West London Singh

Sikhiseeker's message (above) is confusing. It's neither here nor there. After reading it 2 or 3 times I still can't figure out if he or she says it's ok or not. Brother, I know exactly how you feel. I haven't been to the banquet hall wedding party of anyone in over 10 years. I always go to the gurdwara marriage. I never go to the parties afterwards. What would I gain from doing so ? Spiritually speaking it is soul destroying, and I'm not even Amritdhari so I can't believe how any amritdhari can feel comfortable in such places. How can their light shine in such a place? Just by being there he brings shame to himself and other Sikhs and so it is truly destructive on every level. We cannot serve two masters. But even leaving spirituality out of it for the moment it is morally corrosive from an ethical and social point of view. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend we just don't know. We know the debt / suicide rate in Punjab is epidemic. We know most of this comes from the lavish wedding parties and marrying off your children. We know they in Punjab look to us in the west to set the trends and by default set the right example. We know if we set the right example they will follow suit. Instead we carry on spending these obscene amounts of money of parties in banquet halls even though we know full well people will kill themselves as a result of it in Punjab, families will be ruined through debt because of it in Punjab, social problems will worsen because of it in Punjab. Set the right example. Go to the marriage in the Gurdwara. Then go home.

No. It is racist. The majority of crime, like everywhere else, is committed by the disenfranchised. America would do better to address that institutionalised racism rather than see guns as an anwser to any social problem. So these 'blacks' ,who's killings and deaths you dismiss, are they some sort of sub-human animals not on a par with human beings ? Are they so unimportant as humans that their deaths en-masse come second to your 'rights' to access automatic machine guns ? The 'fact' is that there are more black 16 year old males in jail in America than there are in college. Thats a truly damning statement that should, in theory, be enough to end this discussion. But of course it won't. It won't because of thinking like this:..... Americans, with their limited knowledge and understanding of the world at large, are intellectualy stuck in the year 1776. You base your assumption on America being a great democracy on the basis that you don't have a monarch with despotic powers. What you fail to realise is that no other western democracy has had one either for many hundreds of years now. In terms of democracy then, it can be best summed up with the 'fact' that no other nation in the history of the world has imprisoned a greater proportion of it's citizens than the United States of America. Not Stalin's USSR, not China, not Iran, not even Pol Pot's Cambodia. This dubious honour falls to America and shows it's self-label as a 'free' country as a complete sham. It is your own government that is oppressive and it is them that are impregnating you with misguided notions of how guns are safeguarding your freedom. Yes. A Sikh. A Sikh stands for sarbat da bhalla. The welfare of all existence. He does not put his own desires first and disregard the damage being done to others simply because most of the 'others' have black skin. Sikhi is organised compassion. There is honour in the shastar. The Sikh, when he masters Shastar vidya and gatka, masters defence first and foremost. The Sikh, when he masters the sword, the chakar etc, defends with ease and lets the opponent wear himself out to the point of ineffectiveness. There is honour in this art of warfare. There is no honour in pointing a gun and pulling the trigger. It takes no warrior to do that. It is something that little old ladies, little kids and mental patients can do. There is nothing 'Sikh' about the gun.

Thats not correct. The New Testament follows the Old Testament in many positive tales about fermenting the grapes and drinking an alcoholic beverage. Neither the Christian nor Jewish faith encourage alcoholism but both positively mention alcohol as a positive thing, a blessing even, in moderation. Having said that, the Christianity is just a religion the Nazerines (a sect of Judaism) invented centuries after the death of the pious Jew Jesus, when Jews were being expelled from jeruselum. To save themsleves....to be allowed to stay in their homes, they said "Hey....we're not Jews.....we're the followers of the prophet Jesus....let us stay". If I had shameful origins like that I too would drink plenty. Its the only way to forget how I begat.

You Americans have 3rd world levels of gun crime / murders. No other first world country comes even close to having even a small proportion of that amount of murders with guns. If thats a gun success story to you than we obviously have different notions as to the inpterpretation of good and bad.

