What’s your earliest memory?
Guyana, South America, early 1980s, walking around barefoot in the grass near mud roads. Grandma smiling at me while washing clothes on an old fashioned washboard for the neighbors, which was how she earned a living.
What were your grades like in school?
In grade school they were really bad, middle school was mediocre, and in high school, they were actually okay. In grade school, report card day was my personal nightmare. My mom would write back to the teacher “Asif will do better.” And I would say “nooo.” I needed glasses badly starting in grade 5, and each year my vision got worse. We couldn’t afford glasses so I did without them grade 5, 6, 7, 8, and half of grade 9 when my french teacher told me not to come back to his class without glasses.
If you could learn one random skill, what would you learn?
Guitar.
Do you think people are basically bad or basically good?
The Adam Lanza gene is in us all. Jesus is the only cure.
If you were Prime Minister, with almost unlimited political power, what changes would you make to Canada?
- Dissolve Youth Criminal Justice Act. Youth who commit murder, rape and equivalent would be tried as adults.
- Bring back the death penalty. It would be given to murderers and rapists regardless of age. Canada has a nasty habit of letting rapists go time after time, even though they keep re-offending. It’s one of the most mentally ill systems I’ve ever seen.
- Make it so that people who come to Canada have to conform to Canadian culture, not the other way around. Canada sometimes acts desperate, trying to please newcomers who have no love for the country. “Oh hello new immigrant, our national anthem offends you? Okay we’ll change it! It’s against your religion to follow our basic laws? We’ll change our laws! You want us to change our culture to reflect the culture of your old country, even though you left your old country because of how terrible it was? Okay we’ll do that asap.” This kind of thing has to stop!
Do you think any kind of afterlife exists?
There’s heaven, and there’s hell, both last for eternity, and you’re going to one of the two.
Is torture ever a good option? If no, why not? If yes, when?
No. I understand the seriousness of war and doing whatever you can to obtain information from a possible enemy, but torturing someone makes you just as bad as your enemy.
What do you think we could do to improve the education system?
By now you’ve all heard about the teacher in Canada who got fired for giving a student a zero mark on an assignment because the student didn’t do the assignment. The politically correct, tolerant-of-everything-that’s-bad crazies managed to hurt our education system and we simply need to take a few steps back to fix it.
- Teachers should have the power to give a zero grade to lazy students who don’t do the work, without fear of being sued by parents or being harassed online by students.
- Teachers should have the right to teach students real life lessons.
- Principals should be allowed to permanently expel violent or seriously disruptive students from the school in order to provide a better environment for serious students. Education is a great privilege!
We can’t accommodate everyone’s needs. People need to start accommodating the needs of the school and the greater good. The student is not above the teacher.
Would you ever sky dive or bungee jump?
No, I won’t even jump on my bed.
What do you think is one of the most undervalued professions / positions right now?
Good fathers and mothers are at an all time low in Canada.
What business advice can you give new entrepreneurs?
- Read at least 10 books about your chosen marketplace before you start.
- Gather up good advisers from the start (finance, legal, strategy).
- Have written plans and goals.
- Sell your products before you start to scale up, to prove you really have a market.
- Don’t scale up your business until after you’ve perfected your systems (customer service, technology, accounting). I’ve seen a lot of successful small businesses turn into failed big businesses.
- Hire slow, fire fast.
- If investing into someone else’s business, be cautious about putting your name on it! I learned this the hard way.
- You won’t succeed in a week, plan 10+ years with the first 5 as the hardest.
