[LCM Articles] [BIOGRAPHY] Claude Comair, Chairman of Nintendo & DigiPen

[Loai Naamani]

Hey all,

Just thought I’d share with you a very interesting biography I came across during the LCM’s background research for a Technology
Development in Lebanon conference being planned for next year.

It chronicles the early life struggle of Claude Comair as he fled the Civil War to France as a hesitant biology student, then
returned to Lebanon to be an architect, then off again to Japan for a degree in computer simulation, moved unwillingly to Canada
with his wife to start a family and business... and is currently in Washington as Founder and Chairman of Nintendo Software
Technologies, of DigiPen, and of DigiPen Institute of Technologies, the first academic institution of its kind devoted to video
gaming education and attracting 30,000 applicants a year (w/o advertising at all)!

It’s in the form of an interview, and touches on many different themes: the age-old VISA struggle, living the ‘American Dream’, the
value of education and research, the engineer-turned-entrepreneur metamorphosis, and more... The full text is available here:
http://www.n-sider.com/articleview.php?articleid=306 – I’ve selected various snippets below (new references to Lebanon are formatted
as such for those solely interested in that):


Q: Now, could you please begin by stating your name, your job title and where you're currently working? 

Claude Comair: My name is Claude Comair and my job title at Digipen is founder and chairman of the board. And my title at Nintendo
Software Technology is cofounder and chairman of the board. 

Q: OK. Now, before we talk about that, we need to go back and talk about some background questions. So, can you tell me, please,
about where you were born? 

Comair: I was born in Lebanon - in a village in the northern part of Lebanon called Tanor Dieng. And I grew up in Lebanon until the
age of, I believe, eighteen, around that time. Then I decided that I should do my medical studies in Lyon, in France. I stayed there
for a couple of years; then decided that the situation in Lebanon was beginning to be intolerable for me to bear the news that I was
receiving on a daily basis. I did not know what my family was doing, what was happening to my family back home. So, I finally
decided to go back to Lebanon to check what was happening. And in 1977, I visited and decided to remain in Lebanon as long as I felt
I would be needed and to be beside my family and my loved ones, and to forget about the education that I started in biology and
medical field, basically. I went one day with a young woman, a friend of mine, a dear childhood friend of mine. She was going to the
university over there to register for her interior design [degree program].

Q: In the university there?

Comair: 

In Beirut. In a city near Beirut, called Junie. And the university was called University of the Holy Ghost, the University of the
Saint Spirit, depending on how you translate it from French. And I was visiting with her and I was in the hallway waiting for her to
finish her application. And at that time I wasn't allowed to be inside the university if I wasn't a student, for security reasons.
So it's a Catholic university, and this priest came forward to me and all of a sudden asked me, "What are you doing here?" And I got
startled, and I lied. I said, "I'm here to register." And he said to me, "Well, the competition for entrance - or the entrance exam,
if you would like - for the engineering [program] will start in a few minutes. You'd better be in place before we open the brown
envelopes that contain the exams."

And he actually went into the class telling me that I can finish my registration later, that I should be in the exam on time. So, he
took me to the teacher who is looking after the exam, proctoring it, and asked the teacher to escort me back to the end of the exam,
to the administration to finalize my application. Well, I went in pretending, you know, that I would be taking these exams. I sat
down, and I got the exam paper. I don't know what took me. It was the entrance exam for architecture. I did it, and I was chosen
[for admission].

I remained in Junie, Lebanon, where I studied until 1983. I finished my first degree there, in architecture. And during that time I
fell in love with visuals. The world of architecture was so foreign to what I was accustomed to. You know, my father is a medical
doctor; my uncle is a medical doctor. I was supposed to be a medical doctor, but it didn't happen this way. And for the first year
of my life at the university, I was in a conflict with my family because they thought that I was a crazy person by doing so many
years in one direction, [and then making a radical change]. All of a sudden, first of all, I came back to a country that was at war.
Second, I totally changed my profession and went in a direction where none had - where no preparation for me in the family has been
done, you see.