Even when clever, articulate, stable and worldly people have access to guns it is a dangerous thing. Americans having open access to guns then, is a disaster waiting to happen.

Of course the amusement park was wrong and I hope the Singh family achieve a positive result. Having said that though, I do think the family as whole have a bit of growing up to do. My eldest is 10 and is adamant that he is now too old to wear a patka and wants to wear a dastar at all times, especially to school. I don't know what he'd make of the grown men in the picture above dressed like 5 year olds.

I do wish the person that started this thread would realise his grammatical error, go back, press the edit button and change the 'admits' to 'claims'. Every single person with the surname Bedi I have ever met in my entire life claims to be the descendant of Guru Nanak Dev ji. Logic says only a few of them can be right.

Another good reason why the Sikhs need to seperate themselves from India. India loves using English words but doesn't understand the actual English definitions. And sometimes, of course, it has such a low understanding of the laws of English grammar it even uses nonsensical words such as 'Britisher'. No, Amritdhari Sikhs need to stop describing themselves as 'vegetarian' because they are clearly not. Idealy, they should recognise the extreme cruelty of the dairy industry and be vegan but if not, we need to come up with a new word that describes our dietary needs. At the moment we make ourselves look silly and amateurish if we don't even have a word for it. And clearly the right word is not vegetarian.

'Loan words' from where ? Punjabi is 900 years older than Hindi and Urdu is a brand new language........Both those languages have taken words from Punjabi, not the other way round. But if you want to consider every word Punjabi has taken from Persian etc as a 'loan word' and discard it as such you're gonna be left with practically nothing as even the word 'Punjabi' is, by your definition, a 'loan word'. I come from an uneducated rural family. There were no 'educated Punjabis' among my lot and they all knew that the punjabi word for bathroom is gusulkhanna. No they didn't. They were Punjabis who spoke Punjabi so they called it by it's Punjabi name : gusulkhanna. Its just like some working class white english folks living in a council estate will often refer to the toilet as the bog or crapper. That doesn't mean they don't know what the correct English word for it is. No they didn't. You've been reading too many Kushwant Singh books romantcising the nihangs. You've read somewhere about a few nihangs using words like that and you've arbitrarily associated the word with every Sikh that existed at that time. Thats very silly.

My friend, Punjabi has far more to do with Islam and Muslims that you will ever know. I'll give you just one example to set you on a self-voyage of discovery: Question) What is OUR Punjabi word for bathroom ? Answer) Gusulkhanna Question) What does OUR punjabi word 'gusulkhanna' mean ? Answer) Well, 'khanna' obviously means compartment or room so the real question is what does 'gusul' mean. Well now, 'gusul' is the word that the prophet Mohammed gave and is from the Islamic Koran. He ordered that all Muslims must perform gusul before reading namaz. That is to say, they must perform a ritual whereby certain parts of the body have water sprinkled on them, for example water thrown over the left shoulder 3 times. So.....OUR own beloved Punjabi word for bathroom means ' preparing to read the muslim prayer'. Now that, is just one example I've given you. There's a million more showing how much our Punjabi culture, language, architecture is extremely heavily influenced by Islam. Just have a look at the design and layout etc of a typical Punjab village. Looks absolutely nothing like a village in any other state in India but is identical to villlages in Iran and Afghanistan.

Don't forget, Amritdharis are NOT vegetarians. For example vegetarians, by definition, eat fish, thus many products that have a 'vegetarian' label on them are not actually suitable for Amritdharis. Amritdharis are somewhere between vegetarians and vegans.

Thats exactly what it is my friend: An 'Opinion'. And opinions themselves are formed from what we see and hear. Previously, having visited a freshie relative there living in a house full of malwais majhails it is natural I should have formed that opinion. As I stated in the previous message however, having listened to the many broadcasts from Italy on the Sikh Channel this last year or so, most of the sangat there appear to be speaking in the Doaba dialect. A man asked a question and I chose not to ignore him and attempted to answer it. Simple as that. Unless and untill I embark on a detailed survey of them, individualy questioning all 150,000 of them, all we can have is an opinion.

