dalsingh101

Simple. We need a proper ground level, conscious movement within our people that sweeps away all the old baggage, bull5hite like a tidal wave. The first and foremost thing we have to do as individuals is make sure we aren't dumb by constantly educating ourselves - not only about our religious heritage but by also learning from other successful movements like the civil rights one in the US. Learn about those religions that spread themselves successfully (yes even Islam! All of their expansion is not due to the sword believe it or not!). Our actions (towards each other at the very least) should be guided by deeply felt egalitarian principles instead closet agendas. We grow strong by uplifting ,strengthening and empowering the weak amongst us instead of oppressing them or being indifferent. We have to put a high value on each other. We have to value high character over dogmatic practice. We have to consciously and rigorously destroy the social structures and hierarchies that keep us pinned down into small minded penduness regardless of our older generations investments into these structures. We have to master the grand political game, health issues, parenting, war. We need people capable of handling themselves on the street as much as we need doctors and lawyers. We have to stop burying our heads to issues we face. We have to accept fair criticism without getting defensive. We have to become more open WITHOUT becoming dumb, naive victims of our own generosity. We have to get seriously streetwise. We have to raise literacy in English AND Panjabi. We have to develop our art, literature and media to be worldclass. We have to think in terms of economy too, and develop a robust strong global Sikh economy. We have to stretch ourselves as much as we can and avoid and isolate those backwards people who just keep bringing the same, tired, old bukwaas arguments/ideas in the mix.

^^ From what I've seen tarkhans don't have any inferiority complex of juts, they just don't trust them. And seeing as you've been brave and honest enough to admit to prolonged jut nonsense going on in the panth, they appear to have good reason for this suspicion and cynicism by your own admissions. Juts are highly egocentric and easily manipulable along these lines as the Brits found out and used to full effect. Plus you again completely ignore the main point about people not seeing things or wanting to prioritise things like juts might. The most important point in all this (in my opinion) is that we have to address those who REALLY suffer the most from casteism within Sikhs, something juts are reluctant to do because they are the main (although not sole) culprits in this. This isn't about juts or tarkhans, because both of them are quite 'privileged' groups and none concedes to the superiority of the other. What we need to do is address the people who REALLY suffer from the caste bull5hite we have going on in our panth - those who have been traditionally oppressed for centuries, before and after they have become Sikhs. Turning this into some competition between privileged groups is a joke - you need face up to the fact that so called dalits and lower castes are the real victims of this evil and address (and rectify) that inconvenient truth.