At that time, you would do what your father told you to do. And for that matter, I was a very good kid. I wanted to do medical
sciences for them, but eventually I realized that I liked architecture so much more. And I stayed, and I excelled in it. I graduated
from a very hard and tough and rigorous program. And I loved it and enjoyed it. And I wanted to be an architect. That's the only
thing I wanted to be. In the middle of my education, I fell in love with electronics and I started spending every single penny that
I made on assembling kit computers. You know, at that time there was no way that you could officially do computer science, to go to
school, and so forth.

So, I would play with whatever motherboard I could find. I could add things to them, and so on. And by 1979 I wrote a program, which
I called "The U." And that program was a three-dimensional visualization program. It would take the 3-D data of an object, in 3-D
space, and through a series of projections, I was able to do a two-tier presentation of that object on the screen.

At the beginning, I just had numbers. I did not have the possibility to have a graphic screen. And I would verify the positions of
the digits, the dots, the imaginary dots in the imaginary matrix of the memory of the computer. And I would remember many times,
sitting hours on end, filling a kilometric paper to see whether my calculations were correct or not.

One of my teachers at that time who was Japanese looked at my work and he recommended that I should go and talk to the Japanese
ambassador and show him my work. [He said] that he would actually introduce me at the embassy. Which I finally did, following his
insistent attitude. The ambassador sponsored me to go to Japan after my education would finish in 1983. To go to Japan to follow
further education and for the research, totally paid by the Japanese government in the field of visualization and image recognition
and simulation of events.

In a city, for example, if you would have to plan what would happen after an earthquake, in terms of disaster, in terms of efforts
of relief, and so on. And I joined the team in Japan of Professor Suoshi Sesada, who was world-famous for his research in the field
of visualization.

And I was very thankful to the government because they were paying for every single desire that I had. All they needed was just for
me to think and to do my research. And I did that for four years. I met my wife over there, Michelle. We got married and she is
Chinese ethnically, but a Canadian citizen. So, she's a Canadian-Asian woman, a Chinese woman that went to Japan, and we fell in
love. We got married. After a while, she decided that we should to back to Canada.

I was doing a fairly good living in Japan and I was very worried about Canada. This new adventure in my life that would be 
 if you
would say my first migration was going to France; coming back to Lebanon; staying a few years there; then going to Japan was my
second start in life. Then going on to Canada.

It was not something that I was looking forward to, to tell you the truth. As an anecdote, when we went to acquire a visa for me to
get, as a Lebanese, we had to go to the embassy, to the Canadian consulate in Tokyo.

So, I went with my wife and the consul was a lady. And she explained to me that I cannot get a visa to go to Canada from an
application presented in Tokyo. Being a Lebanese, I had to go to Syria to do it, a neighboring country to Lebanon, because the
embassy in Lebanon had closed. So I would have to travel to Syria.

I was very hesitant, being a Christian - at that time the Christian community - it [in Lebanon] was at odds with the Syrian
government. And I simply stated that it would be totally impossible for me to even think of going to Syria to do that. It was simply
not possible.

And I turned to my wife and I said, "Well, Michelle. That solves all our problems. We're staying in Japan." And hearing my comment,
the consul decided all of a sudden that she would give me a visa to go. Of course, that didn't make my day. I was upset, internally.
Happy in front of my wife, but internally I was upset that, again, my life was going to be more nomadic than stable.

So, a few months later we packed and I quit my job, gave my resignation and left Japan. The guys of the lab that I worked with were
very nice. They sent friends from Japan to Vancouver, British Columbia, to help me later on get set up.

But first when we arrived, I didn't know what to do. Prior to coming to Canada, prior to departure, I went to the library and
borrowed several hours of videotapes about [Canadian] advertisements. You know, clips of ads, and so on. And I started watching
them. I was very intrigued to know about the population. Where am I going to land, you know? Canada is going to be a new thing for
me.

So, I got these tapes, about six hours or so. I sat down and I watched them, over and over. And as I was watching, I became more and
more happy. In a sense, what transpired was that, since these ads were made for the population, that this population seemed kind of
nice, to begin with.

