George Wallace said:
It interesting trying to find out who this guy really is. A great way to kill time on the Internet on a rainy afternoon. ;D
It is finally sunny here. ;D
My litle contribution:On a sadder note, this will be my last issue as the Editor of SITREP, as I will be moving to the International Institute for
Strategic Studies as a Research Associate in January of 2006. I would first like to thank Col MacDonald and Professor Ram for their critical"
http://www.acq.osd.mil/ncbdp/nm/docs/Featured%20Articles/sitrep_november_2005.pdf
Next the "American Military University" is the military version of those match box covers(http://www.amu.apus.edu/Academics/Faculty/index.htm
). His bio there is at http://www.amu.apus.edu/Academics/Faculty/faculty-details.htm?facultyID=237. They also list him as having his MA from Guelph and he is an "adjunct professor" His bio also lists his published article's, very short and narrow. But he does do at excellent job at fluffing.
Edit to add:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/atguelph/02-05-08/people.html
U of G graduate student Sunil Ram recalls the spring afternoon eight years ago when his life "flipped upside down." Living just outside Regina at the time, he'd been downtown with a business associate at the office where he and several other ex-army buddies had been running a small consulting company since the late 1980s.
Ram and his friend emerged from the office that afternoon to confront a group of youths high on alcohol or drugs, armed with two-by-fours and, as Ram puts it, "looking for trouble." Ex-soldiers or not, he and his friend were outnumbered. After knocking out Ram's colleague, the assailants managed to break Ram's arm before he was able to lock a chokehold on one of the youths. "My soldier mode had kicked in. I wasn't even trying to be fair." Only half-lucid, having been clubbed repeatedly on the head, upper back and hands, he decided to play dead.
Ram remembers getting up and helping to revive his friend, then staggering into a nearby pub before being rushed to the hospital. "The police figured if they'd hit me one more time, I would have died."
The lingering effects were both physical and mental. Ram couldn't use his hands, and his upper body was immobilized for a time. Even today, after the two years he spent in physical rehabilitation, he has trouble with fine motor tasks. (A collection of thousands of miniature soldiers and army equipment that he began collecting as a war games hobbyist at age 10 has been in storage ever since he was injured).
Today, Ram draws a straight line from that fateful spring day in Regina and a classic case of "being in the wrong place at the wrong time" to his recently completed master's program in public policy and public administration - supervised by Prof. Richard Phidd.
It was the attack that led to Ram's return to university, initially in Regina, then at Guelph. "I never thought I'd be where I am," he says. "The assault changed my life completely."
Before the attack, Ram and his colleagues - all former electronics and communications specialists with the Armed Forces - provided services ranging from resolution of international border disputes to strategic and technical advice to Saudi Arabia from the 1991 Gulf War to the mid-1990s.
Regina was home turf for Ram, who had grown up in Oxford and Regina before joining the Canadian military at age 17. Initially joining in the ranks, by the time he left the service in his early 30s, he was an officer. Among his duties, he had worked on classified projects during the Cold War.
Despite its all-consuming importance then, he says all that hush-hush work seems passé now, something that was underlined for Ram a few years ago when he visited his old squadron, where his former top-secret bunker was being decommissioned. "The world has changed. A lot of what I knew is not so important."
If it seems archaic to him today, he can only imagine how his experiences during the past two decades must have struck some of the undergraduates encountering him as their teaching assistant during his past two years at Guelph.
"People are surprised to learn I'm 40," says the youthful-looking, soft-spoken mature student.
He remembers the skeptical faces during a get-acquainted session for his fellow graduate students in political science when he began his master's degree in 2000. When it came to his turn during the obligatory round of introductions, he tried to skim over his career path. But how do you soft-pedal a nearly 20-year army career, award-winning work in international peacekeeping, an adjunct teaching post at the American Military University - not to mention an ongoing stint as a military adviser to the Saudi royal family?
Right, the Saudi royal family. Even Ram and his colleagues thought they were being strung along when someone called in the late 1980s claiming to represent the Saudis. The call turned out to be a legitimate response to an advertisement the company had placed through the Department of Foreign Affairs.
