Will Sidhu manage a hat-trick in Amritsar?

Vicky Nanjappa and photographer Satish Bodas travel to Amritsar and find the colourful Navjot Singh Sidhu in a tough battle to retain his Lok Sabha seat.

The electoral battle for Amritsar, which goes to the polls on May 13, promises to be an interesting one. Charismatic Bharatiya Janata Party Member of Parliament Navjot Singh Sidhu is pitted against Congress candidate Om Prakash Soni, who holds the impressive record of winning every election that he has ever contested.

After spending a day on Sidhu's campaign trail, it is evident that the cricketer-turned-politician has impressed middle and upper middle class voters in Amritsar, which has 1.248 million voters.

However, he seems to have made a dent among voters in rural parts of his constituency like Ajnala. The villagers are unhappy about him being absent for long stretches of time; they feel he is more visible on their television sets than he is in the constituency that twice elected him to the Lok Sabha.

with thanks : source : http://election.rediff.com/slide-show/2009/may/07/slide-show-1-will-sidhu-manage-hattrick-in-amritsar.htm

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Paramjit Singh Sarna elected SGPC president

Sarna elected SGPC president

New Delhi: Paramjit Singh Sarna was on Saturday unanimously re-elected president of Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Prabhandhak Committee for the sixth time. Mr. Sarna is presently chairman of Shiromani Akali Dal (Delhi).

After his election, he named Bhajan Singh Walia as vice-president, Joginder Singh Guru Rakha as treasurer, Gurmeet Singh Shanti as general secretary and Kartar Singh Kochar as joint secretary.

with thanks : source : http://www.hindu.com/2009/05/10/stories/2009051058790400.htm

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Why do you think there are 300 gurdwaras in the USA

These are the comments received by us from one of our visitor :

Why do you think there are 300 gurdwaras in the USA ... because there is so much politics and infighting for leadership and control ... so after a year or two ... the next Sikh tries starting his own gurdwara after being thrown out of the first gurdwara. It is such a terrible situation ... Sikhs themselves are burning down gurdwaras so that the insurance money will help in building a new gurdwara.

Really shocking.
Can you believe it ?
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Where are we heading for - a wake up call for the sikh community

In Punjab the Turban is disappearing fast. Upto 90% of sikh families in Punjab have atleast a couple of members without a turban. Trimming of beards has become a fashion. In all the cities of India and in every part of Punjab, we can find the sikh youth with trimmed beards. Nearly 70% of youth in Punjab are in the grip of Drugs. This menace is blooming amongst the children and in a rapid manner, threatening the life of the youth of the State of Punjab. The sex ratio in Punjab is not improving inspite of best efforts of various organisations. Even the holy city Amritsar has 818 girls for 1000 boys, resulting into polygamy. Churches are being planted in punjab. Over 60 % localities of Ludhiana and over 50% villages in punjab have got a church.

Isn't it a wake up call for the sikh community. May i ask from the Sikh leaders, Sikh politicians, Sikh masses that where are we heading for. Please give it a serious thought.

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Huge blaze destroys Sikh temple

More than 70 firefighters tackled a blaze that destroyed a Sikh temple in Greater Manchester.
Huge blaze destroys Sikh temple
Friday, 8 May 2009 09:08 UK

The blaze ripped through a multi-use building in the Strangeways area of Cheetham Hill at 2330 BST on Wednesday.

The ground floor offices and the first floor, which was home to the temple, were gutted in the fire.

Firefighters tackled the blaze throughout the night. An investigation is under way but the fire is not thought to be suspicious.

A fire service spokeswoman said: "There was a partial collapse in the first floor ceiling and firefighters had to enter the building wearing breathing apparatus to tackle the blaze."

Bury Road is closed while crews dampen the blaze down.

with thanks : source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/8039526.stm

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The Punjabi student, Narinder Singh Kapany, is known as the father of fiber optics.

With Heading :

FATHER OF FIBRE OPTICS EXPLAINS HOW IT BAGAN
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

The vandals who slashed fiber-optic cables, leaving thousands of South Bay residents without phone and Internet service Thursday, struck at one of the most critical elements of America's vast communication network.

People who talk to each other across a city or a nation - or do business locally or around the world, or seek electronic home entertainment from anywhere - depend on slender bundles of glass fibers, thinner than a human hair, that carry signals or images at nearly the speed of light.

"It really is a miraculous technology, and the Internet couldn't exist in its present form without it," said Joseph Kahn, a Stanford professor of electrical engineering and one of the nation's leading specialists in optical fiber transmission.

The miracle began nearly 60 years ago when a Punjabi university student who now lives in Palo Alto challenged his Indian professor's dogma and set off on his own voyage of discovery that led him to pioneer the science and technology of fiber optics.

Today's fiber-optic cables are bundles of dozens of single hair-thin strands, each fiber made of highly purified glass - often pure silica - and coated in a cladding of impure glass that holds light beams inside. A single cable, about 4 inches thick, has the capability to hold dozens of fibers, which can carry pulses of light signals as far as 200 miles - either curving or in a straight line - at about two-thirds the speed of light. Inside each fiber, the light's "message" is reflected again and again at an angle against the fiber's wall as it travels along, Kahn said.

For long-distance communication, relay stations, known as optical amplifiers, are located every 50 to 60 miles to boost the light signals until they reach the end of their voyage - a phone company, a high-speed Internet connection, or a doctor's instrument probing a patient's throat.

