A month back, while I was browsing through the net, I stumbled upon a URL. The more I dug deeper into the site, the more the grin on my face stretched. It was insauga.com – A perfect guide to exploring every tidbit of Mississauga. I showed it to my team and we were all on the same page… ‘We should interview the mind behind this hub for our next Candid Corner Session.’
After a bit of research, we found the man behind insauga.com – Khaled Iwamura and we finally reached his office to have a chinwag with him.
While sipping coffee, we started throwing crisp questions. We asked Khaled to define himself in three words and he pleasantly replied ‘Fun, Happy and Real.’ From his answer to our first question, we gathered that our session will be totally fun! We asked him about the reason behind building insauga.com. ‘The main thing is I love the city I live in, Mississauga. I thought there was a real gap to find something online about what’s going on and what to do in Mississauga so I thought to build the website and that is how I got to insauga.com.’ he answered. He was so calm and responsive to our questions that we, without taking any pause, jumped to our next question. ‘How do you spend your day?’ we asked. He pleasurably replied ‘My day is spent looking for creative new stories to cover, working on segments and guests for a new weekly TV show that insauga.com is doing, and maintaining and promoting insauga.com in the city and on social media.’ Tuning our conversation to the more casual frequency we tried finding his leisure interests ‘I am part of a Japanese drumming group called Yakudo. I have been performing with them for the past 15 years. As a group, we have traveled as far as Hong Kong and Cairo to do shows and the music has been featured in video games and commercials as well. Recently I have taken a bit of a break from performing and teaching the next generation of drummers. I teach kids from 4 to 7 years old the Japanese heritage of what we call Taiko drumming. I also love winter sports like hockey and snowboarding.’ he shared. He further told us about what he thinks is the best part of his work ‘The best part of insauga.com is I get to meet all the great people, places and events that make Mississauga so great. I love the fact that insauga.com has created a stage for Mississauga to show off what we are all about. It does not work to me at all.’
To a question about the definition of happiness, he smilingly answered ‘I’m not sure. I have never tried to define why I’m happy. I’m just a happy guy most of the time.’ While chatting about different things he told us that he doesn’t have any role model he looks up to. He takes bits and pieces of inspiration from successful people whether it is from the business world or the spiritual world. We tried to play a kind of rapid-fire with him and he came up with the answers so quickly. Here you go with some of the answers to know more about him…
- Holiday Spot – Hawaii
- Food – Hamburger (I am a hamburger connoisseur)
- Gadget – my Smartphone HTC One X
We asked Khaled what he thought he was going to be when he grew up. His humorous and quick answer made us all laugh; he said ‘I’m still not sure if I’m all grown up yet.’ At the end of the session, he shared his learning from work-life and that is; ‘Anything that is worthwhile, takes a while.’ We exchanged smiles, nodded our heads in anticipation, and said goodbye.
Life can be spent in any way but it’s good if it is Fun, Happy, and Real!
Written By: Unosha