"The Saudis invited us to the kingdom to discuss business," says Ram, who still serves as a consultant to the Middle Eastern nation. In fact, he had been slated to visit Saudi Arabia shortly after he was assaulted, but that visit never occurred. Instead, he received a call from a senior Saudi officer to offer him a couple of bodyguards. He laughs as he recalls trying to make his caller understand that "it would be hard to explain why two armed Bedouins were following me in downtown Regina."
Recalling the reaction his abridged CV caused among his fellow graduate students at Guelph, Ram says: "You could just see everyone looking at me and thinking, 'What a big jerk.'" Several of his undergraduate students later checked for his name on the Internet just to verify his claims.
One question a few fellow students might have left unasked was how this ex-army officer and international peacekeeping expert ended up studying political science at Guelph.
Having lost his business following the assault, Ram had paid off his debts but had lost everything else. "I had gone from jetting around Saudi Arabia to not being able to afford gas for my vehicle."
He already held a double major in history and anthropology, earned part time while in the army. And before the assault, he had been working part time on a political science degree. University of Regina political science professor Shreesh Juyal convinced him to resume his studies, initially just a course at a time and then as a full-time honours student. He completed that degree in 1997.
While at Regina, Ram took part in a model United Nations program with Juyal, which included a four-day international conference in Los Angeles. Ram's peacekeeping studies and activities saw him chosen as one of 30 Canadians, including Juyal, to receive a UN Global Citizen Award in 1995.
Ram had taken peacekeeping courses through the UN Institute for Training and Research. Dissatisfied with a particular course on the early 1990s conflict in the former Yugoslavia, he wrote his own updated version of a course, drawing on his military history background and his knowledge of the conflict from peacekeepers who had served there.
Along with Juyal, he now teaches that undergraduate offering as one of 13 correspondence courses offered by the institute. He also teaches peacekeeping to American armed forces as an adjunct professor of military history at American Military University, a distance-education university based in Manassas Park, Virginia.
It was his work there that prompted him to enrol in graduate school two years ago. Although he'd been earning acclaim as a peacekeeping expert, he saw little chance for promotion without a graduate degree.
By this time living in Mississauga with his wife, Aditi, he applied to several universities within commuting distance and landed a scholarship at Guelph. "I like the campus. It reminded me very much of the smaller universities I was used to," he says.
While studying aspects of civil and military co-operation in peacekeeping operations, he has concentrated on writing, both for his course work and for newspapers and journals. That work has served a dual purpose, one going back to the 1994 assault and a lingering mental impairment.
Explaining that his mental acuity is about 90 to 95 per cent compared with what it was, he says: "I write all the time. If I don't write, my reading and writing skills degrade."
Besides its therapeutic benefits, writing allows him to share his ideas and knowledge on current affairs. Within hours of the terrorist attacks in the United States Sept. 11, Ram was on the phone and in television studios providing comment and analysis for the media. He's lost count of the number of commentary pieces he's written, including articles for the Globe and Mail, on various issues, including the attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. His most recent Globe commentary, on the deaths of the Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, appeared in the April 30 issue.
Shortly after the attacks, Ram received yet another call from his Saudi contact to ask whether he'd fly to the Middle East to help gauge the extent of Saudi involvement among Al-Qaeda forces. The notion that he would turn them down to continue his studies at Guelph prompted some incredulity on the other end of the line. But Ram stood his ground.
"I had already made the commitment. I told the Saudis I wasn't going to be available for any real work for a couple of years."
With the completion of his master's degree this spring, Ram now finds himself with more spare time than he'd expected. He had applied to three nearby universities for a doctorate - he was interested in studying the altered security environment since Sept. 11 - but recently learned that all three had turned him down. Instead, he may look for full-time work or at least seek out contract work while reapplying for doctoral studies.
Not being accepted for a PhD program was upsetting, he says, but "after 1994, nothing is a big issue for me."
When Ram thinks about the assault and his road back to recovery, he acknowledges that he might have been tempted to give up. He's been asked at least once whether he resents his attackers.
His response? "What's to resent? I could sit here and cry about what these people did to me. At the end of the day, those individuals will live and die, and history will forget them."
By contrast, "I've made a contribution to world peace through the promotion of peacekeeping in what little way I can. Those actions have prompted the national media to get hold of me and ask what my opinion is. There's a little piece of me in the public record."