That's one thing that I realized. And the ads were naïve in another way, too. Those ads were very naïve in my eyes, anyway. You
know, you can imagine me, a very serious scientist, looking at a woman talking to a dish: "I can see myself in that dish after
washing it in a dishwasher with this liquid!" I felt very comfortable about coming to Canada, for some reason. I felt like I knew a
little bit about Canadians and North Americans, basically, prior to arrival. It's an innocent vision of mine, but that's what I did
[to get prepared]. So I arrived to Canada, and I wanted to work as an architect first. I soon found out that Canadians don't go to
architects to build. They just went to catalogs, found a home and bought it from somewhere, and somebody would come and put it up
for them. So, that's one thing.

The second thing I realized also, was that I didn't know what "Canadian" is. So, how can I build an entity for these people that
they can live in? How can I build a home for a Canadian family, when I have no idea how they live? So I soon realized that I have to
rely only on my computer science knowledge, as opposed to the architectural knowledge. Which at times, still surfaces in me. I will
be an architect forever. Whatever they do to me, I will remain an architect internally.

Q: In what year did you move to Canada?

Comair: 

I moved in 1988 to Canada. Yes, in 1988. So, we decided, my wife and I, to forget about architecture. Why don't we use the knowledge
that I had acquired in Japan? And meanwhile, in Japan, I got another degree. I got a master's of engineering, related to computer
visualization and computer simulation. So I decided that I am going to utilize this to make a living. And I decided to create a
company. I didn't want to go to work for anybody. I decided to create a company, a different company. We didn't know what to call
it; we thought of so many names, and Digipen was our last choice. It was the last choice on the list. And, obviously, all the names
that we liked, they either existed already, or we were unable them to use for one reason or another by the Canadian "naming company
rules," or whatever you call it. So DigiPen was the name. My wife hated it. I kept saying to myself, "Well, IBM is an ugly name,
too! What does it mean, 'International Business Machines'? It's nothing!" What made the name is what this company is going to do.

So, basically, it doesn't matter what we would call it now. But later, it would be glamorous and everybody will like it because it
will be doing something different than other people would do.

That was the first setup. I spent $25, all in all, [to get the company started]. And those were probably the best $25 I've ever
spent in my life. We started the company and I made up my mind - now I'm going to be a father, by the way. Michelle was pregnant.
And when I was young, I had a stable father. I used to go to the clinic and sit there. My father had an office with a table - it was
tangible.

And I wanted to be that kind of a father for my kids. They would come to visit me [in my office]. In my mind, you see? So I wanted
to create a company. I didn't want to go anywhere else to work. And my wife's family is pretty well off and established in Canada.
They have a wonderful accountant that came to me and he said, "Your father-in-law asked me to help you analyzing this situation." I
said, "Fine!" His name is Ron Walsh. He is a very good friend and helped me over the years, and until today he is still the
accounting firm that I use in Canada.

So Ron came to me and he said, "Claude, I like your ideas, but why don't we do a study of the market first?" I decided that a study
of the market is a good idea to start with. I am an engineer; I have nothing to do with business. And on top and above that, I've
been only involved in the academic world. So, I was totally foreign to everything that you may call "business," or being
"street-smart." I couldn't even read the books! At that time, I was unable to read a summary of yearend [expenses and revenues] -
you know, what's "income"!? I only understood that you shouldn't buy things that you don't have money for. That's basically more or
less the motto that I had in my mind, or the resolution.

And on top and above that, I always heard from my parents, "Never borrow money! The banks will foreclose you!" or something like
that. So, I said to myself, "I know nothing about the business. I'm starting a venture. This man wants me to do a study of the
market." I said, "Why not?" And we studied a little bit of the situation, and the bill for doing the study of the market was about
$100,000.