Very interesting and scary article I read from The guardian. Please share your thoughts. The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal The doctors prescribing the drugs don't know they don't do what they're meant to. Nor do their patients. The manufacturers know full well, but they're not telling.Drugs are tested by their manufacturers, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that exaggerate the benefits. Reboxetine is a drug I have prescribed. Other drugs had done nothing for my patient, so we wanted to try something new. I'd read the trial data before I wrote the prescription, and found only well-designed, fair tests, with overwhelmingly positive results. Reboxetine was better than a placebo, and as good as any other antidepressant in head-to-head comparisons. It's approved for use by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (the MHRA), which governs all drugs in the UK. Millions of doses are prescribed every year, around the world. Reboxetine was clearly a safe and effective treatment. The patient and I discussed the evidence briefly, and agreed it was the right treatment to try next. I signed a prescription. Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients by Ben Goldacre But we had both been misled. In October 2010, a group of researchers was finally able to bring together all the data that had ever been collected on reboxetine, both from trials that were published and from those that had never appeared in academic papers. When all this trial data was put together, it produced a shocking picture. Seven trials had been conducted comparing reboxetine against a placebo. Only one, conducted in 254 patients, had a neat, positive result, and that one was published in an academic journal, for doctors and researchers to read. But six more trials were conducted, in almost 10 times as many patients. All of them showed that reboxetine was no better than a dummy sugar pill. None of these trials was published. I had no idea they existed. It got worse. The trials comparing reboxetine against other drugs showed exactly the same picture: three small studies, 507 patients in total, showed that reboxetine was just as good as any other drug. They were all published. But 1,657 patients' worth of data was left unpublished, and this unpublished data showed that patients on reboxetine did worse than those on other drugs. If all this wasn't bad enough, there was also the side-effects data. The drug looked fine in the trials that appeared in the academic literature; but when we saw the unpublished studies, it turned out that patients were more likely to have side-effects, more likely to drop out of taking the drug and more likely to withdraw from the trial because of side-effects, if they were taking reboxetine rather than one of its competitors. I did everything a doctor is supposed to do. I read all the papers, I critically appraised them, I understood them, I discussed them with the patient and we made a decision together, based on the evidence. In the published data, reboxetine was a safe and effective drug. In reality, it was no better than a sugar pill and, worse, it does more harm than good. As a doctor, I did something that, on the balance of all the evidence, harmed my patient, simply because unflattering data was left unpublished. Nobody broke any law in that situation, reboxetine is still on the market and the system that allowed all this to happen is still in play, for all drugs, in all countries in the world. Negative data goes missing, for all treatments, in all areas of science. The regulators and professional bodies we would reasonably expect to stamp out such practices have failed us. These problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they're too complex to capture in a soundbite. This is why they've gone unfixed by politicians, at least to some extent; but it's also why it takes detail to explain. The people you should have been able to trust to fix these problems have failed you, and because you have to understand a problem properly in order to fix it, there are some things you need to know. Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their 40 years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works ad hoc, from sales reps, colleagues and journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are, too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it's not in anyone's financial interest to conduct any trials at all. Now, on to the details. In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug – antidepressants, ulcer drugs and so on – then measured two key features: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found more than 500 trials in total: 85% of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50% of the government-funded trials were. In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefits of a statin. These cholesterol-lowering drugs reduce your risk of having a heart attack and are prescribed in very large quantities. This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. They found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favouring the test drug. These are frightening results, but they come from individual studies. So let's consider systematic reviews into this area. In 2003, two were published. They took all the studies ever published that looked at whether industry funding is associated with pro-industry results, and both found that industry-funded trials were, overall, about four times more likely to report positive results. A further review in 2007 looked at the new studies in the intervening four years: it found 20 more pieces of work, and all but two showed that industry-sponsored trials were more likely to report flattering results. It turns out that this pattern persists even when you move away from published academic papers and look instead at trial reports from academic conferences. James Fries and Eswar Krishnan, at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, studied all the research abstracts presented at the 2001 American College of Rheumatology meetings which reported any kind of trial and acknowledged industry sponsorship, in order to find out what proportion had results that favoured the sponsor's drug. In general, the results section of an academic paper is extensive: the raw numbers are given for each outcome, and for each possible causal factor, but not just as raw figures. The "ranges" are given, subgroups are explored, statistical tests conducted, and each detail is described in table form, and in shorter narrative form in the text. This lengthy process is usually spread over several pages. In Fries and Krishnan (2004), this level of detail was unnecessary. The results section is a single, simple and – I like to imagine – fairly passive-aggressive sentence: "The results from every randomised controlled trial (45 out of 45) favoured the drug of the sponsor." How does this happen? How do industry-sponsored trials almost always manage to get a positive result? Sometimes trials are flawed by design. You can compare your new drug with something you know to be rubbish – an existing drug at an inadequate dose, perhaps, or a placebo sugar pill that does almost nothing. You can choose your patients very carefully, so they are more likely to get better on your treatment. You can peek at the results halfway through, and stop your trial early if they look good. But after all these methodological quirks comes one very simple insult to the integrity of the data. Sometimes, drug companies conduct lots of trials, and when they see that the results are unflattering, they simply fail to publish them. Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? No one can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or has the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it's dangerous? No one can tell. This is a bizarre situation to arise in medicine, a discipline in which everything is supposed to be based on evidence. And this data is withheld from everyone in medicine, from top to bottom. Nice, for example, is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, created by the British government to conduct careful, unbiased summaries of all the evidence on new treatments. It is unable either to identify or to access data on a drug's effectiveness that's been withheld by researchers or companies: Nice has no more legal right to that data than you or I do, even though it is making decisions about effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness, on behalf of the NHS, for millions of people. In any sensible world, when researchers are conducting trials on a new tablet for a drug company, for example, we'd expect universal contracts, making it clear that all researchers are obliged to publish their results, and that industry sponsors – which have a huge interest in positive results – must have no control over the data. But, despite everything we know about industry-funded research being systematically biased, this does not happen. In fact, the opposite is true: it is entirely normal for researchers and academics conducting industry-funded trials to sign contracts subjecting them to gagging clauses that forbid them to publish, discuss or analyse data from their trials without the permission of the funder. This is such a secretive and shameful situation that even trying to document it in public can be a fraught business. In 2006, a paper was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama), one of the biggest medical journals in the world, describing how common it was for researchers doing industry-funded trials to have these kinds of constraints placed on their right to publish the results. The study was conducted by the Nordic Cochrane Centre and it looked at all the trials given approval to go ahead in Copenhagen and Frederiksberg. (If you're wondering why these two cities were chosen, it was simply a matter of practicality: the researchers applied elsewhere without success, and were specifically refused access to data in the UK.) These trials were overwhelmingly sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry (98%) and the rules governing the management of the results tell a story that walks the now familiar line between frightening and absurd. For 16 of the 44 trials, the sponsoring company got to see the data as it accumulated, and in a further 16 it had the right to stop the trial at any time, for any reason. This means that a company can see if a trial is going against it, and can interfere as it progresses, distorting the results. Even if the study was allowed to finish, the data could still be suppressed: there were constraints on publication rights in 40 of the 44 trials, and in half of them the contracts specifically stated that the sponsor either owned the data outright (what about the patients, you might say?), or needed to approve the final publication, or both. None of these restrictions was mentioned in any of the published papers. When the paper describing this situation was published in Jama, Lif, the Danish pharmaceutical industry association, responded by announcing, in the Journal of the Danish Medical Association, that it was "both shaken and enraged about the criticism, that could not be recognised". It demanded an investigation of the scientists, though it failed to say by whom or of what. Lif then wrote to the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, accusing the Cochrane researchers of scientific misconduct. We can't see the letter, but the researchers say the allegations were extremely serious – they were accused of deliberately distorting the data – but vague, and without documents or evidence to back them up. Nonetheless, the investigation went on for a year. Peter Gøtzsche, director of the Cochrane Centre, told the British Medical Journal that only Lif's third letter, 10 months into this process, made specific allegations that could be investigated by the committee. Two months after that, the charges were dismissed. The Cochrane researchers had done nothing wrong. But before they were cleared, Lif copied the letters alleging scientific dishonesty to the hospital where four of them worked, and to the management organisation running that hospital, and sent similar letters to the Danish medical association, the ministry of health, the ministry of science and so on. Gøtzsche and his colleagues felt "intimidated and harassed" by Lif's behaviour. Lif continued to insist that the researchers were guilty of misconduct even after the investigation was completed. Paroxetine is a commonly used antidepressant, from the class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs. It's also a good example of how companies have exploited our long-standing permissiveness about missing trials, and found loopholes in our inadequate regulations on trial disclosure. To understand why, we first need to go through a quirk of the licensing process. Drugs do not simply come on to the market for use in all medical conditions: for any specific use of any drug, in any specific disease, you need a separate marketing authorisation. So a drug might be licensed to treat ovarian cancer, for example, but not breast cancer. That doesn't mean the drug doesn't work in breast cancer. There might well be some evidence that it's great for treating that disease, too, but maybe the company hasn't gone to the trouble and expense of getting a formal marketing authorisation for that specific use. Doctors can still go ahead and prescribe it for breast cancer, if they want, because the drug is available for prescription, it probably works, and there are boxes of it sitting in pharmacies waiting to go out. In this situation, the doctor will be prescribing the drug legally, but "off-label". Now, it turns out that the use of a drug in children is treated as a separate marketing authorisation from its use in adults. This makes sense in many cases, because children can respond to drugs in very different ways and so research needs to be done in children separately. But getting a licence for a specific use is an arduous business, requiring lots of paperwork and some specific studies. Often, this will be so expensive that companies will not bother to get a licence specifically to market a drug for use in children, because that market is usually much smaller. So it is not unusual for a drug to be licensed for use in adults but then prescribed for children. Regulators have recognised that this is a problem, so recently they have started to offer incentives for companies to conduct more research and formally seek these licences. When GlaxoSmithKline applied for a marketing authorisation in children for paroxetine, an extraordinary situation came to light, triggering the longest investigation in the history of UK drugs regulation. Between 1994 and 2002, GSK conducted nine trials of paroxetine in children. The first two failed to show any benefit, but the company made no attempt to inform anyone of this by changing the "drug label" that is sent to all doctors and patients. In fact, after these trials were completed, an internal company management document stated: "It would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy had not been demonstrated, as this would undermine the profile of paroxetine." In the year after this secret internal memo, 32,000 prescriptions were issued to children for paroxetine in the UK alone: so, while the company knew the drug didn't work in children, it was in no hurry to tell doctors that, despite knowing that large numbers of children were taking it. More trials were conducted over the coming years – nine in total – and none showed that the drug was effective at treating depression in children. It gets much worse than that. These children weren't simply receiving a drug that the company knew to be ineffective for them; they were also being exposed to side-effects. This should be self-evident, since any effective treatment will have some side-effects, and doctors factor this in, alongside the benefits (which in this case were nonexistent). But nobody knew how bad these side-effects were, because the company didn't tell doctors, or patients, or even the regulator about the worrying safety data from its trials. This was because