The Punjabi student, Narinder Singh Kapany, is known as the father of fiber optics.

On Friday, Kapany, now 80, explained how it all began.

"I was just a precocious kid taking a college physics course when one day the professor told us that light 'always travels in a straight line,' " he recalled. "But that can't be true, I thought - it must be bent sometimes."

So he continued thinking about light as he went on with his physics studies, he said.

"And when I won a Royal Society fellowship for advanced study in optics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London," Kapany said, "I really understood the principle we now call the total reflection of light - the principle of fiber optics that let me to experiment with light beams inside bent glass tubes."

Initially, he said, he thought only of medical applications, such as the kind of fiber-optic tubes that allow physicians peer into human organs.

"Only later did I realize that a fiber-optic cable could carry light for many miles - and so it can," he said.

Kapany founded a company called Optics Technology Inc. One of its directors was the late Luis Alvarez, the UC Berkeley Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

The company succeeded, as did others, and now he calls himself a "man of changed priorities." These include teaching at Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.

At UC Santa Cruz, Kapany has endowed a chair in optical electronics, and at UC Santa Barbara, a chair in Sikh Studies. He has also financed the collection of Sikh art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and leads international activities on behalf of the Sikh community - his own tradition.

with thanks source : http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/11/MNGD170HIH.DTL

pics with thanks from : sikhnet.com

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Forgotten legacy of the Sikhs

Sikh military police in Kota Baru. The photograph was
published in W. A. Graham’s Kelantan – a State of the
Malay Peninsular in 1908.

ABOUT three weeks ago, hundreds of Penangites and tourists attended a celebration within the historic premises of Fort Cornwallis, the oldest existing man-made site in Penang, to commemorate the Sikh festival of Vaisakhi.

Lost to most people, however, was one particular cultural significance of the site. It was here, soon after the British built the fort in 1786, that the country’s first gurdwara or Sikh temple was housed, for Sikh paramilitary personnel stationed in Penang.

Today, the fort still stands but the temple is no longer there. It made way when the government decided to give away a piece of veterinary land on Brick Kiln Road (now Jalan Gurdwara) for the construction of a bigger temple in 1899, which still stands. The new building was the largest Sikh temple in Southeast Asia at that time.

Like the little-known historic implication of Fort Cornwallis to the Sikhs and the heritage of Penang, there are many other rich facts of the community’s legacy that have become buried by the sands of time.

About two years ago, I chanced to meet historian Malkiat Singh Lopo, to review his novel The Enchanting Prison. Set in Malaya during the early part of the 1900s, Lopo’s work poignantly chronicles the early hardships, predicaments and successes of the Sikhs who, like other communities, helped propel the nation into the modern industrialised land it is today.

The early Sikh community had in fact produced a string of prolific writers. In one book, Maha Jang Europe (Great European War) 1914-1918AD, writer Havildar (Sgt) Nand Singh vividly described the daring exploits of the Malay States Guides (MSG) in Aden when they fought the Turkish forces.

The MSG, a body of local Indian troops which formed Malaya’s own regiment, was based in Taiping. In 1873, the Orang Kaya Mantri of Larut, Dato’ Ngah Ibrahim, was worried about rivalry between Ghee Hin and Hai San Chinese clans in the tin-mining region, and wanted fighting men from Punjab to maintain law and order. He consulted Capt T. Speedy who formed the 1st Battalion Perak Sikhs, which originally comprised 110 men of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. This battalion became the MSG in 1896.

When the MSG was disbanded, the Singh Sabha, a registered local Sikh society, convinced the British resident that the holy temple, the gurdwara, within the Taiping army compound belonged to the Sikhs and not the military.

Once the resident was agreeable, the sabha performed an incredible feat of dismantling the building and re-erecting it almost intact on the present site granted by the government near the railway station. The building is today called the Gurdwara Sahib Taiping.

Malaya was the first foreign country that people from Punjab in India, where the majority of Sikhs live, migrated to. Most of these early migrants were needed by the British colonial government.

While many belonged to the army and police, a steady stream of other occupations also grew – milkmen, cattle farmers, guards, craftsmen and tailors.

The community has left many anecdotes of its legacy. For example, as Sikh populations on the peninsula rose, a unique service established itself in railway towns like Taiping, Kuala Kangsar, and Tanjung Malim where trains would stop for a while. It became a common sight to see Sikh men with milk churns standing on the railway platforms, giving away free warm milk to travellers.

But perhaps the most quaint imprint of the Sikhs lies today in George Town’s magnificent Chinese clan temple of the Khoo Kongsi. As one ascends the steps of the temple, it is difficult not to notice a pair of statues carved out of granite as if welcoming visitors.

The two figures of Sikh guards stand imposingly on the ornate pavilion of the century-old complex. The sight of turbaned Indians being featured prominently at the entrance of a Chinese Fuchien temple may seem jarring.

But not so if one knew the legacy left by the great Sikhs of India in multicultural Penang.

“Sikhs were employed as reliable guards in the old days,” explains researcher Yong Check Yoon who has done a detailed study of the complex.

“And so to post them permanently ‘guarding’ the temple, the Khoo clansmen had two statues of the Sikh sentinels made to ‘guard’ the prayer pavilion.”

The two guards today form a small but fascinating cultural feature among the many communities that have come together to make the great kaleidoscope of our nation.

Himanshu is theSun’s Penang bureau chief.

with thanks : source : http://www.thesundaily.com/article.cfm?id=33148

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