Not really. It depends how you look at things. If your basis of how much Sikhi there is in the proportion of men with kes then yes, you could argue that Sikhi is not strong there. However, if you look at it from the point of view that the other regions have so many men with with dastars on their heads and yet indulge in besharm behaviour such as smoking, drinking and drugs etc then one could argue that Sikhi is stronger in doaba in that there is quality over quantity. Thats actually the total opposite of how doaba always has, and continues to, look at the other regions. Looking at the present though, doaba is practically the only region in Punjab that hasn't got epidemic rates of drug addiction. If you were to visit all 3 regions today the first thing you notice in the rural areas is how far behind malwa and majha are in terms of development. In the doaba villages you will be hard pressed to find any old house still standing. In terms of money coming in from overseas they have had a 100 year head start compared to malwa and majha. It's diaspora have ensured 50 or 60 years of extremely high land prices, given it's perennial seller's market. This is something malwa has only seen in recent times given it's recent diaspora in Canada and the staggering rise of Ludhiana as an economic powerhouse. The UK is overwhelmingly doaba, the malwais don't even get a look in here they are so small in numbers. Basically, if you look at all the old established communities such as the UK ,Yuba City in California and New Zealand etc, the character has always been overwhelingly doaba, especially when you consider how much of the East African Sikhs were also originally from doaba. The Malwai diaspora has been a very recent phenonema in comparison. Italy, right now, has about 150,000 Sikhs. Having heard them often on the Sikh Channel my guess would be that most of them are from Doaba as that is the dialect you most hear from their mouths.

No I'm not saying the Sikh owned shops ARE using animal rennet, I'm merely hoping that when they source their ingredients from a supplier they are taking into account ethical and moral concerns rather than purely monetary concerns.

This will answer some of your questions KharkuSingh, and it seems chains such as Pizza Hut, Dominos and Papa Johns at least use only vegetable rennet : http://www.vrg.org/vrgnews/2007aug.htm#pizzahut It's ironic, but as the big chains have moved towards a more humane approach by using vegetable rennet, we Sikhs are far more likely to be eating animal rennet mozzarella if we buy our pizza from Sikh owned pizza shops. And that is because the ingredient buying motivation of the small business owner is geared far more towards getting the cheapest product rather than ethical concerns. In your part of the world, where there is such a massive supply and demand for mozzarella, that cheaper one is very likely to be the traditional animal rennet.

Pizza is made with Mozzarella cheese. Mozzarella is made using an enzyme called rennet, and traditionaly that is the lining of an animal's stomach. Whether or not the pizza you eat has that meat rennet depends largely, these days, on whether you live in the UK or Canada / America. In north America, if you eat a pizza made from any of the large pizza chains, or even a frozen pizza, there's still a good chance the mozzarella will have been made using animal rennet. In the UK however, it is actually extremely rare for meat rennet to be used so the mozzarella will more likely be made from vegetable rennet, thus totally suitable for all Sikhs.

What we need to do is encourage the 'Sikh themed film industry' to break away from the Bollywood model. Stop making everything, including serious issues, into musicals and start recording dialogue on location rather than in a studio later on which gives all movies from the sub-continent the sound experience of a very cheap dubbing of a very cheap 1970's European flick.

This is the upside down topsy turvy world which is India. Getting 'backward class' status is like winning the lottery. Get it, and your son and daughter is guaranteed a job. Get it, and your son and daughter is guaranteed a university place. Get it, and your son and daughter only needs to attain a lower grade in order to get a pass in exams. Without it, the status quo was that unemployment among jatts, including their graduates, was close to 90%. The urban classes who own the private businesses in Punjab don't give jobs to the jatts because they only give jobs among their own groups and the government civil service jobs were reserved for the backward classes. That, and that only, is why many jatts were agitating to get the 'status'. When you live in a corrupt, backward system, the only way to function is in corrupt backward ways.