of a loophole: you have to tell the regulator only about side-effects reported in studies looking at the specific uses for which the drug has a marketing authorisation. Because the use of paroxetine in children was "off-label", GSK had no legal obligation to tell anyone about what it had found. People had worried for a long time that paroxetine might increase the risk of suicide, though that is quite a difficult side-effect to detect in an antidepressant. In February 2003, GSK spontaneously sent the MHRA a package of information on the risk of suicide on paroxetine, containing some analyses done in 2002 from adverse-event data in trials the company had held, going back a decade. This analysis showed that there was no increased risk of suicide. But it was misleading: although it was unclear at the time, data from trials in children had been mixed in with data from trials in adults, which had vastly greater numbers of participants. As a result, any sign of increased suicide risk among children on paroxetine had been completely diluted away. Later in 2003, GSK had a meeting with the MHRA to discuss another issue involving paroxetine. At the end of this meeting, the GSK representatives gave out a briefing document, explaining that the company was planning to apply later that year for a specific marketing authorisation to use paroxetine in children. They mentioned, while handing out the document, that the MHRA might wish to bear in mind a safety concern the company had noted: an increased risk of suicide among children with depression who received paroxetine, compared with those on dummy placebo pills. This was vitally important side-effect data, being presented, after an astonishing delay, casually, through an entirely inappropriate and unofficial channel. Although the data was given to completely the wrong team, the MHRA staff present at this meeting had the wit to spot that this was an important new problem. A flurry of activity followed: analyses were done, and within one month a letter was sent to all doctors advising them not to prescribe paroxetine to patients under the age of 18. How is it possible that our systems for getting data from companies are so poor, they can simply withhold vitally important information showing that a drug is not only ineffective, but actively dangerous? Because the regulations contain ridiculous loopholes, and it's dismal to see how GSK cheerfully exploited them: when the investigation was published in 2008, it concluded that what the company had done – withholding important data about safety and effectiveness that doctors and patients clearly needed to see – was plainly unethical, and put children around the world at risk; but our laws are so weak that GSK could not be charged with any crime. After this episode, the MHRA and EU changed some of their regulations, though not adequately. They created an obligation for companies to hand over safety data for uses of a drug outside its marketing authorisation; but ridiculously, for example, trials conducted outside the EU were still exempt. Some of the trials GSK conducted were published in part, but that is obviously not enough: we already know that if we see only a biased sample of the data, we are misled. But we also need all the data for the more simple reason that we need lots of data: safety signals are often weak, subtle and difficult to detect. In the case of paroxetine, the dangers became apparent only when the adverse events from all of the trials were pooled and analysed together. That leads us to the second obvious flaw in the current system: the results of these trials are given in secret to the regulator, which then sits and quietly makes a decision. This is the opposite of science, which is reliable only because everyone shows their working, explains how they know that something is effective or safe, shares their methods and results, and allows others to decide if they agree with the way in which the data was processed and analysed. Yet for the safety and efficacy of drugs, we allow it to happen behind closed doors, because drug companies have decided that they want to share their trial results discretely with the regulators. So the most important job in evidence-based medicine is carried out alone and in secret. And regulators are not infallible, as we shall see. Rosiglitazone was first marketed in 1999. In that first year, Dr John Buse from the University of North Carolina discussed an increased risk of heart problems at a pair of academic meetings. The drug's manufacturer, GSK, made direct contact in an attempt to silence him, then moved on to his head of department. Buse felt pressured to sign various legal documents. To cut a long story short, after wading through documents for several months, in 2007 the US Senate committee on finance released a report describing the treatment of Buse as "intimidation". But we are more concerned with the safety and efficacy data. In 2003 the Uppsala drug monitoring group of the World Health Organisation contacted GSK about an unusually large number of spontaneous reports associating rosiglitazone with heart problems. GSK conducted two internal meta-analyses of its own data on this, in 2005 and 2006. These showed that the risk was real, but although both GSK and the FDA had these results, neither made any public statement about them, and they were not published until 2008. During this delay, vast numbers of patients were exposed to the drug, but doctors and patients learned about this serious problem only in 2007, when cardiologist Professor Steve Nissen and colleagues published a landmark meta-analysis. This showed a 43% increase in the risk of heart problems in patients on rosiglitazone. Since people with diabetes are already at increased risk of heart problems, and the whole point of treating diabetes is to reduce this risk, that finding was big potatoes. Nissen's findings were confirmed in later work, and in 2010 the drug was either taken off the market or restricted, all around the world. Now, my argument is not that this drug should have been banned sooner because, as perverse as it sounds, doctors do often need inferior drugs for use as a last resort. For example, a patient may develop idiosyncratic side-effects on the most effective pills and be unable to take them any longer. Once this has happened, it may be worth trying a less effective drug if it is at least better than nothing. The concern is that these discussions happened with the data locked behind closed doors, visible only to regulators. In fact, Nissen's analysis could only be done at all because of a very unusual court judgment. In 2004, when GSK was caught out withholding data showing evidence of serious side-effects from paroxetine in children, their bad behaviour resulted in a US court case over allegations of fraud, the settlement of which, alongside a significant payout, required GSK to commit to posting clinical trial results on a public website. Nissen used the rosiglitazone data, when it became available, and found worrying signs of harm, which they then published to doctors – something the regulators had never done, despite having the information years earlier. If this information had all been freely available from the start, regulators might have felt a little more anxious about their decisions but, crucially, doctors and patients could have disagreed with them and made informed choices. This is why we need wider access to all trial reports, for all medicines. Missing data poisons the well for everybody. If proper trials are never done, if trials with negative results are withheld, then we simply cannot know the true effects of the treatments we use. Evidence in medicine is not an abstract academic preoccupation. When we are fed bad data, we make the wrong decisions, inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering, and death, on people just like us. • This is an edited extract from Bad Pharma, by Ben Goldacre, published next week by Fourth Estate at £13.99. To order a copy for £11.19, including UK mainland p&p, call 0330 333 6846, or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre

^^ Thing is, we also have to think about developing a 'Sikh economy' that will help the community prosper and form networks for employment, opportunities. Essentially secure our own economic independence and security. Food places would play a BIG part in that. Unless everyone thinks that we should just continue crawling up the backside of the western economy (or any others) and completely rely on them for jobs. Muslims in London have smashed it - a strong food based economy and they have tons of barber shops and stuff. Their money and outside money circulates within the community. Our lot seem too dense to grasp the significance and need for this?

^^^^ Don't overlook the fact that some of those girls that do this ARE from families that do not promote those secular values and have a religious upbringing. Watch the SAS video that's in the 2nd post and see for yourself. Complex mixtures of attention, attraction, self-esteem (low or overconfidence), naivety, excitement, biological and social factors all come into play here (amongst other things I presume), I don't think simplistic interpretations of the matter helps combat the problem?

Point is that we are rife for internal conflict and civil war with our current lack of cohesion, which will become even more pronounced if we concentrate into a state. And we haven't spoke about how nonSikhs will feel about this. We'll need to persuade them too, unless people are planning a Pakistani style 'clean up' partition style...........

One thing that seems to get ignored is the general 'vibe' of our community. Truth is we aren't especially reserved or restrained when we get going. We ARE combustible people, for better or for worse. We aren't particularly good at organisation and structure - probably at least in part because we are generally free spirited and independent minded. Plus we have that Indian corruption thing as much as any others, which WILL effect things. We have serious baggage from Panjabi culture that nobody seems to want to let go of anytime soon either which will define K'stan. So we knoe caste divisions will quickly manifest and effect all organisations/bureaucracy. Talking realistically, I'd say we still have a hell of a lot of growing up to do as a people - and yes, personally I think it would be infinitely smarter to do this before we get a country - instead of facing the not implausible possibility of a seriously backwards 'Sikh country' dealing with all the crap we struggle with today. And I'm talking about drink, drugs, female infanticide, casteism and all that other good stuff we've had going on for a while now. Should add^^^^ We have a terrible tendency to ignore pressing issues that make us uncomfortable too........as seen with the ostrich stance towards the grooming of Sikh girls, or casteism for instance.

Generally no problem with that, as all shops have a clear halal sign on the front (wouldn't get much business otherwise)!Plus Sikhs need to get away from the idea that they can dent many businesses in any significant way by boycotting - as we don't have the numbers.That being said some noise was made about putting unlabelled halal into school dinners and selling it as nonhalal in supermarkets.You have to say, Muslim numbers give them serious consumer strength.

Not condoning it, but judging by surviving accounts he knew how to separate or time his 'shenanigans' so that they didn't generally interfere with his ruling.

@neo I lived in East London most of my life, very big Muslim community. 99% of shops halal (no joke). lol I don't have nothing against it, business people must cater to their local demographic. The places you went to have much bigger Sikh communities btw. That being said, I went to Goodmayes (in Essex) the other week and was shocked that their weren't many Sikh places to eat there either as they have a sizeable population there? Maybe generally apnay don't like eating out or something? @Singh559 I'm surprised because I have mentioned it a fair few times. No, I didn't recently cut it.

It was a mixture of factors bro. Putting it solely on these things isn't accurate or realistic imho? Will do. I don't know what you base this on? Because it appears as if we have little information regarding his habits when he was younger. Assumptions are dangerous. This I agree with. And note how CP is the largest section of the Dasam Granth (by far!!) indicating how much importance was given to this subject and indicating a strong awareness of how such things prey on us all. Quite opposite to the conservative see no evil, hear no evil thing we have going on today.