So, I said to myself, "No, no. This is illogical." And I don't have that type of money to start this company! Why don't we use the
$100,000 to start the company, too, and if it fails we would have studied the market at the same time! You know, we would be better
off! [laughter] So, I decided, "Forget the study of the market!" We set up in my house. We were utilizing at that time my in-laws'
home in Canada. My father-in-law was the ambassador to the Vatican at that time, so he wasn't there. So we used the house. I took
over the dining room; turned it into my office. And we started the business.

We registered the company DigiPen - an ugly name. And so be it. We will do great things! And I said to myself, "We will only hire
people that have a research project." Because like that at least they will be close to the academic world. I can understand them,
you see; I can understand what they are doing. And they can understand me a little bit.

So, it doesn't matter if the project made money at the beginning as long as it's a good idea and there is a drive and love behind
it, and passion. And that was a must! Every single employee that we hired in the first couple of years had a project, a crazy
project of some kind.

And we started. I put an ad in the newspapers for hiring personnel, and Mr. Chu, Jason Chu, was the first applicant out of 200
people. So I spent, maybe, my first month of business interviewing these people that lied to me, left and right. For an engineering
position, I had a skiing instructor apply, pretending to be an engineer.

So, I was flabbergasted by the innocence of Jason, Mr. Chu. And he was the only one who came to me and told me that he knew nothing
about the business. He told me he was a self-taught engineer and didn't know how to program. But he also said that he was willing to
learn and he doesn't deserve the salary that I was offering. He would settle for $1,125 a month, Canadian. I said, "Yes, come on
board!" So, the company was myself, who knew very well my job, that's true, plus a person who was a mechanical engineer who had
nothing to do with computer software.

And we started our business this way. And our first bill that we gave to a person was $12, plus a few cents. Another bill was $40,
and something. The first year, we decided that Vancouver was not computerized enough in the engineering offices, so I created a
system in Vancouver where DigiPen would negotiate on your behalf the purchase of the [computer] equipment. Every penny that we can
make for you as a saving, you have to spend it in our company to learn how to use [the hardware].

So, basically, we would go to some distributor to buy workstations for an engineering office. Let's say, the list price would be a
million dollars or half-amillion dollars. We would get a 30 percent or 40 percent discount, approximately.

That money in totality was given back, credited back to the buyer in terms of training [by our company]. We wanted to make sure that
people who were buying our solutions were very well trained. And we would install the new computer system at DigiPen, and bring the
employees of the company from all levels, including the directors and VPs and so forth, to be trained, and then sent back to their
companies. And then slowly, slowly bring the computers that they bought out of DigiPen back into their companies.

So at DigiPen we had several little companies. Our work became the work of every single company that we were trying to help. And
once the solution within DigiPen started being productive, with the manpower of the said company, we would pack it and move it to
that office. Like that, they did not lose the senior people. We introduced the computer into the engineering environment and
architectural environment in a very smooth way.

And we learned also slowly, slowly how to teach them. And first year we did a lot of business immediately. Friends came from Japan
to vouch for us in a meeting at the University of British Columbia. We received hundreds of companies attending the lectures that we
gave to see what is visualization, what is the state-of-the-art at that time of simulation, and so forth. And how they can introduce
it into their offices, and so forth.

And at the same time, a group from Japan came with a professor, Professor Sesada, to tell the people of Canada that "This man, Mr.
Comair, who is a foreign person to you, actually did write the software and the software is his authorship." And that it was all
right to basically give me a seal of approval. And immediately the name of the company and the quality of the company was actually
working, hand in hand. So, the name was growing and the quality was growing and slowly grew in a city that wasn't computerized. We
grew just to big size.

Q: Please talk about what the original business plan was for DigiPen.

Comair: Ah! Nothing! Just do business! [laughter] In the field that I know, my education was computer simulation and visualization.
So I really didn't have any business plan. 

Q: You had no targeted plans?

Comair: 

I had no targeted plans. Many kids are going to hear that, and they are going to think that this is the way to go about [starting a
business]. I'm sure there are much more sound and scientific ways to start the business, but I didn't. I didn't. I had absolutely no
idea what I would be doing and I still have no idea what we will be doing.