Not so much Iranian nationalism per se Mehtab Singh, more events leading up to the Iranian revolution. Most importantly how vital it is to have the intelligentsia on board. In pre-revolution Iran, with the Shah cracking down harshly on practising Islam, it was people like writers and academics who, although not at all religious, disliked the way that they were not allowed to be religious even if they wanted to........which they didn't. With them on board the poor masses couldn't fail. Back in the 1980's we Sikhs had the intellegensia on board. At the forefront of the Sikh movement were not uneducated types, but graduates with masters and phd's...i.e the All India Sikh Students Federation. That needs to be a priority of ours as even recent revolutions and uprisings in places such as Egypt, Tunisia etc have shown how popular uprisings will only work with them on board. There are of course some stark differences between Punjabis and Iranians. The Iranian people in general, and their academics in partcular, have always been very emotional people stirred by poetry and the arts. For such people, it is easy to think about what is going on and empathise with the suffering of others. We Sikhs, and Punjabis in general, seriously lack such a class of people. With us, its all about money. Our elite are not those that can wax lyrical about Nietsche and Descartes, but simply rich fools. Until we address that, our movement continues to look, from the outside looking in, full of uneducated types.

And so farewell, Kushwant Singh. You are gone. But your legacy remains. The Indians see us as stupid. Silly. And thick. And its all thanks to you. With the 'Santa Banta' Singh characters you created. The Indians loved you. The Sikhs were indifferent. Wonder why that is? You were always one of them. Never one of us. For one that says he loved drinking whisky whilst listening to gurbani. Me thinks your'e having your comeuppance now.

Given the current demographics of Punjab freedom under the notion of a 'Khalistan' is extremely difficult if not impossible to imagine. Freedom will come but it will come in the form of a collective Punjabi pride. We can look to the example of the Iranian revolution : Back in those days Iran was considered the France of the east. The vast majority of women walked around in mini-skirts etc and very few had any religious feelings whatsoever. What united the religious and the non-religious however was knowledge of their proud history of having spent thousands and thousands of years without ever being ruled and controlled by a foreign power. When they saw how their corrupt Shah was giving control of their natural resources of oil etc to British and American companies it awakened something in all Iranians...rich and poor, religious and non-religious. It united all Iranians. This is the same thing that we need to awaken in all Punjabis. We need to re-ignite that spark. Punjabis need to feel that same sort of anger each time they see Bollywood raping their culture.....Each time they see Bollywood ridiculing their proud history etc. It is no co-incidence that most 'Khalistanis' in the UK are moneh and they are mostly motivated by intense Punjab pride. That is what we need to tap into if we are to be free. The Punjab national pride is already there for the taking but we just haven't utilised it effectively.

Winds of change my friend. Every 50 to 60 years around the world a wind of change blows. The wind is blowing and India is stupid if it thinks it can ignore it, for it is an unstoppable wind. Lets talk about Scotland for one moment, and remember, India - although it likes to call itself a 'democracy' - arrests, imprisons and tortures under achaic sedition laws anyone that even dares mention a separate homeland. In Scotland some people - not all, just some - articulated a desire to break up the UK and become an independant country. Now compare the UK response to the India response. See how a country needs to have democratic values before it can be termed a democracy. The UK government response was to engage the separatists in debate and also provide the separatists with free TV airtime during elections so that the debate can be held on an equal footing. After debate, the UK government have announced that a referendum will be held in Scotland this year asking all Scottish people this simple question : 'Do you wish to have your own independant country?'. The UK government wish them to say 'no' but have stated they will respect the wishes of the people. If the people vote 'yes' than the government is prepared to break up the UK and let the Scots go their own way. Now these, are the values of a democracy. Once Scotland goes, the Catalans around Barcelona will soon break away from Spain, the Basques in northern Spain and southern France will follow suit, Belgium will then cease to exist as the government in Paris is already in negotiation with the french speaking half of Belgium about incorporating it into France, and Quebec will follow too. That kind of wind is unstopable. A free Punjab is coming whether or not the Indians like it. It is for this reason we western Sikhs should concentrate on not only educating but also winning the hearts and minds of the Sikhs in Punjab. They have lost their way but its not their fault. They have not been allowed to know anything about the truth. Thats our job to teach them and show them. Enough of arguing with India. You can't reason with unreasonable people. Lets concentrate on getting our own people ready for the wind of change.