You are SO lucky man! I'm not Amritdhari (or even kesh dhari) but I don't eat halal, and that pretty much means I can't eat out at all where I live.....lol On the plus side, it saves me money and makes me up my degh skills...

@acsap What, including the drug taking, drinking and sexual antics? lol The paradoxical thing is that most K'stanis of today would vehemently detest and object to a leaders who was anything remotely like M. Ranjit Singh in terms of personal habits. Plus to be frank, from what I've seen of K'stanis (and as someone who was one himself for a long while), I think freedom of expression type issues would be very low on their agenda.

Like the UK, the first response you'll probably get to such statements is disbelief. Can you give examples of it going on in Canada?

If you are maintaining a good weight (i.e. not over or underweight), and are generally active, there is no issue with eating well. But, if it gets really weird, get your blood sugars checked out (HBA1C and a fasting glucose reading). My Uncle was slim and suddenly started eating 3 fold his normal diet without putting on weight, later it transpired he had diabetes, so get it checked out, although there is no need to panic right now. If you eat a lot, train a lot - it helps.

If ANYONE on the forum (especially those in the UK) hasn't watched the video in the OP - please do so as a priority.

Maybe you're in luck?? I've had a bit of experience teaching a nonPanjabi speaking relative Panjabi/Gurmukhi , although the focus has been on the alphabet rather than speaking (so far). I've also got a best friend who is an esol teacher whose shown me good strategies for teaching languages. I presume that you must have some basic vocabulary (i.e. you probably know at least a few Panjabi words), which gives you an advantage. You also have everyday access to fluent Panjabi speakers which is a BIG PLUS. You're probably struggling most with syntax - or the order of words in a sentence at this stage? So focus on that Here goes: First things first - Fall in love with the idea of you speaking/reading/writing Panjabi. You must REALLY want it, from deep within yourself. At the very start acknowledge that there will be times that you will have ups and downs - and that you will persevere regardless of these. So lets jump right in!! We are going to start by having you learn about 15/20 words. Learn them 5 a week if needed, but LEARN THEM PROPERLY, so they are committed to your mind. To teach you the basic syntax (i.e. order of words in a sentence), let's focus on kitchen related stuff. So here are your word lists: Objects: Chah - tea Pani - water Dudh - milk Kursee - chair Pateela - pot Doing actions/verbs: Rakh - place/put Paa - pour/place Khaa - eat Pee - drink Baet - sit Sit - throw Positions: Vich - in Naal - with/alongside of Uppur or Utey - on top of/over Haitaan/Thullay - beneath/below/under Pichay - behind Once you know these, words we can start putting them together in sentences. Learning them shouldn't take you long. Get help from your family if needed.

Straight up. Because Sikh 'politics' has been getting abused for decades - going all the way up to the premiere institutes such as the SGPC. The part of my last post quoted below answered your above question in my opinion. Dude, you come to London man, and all the average 'Mr. Singhs' are really bothered about is their kid's education/grades/job. Sure there may be some consciousness about political issues back home, but these are generally 'lightweight' compared to the concerns about wealth and status which are primary. If you did theoretically open up the 84 commemoration Gurdwara, the people most likely to attend would be the usual crowd, who go to the 84 rally in Hyde Park - plus there is a VERY good chance it will very quickly become another 'Ghost town' unless it is situated in an area with a sizeable Sikh community which do not already have ready access to a Gurdwara - personally I don't see any areas like that myself? And as stated previously, there is a stronger argument for the money being better spent on directly helping the widows and families of the victims of 84. We have talk about DECREASING the number of Gurdwaras these days i.e. Giani Thakur Singh talking about having one per town - and we already have dwindling attendance in many Gurdwaras - so is opening another one really a solution? We should do better with those we already have, no?. The fact that 'the panth' has been ignoring the matter for so long should open your eyes. There has been a willful, purposeful suppression by people determined to silence and negate the narratives of other segments of the panth, be this in the form of differing political stances or even differences in practice of faith. This has been been in the face of plenty of reasonable voices that warned about the long term consequences of this on Sikh cohesion. Some of us could see the mess this would cause from miles off. I have no idea if they are? But if they are - then they are only doing what juts themselves are doing anyway. My own guess is that most sensible people with any shred of integrity probably see the disgusting mess and hypocrisy going on with certain Gurdwara management 'politics' and give it a wide berth. What remains are a small bunch of myopic pendus battling amongst themselves, with an unrealistic and inflated idea of their importance and influnce 9real and potential) over the panth?? And with that statement you totally negate all of the criticisms of juts as phobia and do EXACTLY what the OP and myself are talking about. back to square 1. Seriously dude..... Things are changing so rapidly now that only God knows where the cards will fall for our community. But we will suffer for the decades of mismanagement. Institutional casteism is a reality - and it has a BIG impact on the panth - face up to it. Anyway caste is just one of the issues highlighted in the OP and you seem to be having difficulties grasping the ideas behind the OP and my posts, so I wont keep going round in circles. It's sad that a younger like yourself, falls into the hole of becoming some sort of PR representative of your caste group, over having a wider, more progressive vision for our community that transcends those old stratifications. Your thinking is too old school dude - and not in the good way.