And people asked me one time, "What does DigiPen do or what will it do in the future?"

And I said, "It will do exactly what the people of DigiPen know to do." If someone knows how to paint, we will actually turn it into
DigiPen, and if they cook, we will turn it into DigiPen and we will be cooking. So I do not have [a clear business plan]. At this
point, as frightening as it is, the only issue that I keep at DigiPen and I said from the beginning, is that research would be these
crazy people and their crazy ideas. They have driven us into the craziest fields.

A few years back, we were already visualizing the most complicated engines, and hundreds of villas and homes have been already
completely visualized. One early client in the first early couple of years in Orange County [California] called me and he said, "If
you come down to Balboa Island, I'll make your travel worthwhile."

So I picked up a flight, went there, and met with the person who I don't want to name. I don't know if he likes to be named. And
immediately, in less than fifteen minutes I got



on a handshake fifty or sixty prototypes to visualize homes that they were building in a complex. And it happens that this person
went bankrupt and couldn't pay, so I ended up with these homes that I didn't know what to do with, all these databases.

And I didn't want to sell them as architectural plans. So what I did, I invented "virtual home renting." You would come to me if you
wanted to do an advertisement. For example, we did one for a gas company and hydro company - for B.C. Gas. They wanted homes where
we could show the pipes going through the walls and how they would look, for an ad. And I would actually rent you a home! I would
rent you a home that you could explode, blow up.

Q: A virtual home?

Comair: 

A virtual home! By the second 
 I would charge $1,000 a second. You know, a fifteen-second animation is $15,000. And it could be
cheap at that time because I had those things ready-made.

I created a fast way to do TV presentations. You know, like Movie of the Evening or Behind the News. At that time, TV stations would
not have the necessary hardware to do their own logos and their own whatnot. And, as a matter of fact, this is how I moved entirely
the company from the engineering to the art and entertainment industry.

This is another little story that may be of certain value to young people on how you can never tell what happens to you. I received
a phone call from a young producer at CKVU-13 by the name of Johnny Mitchell. And he tells me, "Mr. Comair, I heard about you. I
heard that you have the software and the hardware to create 3-D visuals and so forth." I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, my problem is
that we are changing the name of CKVU-13 to UTV, the letter "u", as in 
 a short for "you," as in "y-o-u" - "you." And it's going to
be UTV instead of CKVU-13."

And I knew how to create all sorts of animations for the backgrounds, the foregrounds, the movie of the evening, the weather
network. I said, "Wow! Wow! This is very good, but I have nobody to help you because we don't have an art director." Right? We don't
have anybody that has any artistic sense.

He said to me, "Well, I have nobody else but you. Everybody's telling me that it takes weeks and weeks and weeks to do a few seconds
of animation. And somebody told me that you can do twelve hours a year." I said, "Well, that's true." We had put together a system
that allowed us to create, in 1988, twelve hours of animation already in a year. Which is immense, really! While other companies
would charge you five to ten thousand dollars per second and it takes you six hours per second to make an image, sometimes. We did
thirty images per second; that's six hours an image; that times thirty, you know, how much that is per second. And we were there
developing hours and hours of animations a year.

So he came to me and he said, "Well, I need to meet you and I'll pay you whatever you want but I really would like this thing done."
I said, "Well, listen. The only person who is close to an artist here is myself. And I will sit down, we will hog a workstation.
I'll sit down with you. I'll try some things. If you like it, you may take it. If you don't like it, you don't have to be
obligated."

And it was a weekend. So, we sat down during this weekend, Johnny Mitchell and myself, doing logos; digitizing a logo; showing it to
him in real time; going up and down; exploding it; putting colors on it. Everything I've done this guy liked! Everything!

Not to say that it wasn't nice! [laughter] But everything! It was so nice and so easygoing!

And when we finished the job, I got paid for it immediately, which wasn't the case with engineers. An engineering company would
practically kill you before they paid a debt!