No I'm not going to do that GPS. We, all of us together, have been down this route before here. Its just a very simple process of doing simple google searches and reading the vast literature on the matter. You can quite easily do that yourself. That is correct. Partition is full of anomalies like that. For example, in Jalndhar district, in the villages around Moa Sahib Gurdwara, where Sri Guru Arjan Dev ji was married, there still exist today a cluster of muslim villages that were left unharmed by the Sikhs despite hundreds of thousands of muslims being wiped out in the district as a whole. The reason for that is because when Guru Arjan Dev ji got married there he was given such a warm loving welcome by the local muslims there he described them as his own "beloved muslims" and subsequently a mosque sits within the compounds of the historic Gurdwara there. Sikhs never forgot that and let them be whilst madness prevailed in '47. By the same token, its worth remembering how 99% of Pakistan's Sikhs live not in Punjab but in the tribal north west frontier pathan areas. The reason for that is because as per the pathan code of conduct: Pakhtoonwali, the pathans were duty bound to consider the Sikhs in their villages as 'hamsara' and so duty bound to protect them with their lives from neighbouring pathans. This is of course the strangest anomaly because it was the same pathans that raided the plains of Punjab and did most of the killing of Sikhs in Lyallpur etc. No I haven't Proactive. Why would I ? That would not only be obsessive but a waste of my valuable time and resources. Yes there has. Pretty much everyone agrees that more than double the amount of muslims were killed than Sikhs. We talked about anomalies above and the city of Amritsar articulated this wonderfully. Read the history of the city brother. Despite being our holy city it was always, right up until 1947, an overwhelmingly Muslim city. An anomaly because it's sister city Lahore was far more Sikh and Hindu in character. You see, as sister cities the two cities served each other's needs. Amritsar served as the industrial base for Lahore. So, whilst the Sikhs and Hindus owned the businesses in Amritsar they actually lived in Lahore and commuted the short distance each day. In contrast, it was the Muslims who formed the backbone of the Amritsar workforce of those businesses. Thus, Amritsar was very very Muslim in character and make-up. As I stated before, I will not entertain any notion of us being the biggest sufferers simlpy because we lost most land, homes and businesses. The day we start to value material possessions over human life is the day we, as a people, de-humanize ourselves. That is not the nature / psyche I want my kids to grow up with.

Well I am 'well-read' but I actually see that as a hindrance these days rather than something good. There was a time when a man like Coleridge was celebrated for being extrordinarily clever after reading every book available in the entire world but we live in today extraordinarily stupid times. We live in a world where the average published book is written either by dunces like Madonna and Jordan or those with the literary prose of a 10 year old...e.g Dan Brown of da vinci code fame. Thus, in this day and age, this upside down world we live in, a man who is extremely well read and does as Coleridge did, i.e reads every book in the world, will actually end up being far stupider than the man that reads no book at all. So...leaving my meaningless and negative 'well-read' claim aside, when you take every single report, every single document, every single book, every single thesis on the matter of partition and add it to the oral history passed down from the elders in the Sikh dominated areas such as Jalandhar district and Ludhiana district I'm not sure how you can dispute the extremely high muslim death rate. You can, however, because you want to. And we both know why you want to.

I'm not sure why you're using Hindi words to Punjabi speaking Sikhs, but there is no such word as 'gotra' in the Punjabi language. In Punjabi we have a word called 'gorth', perhaps thats what you mean ? Well you might be, and judging by your penchant for using Hindi words you probably are but... we're certainly not. We belong to a place called Punjab. It spent thousands of years being the easternmost province of Persia, totally seperate to the nation to its south called India and only became part of 'India' in 1947 after the Sikhs were lied to and hoodwinked into joining it after false promises of autonomous freedom.