Bhai ji, I know we can only get a partial sense of someone over the net, and I know you are trying to be complimentary. But seriously brother, do give some people credit to not be gullible or easily susceptible to others influences. I have my own destiny and Rabh is unveiling things to this fool at their own pace - as their nadar dictates. I've never really been 'under the influence' of others from a relatively young age. I'm sort of independent minded like that, frequently to the chagrin of even my family. lol I'm trying not to offend you here but I feel I have to make the point. I don't know Giani Arshi enough, or I haven't looked at his own personal beliefs close enough to be able to make any judgments visa vis what he believes. And before I point fingers regarding others spiritual discipline/beliefs - if I'm going to be even half a man - I have acknowledge my own frequent shortcomings, lapses and misapprehensions in this area, which are in no way small. I might as well take this opportunity to let you know that the most 'influence' (if you want to term it such) or support I got towards getting into prayer and simran came from a forum that MANY ignorant people were deriding as 'suspicious' or even 'anti-Sikh' at the time (sikhawareness.com). That (frankly life changing) experience itself makes me very cynical about paying attention to 'reputations'/slander and following the opinions of others over learning and experiencing for myself. But that's just me. However I got there, by whatever unconventional, circuitous route - I'm very happy to have got there. On a good day simran gives me a peace and contentment that has eluded me all of my life, even on a mediocre day it helps me relax and be at peace with myself. It has also done wonders at making me understand the nature of mind too. But it IS a battle. I do fall off the wagon. With God's grace it will be a battle I'll fight my whole life. And this is the part you need to pay attention too especially carefully...... to my mind, the journey to where I am now involved ALL of the characters I interacted with - even if I can't remember my interaction/exchanges with them. Thus, I would say, in terms of the negative, bad stuff I've seen, experienced in my life (and I'm no sheltered cat trust me), I'd say Giani Arshi doesn't even register as a blip. I hope you understand?

@chatanga I feel I am saying what's on my mind as clearly as possible mate. BTW, what you've done with your anecdote is give us a PERFECT example of exactly what the letter in the OP and I am talking about. Did you ever consider the background/context of statements like you mentioned? I don't think you have. Did you ever consider why there is such suspicion towards juts? It's well founded in my opinion. There is a real, longstanding and GENUINE concern that many juts use the Khalistan/1984 issue as some mobilising device without really caring too much about it in reality. Not saying every last jut is on this but plenty are. My former local Gurdwara was a 'Khalistani' one - and all this meant in practical terms was to have a few slogans and perhaps a few pictures of shaheeds up. Nothing else. I knew the pardaans, in reality the last thing they were concerned about was K'stan, and they certainly weren't ever going to take any action about it. That probably sums up the majority of such committees - so are you really shocked at people's cynicism in this respect? Plus the point about different Sikhs having differing attitudes/perceptions of 1984, or different economic visions visa vis India seems to have gone COMPLETELY over your head. I supported the idea of K'stan for a long time, I though 84 should be central to issues as well a while ago - that doesn't mean I rode rough-shed over over other Sikhs who might not have felt this way. I didn't do that other narrow minded pendu buckwaas of questioning people's Sikhness' due to differences in opinions in these domains either (let's see who goes down that route first on this thread!). Real talk - right now we need to urgently deal with SO MANY social/cohesion issues in the UK where we are assailed by other communities and ideologies, that even I question the need for what you spoke about before! Does that make me anti-panthic now??? I don't know where this proposed 84 commemoration Gurdwara you alluded to was planned to be built. If it was in the UK I'd serious question its purpose when we already have plenty of gurdwaras in places that were formerly populated by a sizable Sikh communities, many of whom moved to better/other areas and which are now practically empty most of the time. Sikh ghost towns if you like. We already have big issues securing Gurdwara as Winconsin, and Bow Road Gurdwara has shown us - I suggest we need to concentrate on securing our existing infrastructure before expanding it. Plus, I'd say any money would be better spent on trying to help victims of 84 directly in any case, we all know we have widow colonies with families in all sorts of dire straights - so why another Gurdwara? This persistent failure to broaden and accommodate alternate viewpoints (especially political ones) is exactly what causes the fissures that leads up to people breaking off to be able express themselves. That is what the OP is talking about. If you've grasped what I wrote above (if you even care to that is), then you'd see that the above simplification of the situation is ridiculous. Casteism - especially juttism, IS a big issue in the panth. All nonjuts are sick of it, some so -called 'lower castes' to the extent that they have left the panth. But you want to act oblivious and play it down. No, face it. And I know that many juts would rather sweep this gund under the rug than deal with it. You just better become accustomed to people who actually believe that equality is worth fighting for - highlighting it. I too was waiting for the imbeciles to die, but what you seem to be showing me is that the backwards people seem to be able to replicate themselves in nonthinking younger people who just carry on with the same old crusty cobblers themselves. Nothing different - more of the same old...... And I know you're not an <banned word filter activated> because we've worked on stuff together before - so do I have to put it down to purposeful, willful, motivated ignorance. You sure sound like the older, unimaginative generation to me mate. You sure you're not being groomed to replace them when they die? Caste is the big, white elephant in the corner too many people ignore - read the Op again - it's one of many issues we have to address. Hopefully we'll get there. The only thing I'm sure of is that we'll need more 'out of the box' thinking to do this and balls to face down the conservatives who persistently try to play it down.

