher asked you that question when you were at school. To me it was one of the worst questions I ever had to answer. I remember being in my small kindergarten called “La Belle Aventure” just behind the mosque in Beau-Bassin and being surrounded by kids already seemingly aware of what they wanted to be.

There was a simple explanation to all this. I spent the first years of my life in a small village completely cut from the outside world. The only white people I knew were tourists seen going through the village. I even ended asking a white kid at the kindergarten “to enn touriss toi?”. It was inconceivable for me that there could be a “White Mauritian”!

Other things were inconceivable in my small brain. How could only one human being make a thing like a plane fly? Actually I wouldn’t even have known what a “pilot” was. The word was a discovery for me when kids said that they wanted to be pilots. The same went for doctors or firemen. The worse for me was to hear some of them wanting to become policemen. My deep belief as a kid was that a policeman would put anybody in jail had that person had the slightest cheek of looking at him in the face! How the hell could someone want to become such a person?

The tragedy for me was that I knew nothing but the sugar cane, peanut and tomato fields my grandparents worked in. Everybody had all those great jobs lying there in front of them, at least I believed, and I didn’t even know what they were. Incidentally I burst out crying because I thought that you HAD to have a dream job as a kid! Well this is what the adults made you believe.

At the end of the day I’m still wondering if all those kids knowing what they wanted to become have done those jobs. I think that many must have succeeded in their quests for their dream jobs but how many have shifted, how many have abandoned? In my case, things are different. I did not have a dream job because I’m interested in a too many things. I think that I just needed to experience all types of jobs and gather the experience to find and carve myself a job to my measure.

To tell you the truth, I do have dream jobs now but I don’t think that I’ll ever get into them because of the specificity of my current job which I simply love. Those dream jobs are: high end restaurant cook and wine maker.

The Mauritian education system has evolved a long time ago but I’m from that generation that was torn between the traditions that the parents were trying to keep under control, and our lives ny the way, and a more modern world with huge western influence. Depending on how “cool” your parents were you were either the “Beverly Hills 90210″ fan or just the nerd round the corner who could only watch “Samachar”.

Reading was an IMPOSED activity. I remember that when I was in standard 5 and 6, no kid in my class had the right to play, not even run, during the recess to keep us in under constant working pressure. Well, you could be a rebel like Johnny Depp in “21 Jump street” but corporal punishment allowed the teachers to easily stop you from dreaming of becoming a hero. We were 9-11 year old race horses and the major part would leave the competition grounds quite quickly in the years to come. You had to be a successful race horse.

We had to read. You had to read. They had to read. English books being a preference. We still talked English like Italian shepherd dogs but still had to read loads of books. If I recall, we had those two books in French and English where we started learning to read: “Rémi et Marie” & “Robin & Rita”. By the age of 5 you were already reading your first book.

Looking back, I was not the type of kid prepared for any reading spree. I was living my wonderful villager kid’s life in the North of Mauritius. But one thing, one sole thing changed everything. It was not the forced reading at school, it was the compensation for absent parents when they left and moved into the city. Like many Mauritian families, the parents worked from dawn till dusk. Along with that they’ve always been pretty traditionalist, so forget about being open-minded and all that.

My parents had as much confidence in me as they would have in a man-eating tiger and always thought that I would be up to some sort of mischief. And it got worse when holidays came by, this somehow explains why I hate holidays. To cope with the burden of having me at home, my father had his secret weapon. His work’s library! This made most of my “collez” holidays were the most bitterly anticipated moments of my life. My father’s workplace had a huge library which turned out to become my prison for weeks.

What could I do? I had the choice between going there or having a good thrashing and then going there. No wonder I chose the first option. I did go there dragging my feet. In the end you try to kill time before it kills you and just start reading what falls in your hands. I made friends with the librarian and after some time I would ask for specific books and authors that got on his orders. I got to read all the books “new”, then other people’s kids would have them. I was like a one person recommendation board for teenage books. At the age of 13 I read my first Terry Pratchett book which would bring me to Tolkien, Herbert and a lot of other precious fantasy authors while discovering Anne of the Green Gables, the Rougon-Macquart series and Sir Conan Doyle.

As years went past, I was granted access to the most interesting section of the library for a 16 year old testosterone-filled and high on hormones teenager… the Gerard de Villiers and adult erotic section. There I simply carried on reading those SAS (Son Altesse Sérénissime) books which were a mix between James Bond, Dan Brown (had he written at that time) and, well I have no other reference to erotic literature, but some pretty agile person who would transform primal sensations into words. When thinking about it I read those mainly for adventure as the erotic parts were only 0.05% of the books.

These teenage days actually have an impact on our adult life. When my wife and I moved to our new city some 4 months ago, I was amazed by the number of book filled boxes we had. I sold nearly my comics and manga collections over the past 3 years but still had loads of books around. This is where you find out that you just carry on reading all the time.

I really don’t know about the other people of my generation but having books around and reading is just natural now and we don’t even buy them just to say “I’m reading books”. If you want to have an idea of my recent reading these are the books I read over the past month: Terry Pratchett’s (UK) Unseen Academicals, Natacha Appanah’s (Mauritius) Blue Bay Palace and I’m halfway through Ananda Devi’s (Mauritius) Le Sari Vert, along with a long term run of Guthrie Govan’s (UK) Creative Guitar Techniques.