So the next day, I grouped the people of the company, on Monday. I remember very well that Monday; I will never forget it. And said
to them that every single engineer would finish their work, and then we'd pack and go to Hollywood.

I'm never going to work with engineers anymore, as an engineering company. We are moving into the entertainment industry - TV,
movies, video games. You name it, we'll do it. But no more, no more, these tough clients that we have. Extremely demanding. In a
situation of an engineer, if there is anything that goes wrong, they don't want it. They won't pay for it. Here we have a client
that if [we do our best work] 
wow! He's in awe in front of it! That's it! This is the future for us.

And, indeed, I moved the company at once and economically I did like a big, big car - whoosh! - I turned us towards Hollywood and we
moved here. And this is when I encountered Nintendo.

I wanted to do video games. I knew that in 1990 nobody came close to, at that time, what we had internally. It wasn't published
work. It wasn't work that you would hear about it in the university. These are proprietary software [programs] that we have done. We
really worked over them, and they were extremely efficient. So luck and providence moved in a way that I met the son of Mr.
Yamaguchi, the owner of Nintendo, who recommended me to talk to Nintendo.

I brought my work and the work of DigiPen. And, indeed, a few days later Mr. Arakawa, the president of Nintendo of America, gave me
a phone call. And we decided to meet. I came from Vancouver to Seattle, and then from Seattle to Redmond that morning. And the
meeting was scheduled to be about forty minutes. We stayed about six hours together, talking. And me, very young at that time.
Didn't realize how young I was.

Q: What year was this?

Comair: 

I didn't realize how young I was, and how crazy I was, in terms of, you know, telling Nintendo, "I recommend you to build a world, a
studio world, from which you get all your characters." And it would be the Disney World of video games, you know? And then we would
rent that world to other companies, and other channels, like TV channels or something. So they can actually have real time virtual
reality.

In a sense, all the games that you have are in this world. And, say, you put the pad on the ground in your room, and you start
jogging on it and on the TV you see yourself going into the world. You're running. And all of a sudden another person that logged
into the same world picks up a car and he's driving in the city pretending to be 
 it's a game about being a cabbie or a taxi
driver. And he's this crazy taxi driver going around, speeding up and so forth. And all of a sudden he hits you! You know, he kicks
you out of the game, right? Out of the world. Because you're dead, basically.

Meanwhile, another person, who every morning likes to try the flight simulation game, logs onto the same database and takes his
flight simulator. And he's looking down on this entire thing. Sees the taxi driver hitting you, right?

He won't see that tomorrow morning, because tomorrow morning you decide to actually play a little bit later, a fraction of a second
later. The cab driver misses you and you don't get killed. My multiplying this event by 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 users on the same
database, you achieve a near virtual-reality world. You achieve real virtual reality.

Virtual reality is not about the goggles. Many of us think that virtual reality is about some goggles and some gloves and people
standing in front of a monitor, which they can't see, in front of a keyboard, which they can't see. But they're waving the gloves in
the air; trying to capture things in the air and put them on top of each other. And they think that this is virtual reality.

That is not virtual reality. The gloves are nothing else but an input device. The goggles are nothing else but a TV screen. And what
makes it virtual reality is, in a gimmicky way, is just that it looks spatial; it looks cool; it looks out of this world. Then
people say, "Oh, this is the tools of virtual reality." But virtual reality, in truth, is actually the randomness. Try to get the
closest possible to the randomness that happens in our daily life. Today I said hello to my wife. I kissed her; took the time to
smile. I missed a deadly accident. And I didn't die, right?

That is reality. And in order to make a virtual reality, you have to have enough randomness of these events - right? - to actually
simulate or to tend towards reality. That is virtual reality.

So, I proposed this idea to Mr. Arakawa. At that time, the NES and the upcoming SNES, the new SNES that was on the market, which
was


... 

Q: Had you moved from British Columbia?

Comair: 

...

And I am not asking money for this kind of education. Instead, I would like people that paid the tuition to be investing directly
into the engineering fields, or engineering topics such as computer languages, such as mathematics. We have more than fourteen
[classes] in mathematics - fourteen times three credits of lectures. That's horrendous for an engineering degree, or, sorry, for a
computer science degree.

