TORONTO, CANADA, March 29, 2007: Driven by the desire to customize funerals for their communities, a new wave of funeral directors catering to all ethnic backgrounds, including Indian, is entering the business of death in Toronto. “There’s an untapped niche I think that they can fill,” said Jeff Caldwell, who directs the two-year funeral service education program at Humber College. Applications to the funeral service program have doubled in the past few years, says Caldwell, in part because of the popularity of the U.S. TV series Six Feet Under, which chronicled the life of a family in the funeral home business. But a growing number of students are entering the field out of a desire to help their own communities. At present, about five per cent of those in Humber’s program are ethnic students but Caldwell says it’s growing.
One such student is Johti Johal, who is Indian. She’s doing her college practicum at Benisasia, a funeral home in Mississauga, west of Toronto, that caters to South Asian clientele. “In our Sikh and Hindu community, we don’t have another funeral home that caters toward our needs,” says Johal. She prepares for a Sikh funeral by laying intricate dark blue prayer mats on the floor, placing flowers and testing their music. “[Other funeral homes] wouldn’t have blankets on the floor for you, they wouldn’t have shoe racks to take your shoes off, they wouldn’t have head ties to cover your head,” she says. Those little details add up to big business for such specialized funeral homes. Benisasia has seen the number of funerals performed there quadruple in the past five years to 400 in 2006. That is not going unnoticed at Humber College, where Caldwell is educating his students to be more open-minded when dealing with all religions. “What we are trying to teach is when a request comes in, do everything you can to be able to satisfy that request, and certainly ask questions: ‘Why is this done?’ so I can remember it for next time and do it without being asked a second time,” said Caldwell.