Funny how some people despise Mauritians living abroad. For most of those despising the “foreigners”, the first thing is a sense either of jealousy or inferiority. But I can’t blame them for obvious reasons! When I was a kid I had uncles and cousins coming from the UK or France. We Mauritian children had to make the effort of speaking English or French, they would never get as low as start talking Creole. I recall my grandma trying to understand my cousin who could speak Creole but never did with her.

At the same time, they would tell me how great their life was abroad and, dude, let’s face it, that cousin was younger or the same age as me and he had already got on a plane. Everybody seemed just to bustle around those people coming from abroad and practically abusing of the Mauritian sense of hospitality. There was always a something to do around them since the minute they got up. The “foreigners” got eggs every morning at breakfast. I was entitled one that I ate sitting on my grandad’s lap every Sunday. Everyone somehow wanted to bask in that faint light shining around the Mauritians from abroad. For us kids, “langleter” was an El-Dorado, every plane we saw flying was going “There”, where life was great and changed you so that people just had stars shining in their eyes when they look at you when you came back.

And here we were, kids, looking up to them. We were trying to imagine their wonderful life there in Europe while we here, in the small village of Cottage went to sleep on a mattress on the floor in our little corrugated iron house. We shared the mattress in three, some cousin or my brother, my Dadi (grandma) and I. The “foreigners” chose, on their part, to go and sleep at the only relative in the group (we being an extended family) who had a real “lacaze blok”.

The best food was made for them when they came. We never had that kind of food really. People came to fetch their presents relatives gave the “foreigners” to bring to Mauritius. The whole day was a huge bustle. They were entertained and excursions were organised by the family to get a taxi to take them to the seaside, to interesting places and to enjoy their holidays. We kids spent our holidays either sitting around at home or helping Dada (grandad) in the garden or “caro pistass”.

It was fun to have them here though. Why? Because everybody was so interested in them that they left us, kids, alone. We could do what we liked since no one was paying attention. We could hang around the adults and listen to some forbidden, not usually understood but seemingly very interesting conversations till late at night. We could fish the cherries out of the “fruit au jus” without anyone noticing and we could drink all the “jus” out of it as at least 3 cans of this highly esteemed dessert had been opened.

However, some things were terribly wrong. When I grew into a teenager I started understanding the conversations. There were arranged and nearly forced marriages when the relatives got back to Mauritius. There was back biting. There was a lot of “we foreigners are better that you ‘ti kaliter’ Mauritians having stayed here in your crappy village and going to watch your football matches seated on benches in the overcrowded village hall”. There was a lot of “we have 2 cars”, “we live in a big house in London or Paris”, “we make big money”. All in all, it was the confrontation of the “better” Mauritian to the local Mauritian.

This made me understand that somehow, the Mauritian hospitality was such that you would always be welcomed like a prince, but that the ego was a thing that messed people’s minds. Ego even killed your relationships with your own family. The fact of leaving the country and living abroad made the past generations think that they had climbed up the social ladder such that even relatives should be considered as inferior. I don’t know if this still prevails. Too bad for me, I never also expected to leave the country and finally end up living abroad. For me it was supposed to be a 1 year to 4 year trip but things never turn out as expected.

Living far from Mauritius has strengthened my bond to that small piece of land. It has sealed my belonging to the Mauritian nation as a whole, where there is no difference between races and religion for me. Mine, rasson, briyani, ti-puri… tell me which Mauritian has never eaten at least one of those while each can represent a part of the Mauritian multi-culture. Years spent abroad teach you that in racism there is no communalism, its not because you’re of Chinese origin nor of “grand nation or ti nation” (it took me 22 years to understand this b*llsh*t) or even a bit fairer that you will have better treatment, you’re just a foreign tit. Say what you will but the persecution of the Creoles during slavery is part of my history as much as the coming of indentured labourers to work the sugar cane fields is part of the history of any other Mauritian.

This, dear reader, is what makes me speak only Creole when I’m with Mauritians or when I get back to Mauritius even if it means, true story back in 2001, being served last in a shop because all the other people present spoke French. Even in my family, relatives say “to encore conne coze Creole?”. How can you forget a language you’ve spoken all your life? This is the Mauritian in me.

Many a web designer out there hold blogs telling you how they made the move and stepped off the web design agency hook to go full freelance. These experiences are great and offer you an overview of the alternate career you could be leading if you’re in the web design industry.

My experience is rather different. I started out in a web agency but later on turned towards a bigger company where things didn’t work out well. In the end I got into the “Web Mastering” (ooow, so old-skool) job. It actually consists of leading a large enterprise into the Web world by offering solutions for their websites and working on their online reputation. I must say that the experience is really different from any other.

First things first, the persons working with you might not have a single clue of what the web is. For some of them “Google is the Web”. For others web trafic is a complete alien word (well, you can’t expect everybody to know that we record their tracks) and for some web design is merely the copying and pasting of a paper pamphlet online (… and we’re in France).

The second thing is that most of the time such companies really require your services, so its a real pleasure to work with these people. Some might have pre-conceived ideas all the more but most are open minded and are ready to win the conversion rate battle.

Mind you these things might not be the simplest situation of all. Some people think that nothing is good if its not their brainchild. This usually ends up in the person wanting to drive the project completely oblivious of web design concepts, conversion rules and search marketing. This is where you have to take out your positive criticism cape and try to change things. It might somewhat turn really sour for one in this situation.

All in all the experience that I’m now living is proving to be really different from any other I have encountered in my professional life. I’ll keep you posted on this new experience