But I insisted, and I put my foot down and I said to them, "Well, listen. This is what they need to go to work, right? It's already
160 credits. I'm not going to make it 180 or 200 credits. It's not going to be possible!" And so we argued and argued, and I put my
foot down. And I said, "Well, is it going to be Washington or shall we go somewhere else to do it?"

Well, I won! [laughter] And we had a compromise - a sentence that we had to write on the curriculum that says this is a very
vertical education. Which we did. Which wasn't a lie.

...

Q: Why did you go to Washington in the first place? Why didn't you stay in British Columbia? 

Comair: 

...

And so Microsoft is a big software force in the region here. Nintendo is here. It's the best in world gaming at that time. And
today, I believe it is still. And you had other companies around as well, that were very big. But I believe that the area was
extremely rich in its industry that actually is catering to the software as opposed to hardware [markets]. And Sierra was here;
Electronic Arts has an office here. These are wonderful companies, and if you are going to create a school you must be amongst your
clients. My clients are the companies that will hire from my students. So I had a promise and I live to this day with this promise.
DigiPen never advertised. The 20,000 or 30,000 demands for applications this year that we receive is with no advertisement at all.

...

Q: Is it DigiPen curriculum?

Comair: 

...

So I believe that even though gaming that has been actually notorious in the past, synonymous of violence and synonymous of wasting
time, it is now the medium that the teachers are begging for. "Please introduce gaming into the education world."

And what was done last year. DigiPen, in an unprecedented move, took a lot of money, I'm not going to say how much [laughter], but a
lot of money and put it into a project which we call Project Fun.

...

Q: ...

In a sense, believe it or not, I consider myself the luckiest person on earth. Despite all the problems that I went through in life.
Like being born in a country that was torn by war. I had to actually leave my country. Got personally injured many times, severely.
Even went into a coma in my life. So lots of events happened to me as a person that made me tame and calmed me a lot. But if it
wasn't for my education; if it wasn't for my father always telling me, "Claude, we live in unstable times and the only thing you can
keep is what you keep in your head, because one day you are going to leave. One day we are out of here. We cannot remain where we
are." And he was right! I wasn't able to remain in Lebanon. I had to leave as a young man. I left without money. At times, to buy a
Coca-Cola drink, I needed to make serious planning for it. Like whether this month I can afford one drink or not.

And because of my education, because of my background, I can say to myself that I'm the true American dream - the guy who came with
nothing, and based on his education, made something out of his life. And now, thank God, I don't have to worry about my living. You
can imagine that in my position I make a decent living, which is correct. But I don't know how to sing; I don't know how to dance; I
am not a handsome fellow that can, based on my good looks, [make my living]. I don't have any talent, visible talent, that I could
actually go and utilize, other than my education.

And it's only through this education that actually I was able to make a good life for myself, for my kids, for my family, and for
hundreds of people that work in my company. You know, it's wonderful! It's absolutely a blessing, and I thank God every day that I
am alive that He gave my father the time to tell me those things. And I actually happened to have listened, somehow. [laughter] At
times, very reluctantly so, but with a bit of discipline, I listened. And today, I am what I've become.

I did not take a pill for success. I did not buy an elixir where overnight I became a successful man. It was through hard work and
through stubbornness and believing if you do a good work, you will get compensated for it.

So based on this, if there is anybody who will listen to this tape later on, I would say, you know, invest in your brain. Invest in
your knowledge and you will never go wrong. You will absolutely never go wrong.

Personally, the only stocks that I own of any company are the stocks of DigiPen. I don't have a penny in the stock market. All of my
investment is in my dream, my knowledge. That's who I am. My investment is in the people that work in the company. By teaching and
by sending them back to school, by forcing them to do research, right? Not by squeezing them to the last drop and then they don't
know what to do anymore, right?

So, education is very important. Education is a salvation. Education makes people nice. Educated people don't fight, don't get into
quarrels. Educated people don't get into anger sprees and break things around, you know? Educated people live happy.