Look we are going off topic here, maybe need to start another thread. Personally I'm against all imperialism, whether Brit, US, China or another one else. Can we get back onto malicious portrayals of our Gurus/faith??

^^^ Now THAT sounds good!

You open up a whole Pandoras's box with that question. Different things are acceptable within a community at different times in different socio-political contexts. For example we have a few references to Guru Nanak being a reincarnation of Raja Janak in some old manuscripts (something I don't personally believe in), and I'm pretty sure this statement (whatever its genesis) probably didn't bother a lot of simple, villager Sikhs in the 17th century, I think even Rattan Bhangu in his famous Panth Prakash (unedited version) refers to this so some people still believed this well into the 19th century - the point I'm trying to make is that this probably wouldn't have raised an eyebrow for many Sikhs in the past. But look at what happens when we have a change in the socio-political scene due to being subjugated by the British after the Anglo-Sikh jungs.... People start arguing over this, people surreptitiously remove all references to this from published versions of manuscripts etc. etc. What was nothing before - becomes a beating stick later on. Personally I believe that anyone with a bit of brains and mischievous/malicious intentions can make pseudo-intellectual attempts to throw mud on any faith system, if they are determined enough. Arya Samaj already tried it on Sikhs ages ago. We've already had attempts to malign our Gurus with deserting their wives and children. The possibility of dasmesh pita having more than one wife has been used. One guy in the 80s was saying that dasmesh pita was a 'fashionable' Guru. McLeod slyly puts out that some people say the Gurus weren't truly committed against casteism etc. etc. If someone is thus inclined they could quite easily be offensive. Let me give you one clear example of misinterpreting a sakhi. The sakhi where dasmesh pita ji orders a brother to be slapped about because he kept, repeatedly reciting Gurbani wrong (from parchian Sewa Das I think?) and Singhs going overboard and battering him senseless - you could easily get some j-erk to decontextualise that and try and suggest Guru ji was cruel. Another dodgy one is people saying that it was unfair for Guru Har Rai to put Ram Rai in dangers way but sending him to Aurengzaab and not facing him himself. Do you get my point? Sl@gging off someone's faith like this is the easiest thing in the world and NO two groups doesn't have practices or beliefs that the other would consider straight weird/backwards/bizarre. We need to face this fact and learn to 'wipe the dirt off our shoulders' in the face of ignorance in a classy way. Thing with sullay rioting is that they are big and committed enough to make it a serious issue, our lot trying this easily ends up looking like a small bunch of pendus throwing their toys out of their prams.

@kaljugi Maybe I watched it too late in the night when my brain was a bit tired?? Was baffled at places like a flummoxed old man!! lol Really they took the Total Recall idea (being stuck in a dream) and went wild with it.

Watched inception last night - really struggled with it but kept watching till the end. Personally i thought the best thing about it was the special effects of a city being folded onto itself - not my kettle of fish. I just hope The Grey (which I got on your furmaash) isn't a disappointment too........(not to mention waste of money lol) I see I'm going to have to school some of you people on some decent, intelligent contemporary films: Watch some these, I found them intelligent and entertaining: Rise of the apes - prequel to planet of the apes movies - looking forward to the day we all rise up like the bunders! Sin Nombre - Latino/US film with subtitles - very good. Gran Turino - Clint Eastwood still going strong! Safe - Was good, especially the fighting scenes Safehouse - Denzil Washington Classics: Seven Samurai The 36 chambers of Shaolin The green mile Shawshank redemption