And that's what I hope one day I can bring to my old country. Some education so they can 
 it's a very, very rich country in
education and in history. Unfortunately, it took the road of war and destruction several years ago, and now they need a lot of help.
They need a lot of attention to the young people, so those young people will grow educated and peaceful and they can live in peace
with their surroundings and their neighbors and love and those things because 
Well, I can't talk about this without having some
feelings.

Q: Do you want to go back to Lebanon?

Comair: 

Well, I do not want to go back to Lebanon as a person. It's not that I don't want to go back to Lebanon. My kids are born in Canada,
were born in Canada. And they're Canadians. I brought them up as Canadians. I did not bring them up as young Lebanese. They don't
speak the language. They do not know much about Lebanon, other than I come from there.

I am personally, but I have lived a life torn between my youth and where I grew up and what I like. I am here and I was there. You
know, I cannot go anywhere here or in Canada that I say to myself, "This is where I walked with my grandfather or with my grandma."

But I don't want them to have this life, you know? We made a choice in life; we came here. They are Canadians; they will be
Canadians. We moved to the United States. Now our company is here. Our life is here. And we intend to remain here, to grow old here.
And live with our friends that are my family now, and my colleagues. We've been working together for fifteen years, some of them. I
see them more than my own brothers. This is my family. This is my land now, and my dedication is towards here.

Now, eventually I would like to, as a person, help in Lebanon, of course. But I am not at this point interested in - well, let's say
that the Lebanon that I knew is no longer there. What is a country? It's people, not just geography. It's people. And the people are
not there. I grew up. I don't know where they are anymore. So, there is not really much [left there for me].

But what I would like to do 
I hurt when I see Lebanon in the news. I hurt by saying to myself, "Why is this place on earth cursed
so much?" I hurt because I believe that many young people will have to follow [my path]. You know, the migration path is a terrible
adventure that comes with every single expatriation, of leaving your country or your birthplace.

Maybe what I would like to do is educate over there. Maybe what I would like to do is start schools over there. What I would like to
do is to start a flame that would tell people that there is hope, there is something else than war. For that matter, I would like to
do it somewhere else as well. Anywhere that we can do it and help; anywhere where there are kids I would love to do something.
Lebanon is no different. Lebanon is no different.

And I am doing a lot for the education over there, I think. And I owe it to Lebanon for the first eighteen years of my life. In a
way, I have to help, and I will help. But I will only help in terms of enlightening people and educating people. I'm not an advocate
of spoiling a person to the point where they don't do anything anymore.

I would like them to work. I would like them to be prosperous. I would like them to be happy. And I would like to only see Lebanon
in the news for beautiful things, not here about bad things at all or terrible things that happen. And I believe in the past few
years they started to pull their act together and get out of this.

No, in all fairness I could say, in all honesty, that I lived outside Lebanon more than I lived in Lebanon. And, most importantly, I
lived my adulthood outside, which means I got to meet people at a different level of knowledge, at a different level of awakeness.
If I can use that word in English, I'm not sure. But I was more awake. I was a kid, you know. I wasn't even aware I was in Lebanon,
right? I was aware that I was in Lebanon at age fifteen, which at that time I didn't care much; I was a fifteen or fourteen year old
kid. Then, by age eighteen I left. So I just have vague memories of things. But the concrete memories are, when you get sick, you go
to the hospital. And half of the company comes and sits and help you through it. And half of the people that I never saw they were
there before me, they came, they sat down, they held my hand, they prayed for me. I then realize how important life here was for me.

That's basically what I can say about myself. Nothing more, you know?

...


[excerpts from http://www.n-sider.com/articleview.php?articleid=306]

 



Hope you enjoyed!
L.

___________________________________
Loai Naamani
PhD Candidate - Information Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

    Phone: +1 (617) 452 5380
    Email:  Loai at mit.edu
    URL:   www.Loai-Naamani.com <http://www.loai-naamani.com/> 

 
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