dalsingh101

I've worked with pendus here doing the very jobs they are in the past. I know exactly what they are like and how they live. I'm not in any bubble here. I'm not some rich spoilt vlaathi bloke. You need to realise, that it's not a sob story for all of them, a lot of the ones who manage to get over here these days are from well to do families with connections, the same type of idiots who act obnoxious to those they deem beneath them back home due to caste or finances. You need to realise that Panjabi men often don't act like they really are infront the women and you're just bringing maternal soft instincts to the situation when it's the last thing needed. People like you might think that all the backwardness amongst our lot is excusable for x, y z factor. I don't. There is no excuse to murder our daughters, I couldn't give a toss about excuses of dowry, honour, social status, looking after aged parents etc. etc. You might think it is okay to absolve the community back home of any responsibility to develop and create a robust economy and positive mindset that helps Panjab progress - I don't. There is no option other than the long game of creating a strong vibrant Sikh economy, that goes beyond farming in East Panjab. It's the failure to do this that has pendus running over here at any opportunity. Our problem isn't lack of ambition or ability. It's one of a lack of imagination and will to build our own nation (as in a society that meets our needs not necessarily a Khalistan). Until we do, we'll probably always be trying to run away from our heartland to some perceived relative utopia. This is perceived as the easy option.

What do you know about my empathy G Kaur? Maybe it isn't the girly type for sure, but it's there. Other than that there is a time for tough talk and yes, I can be highly irreverent with my language. I find it much better than stuffy, repressed talked. Maybe you are just being too sensitive and apologist for our own people's shortcomings? A time does comes when enough is enough and pussy footing around the issue serves no good purpose. It isn't wrong to try and force a message across in a more abrupt manner when trying it gently has so obviously failed. My family came here because they had skills that were needed and asked for. So it's never been a case of jumping out blindly. Plus being a girl it's like you can't ever debate things with a degree of detachment and have to personalise every damn last thing said. In the end all that I am saying stems from a desire to see our people do better and a sense of disappointment at the absolute lack of strategic thinking that characterises our pendu brethren. It's not some manifestation of ego that gets pleasure at deriding people unfairly, it's a desire to see improvement and progression that our people seem blissfully unaware of. By the way did you notice how the Japanese didn't act like a bunch of wild animals when they had their recent crisis and had to queue up for food? So it is possible for people to not act like crazed animals under such circumstances. Take your accusations and stuff them. Just because my position may fly over your head doesn't mean you can accuse me of all the crap in your last post. I'm no spoiled kid, I grew up in what was a very poor, violent area of London back in the day, you don't have to be a pendu to have problems. Your stereotype of the vichara pendu is bullshit too. I have cousins who live extremely comfortable lives in pends back home compared to many people here. Your problem is that you don't know the point at which we should uncompromisingly strive for better standards in our quom without excusing every last dumb thing our people do.

I genuinely find it hard to answer your question. Growing up in diaspora when I did really can cause complications in terms of a simplistic self definition. One's understanding of oneself (from my experience) seems to grow with age and even change with increasing understanding. Am I a pendu? Well no, but I probably do retain pendu characteristics (as much as the idea seems unpalatable). If I have to define myself I would say I am a Panjabi Sikh whom fate destined to grow up in urban London. I've always thought one day some one will tweak the recipe for punjeeri and sell it to the west as some health food!

I don't think I will because it wont help you and will just be an interesting historical distraction that goes against mainstream opinion/practice today. Suffice to say that in the end, only you can be your own guard about what you eat and the matter resolves around how much you may be willing to compromise this in the name of social graces (or not wanting to appear rude). I was a strict vegetarian for many years when younger so I certainly know the circumstances you are talking about. The reality is that in today's world many foodstuffs have animal derived products in them, this is never easy to tell at a glance. Given human nature and the great variation in how much people put on 'detail' it would be plain naive to rely on others to be as fastidious as you may (or may not) be. Sorry if I'm repeating myself.

Unfortunately the old man's side of the family are some of the most pendufied junglee pendus I have ever encountered. They put the 'pend' in 'pendu' and prove that whilst the pendus can leave the pend, the pend doesn't necessarily leave the pendu! You should make them something more healthy like reduced sugar punjeeri instead!

I get the nirgunvaad bit, but is our bhakti different from other bhakti movements in in anything other than a focus on the nirgun conceptualisation of a creator? How is the place of bhakti in our thing different to it's position in advaita vedant in general? Plus what exactly do you mean by our sadhanas?

My definitions vary across contexts. So in one context (type 1) pendu represents someone from a pend. Nothing else. This is a neutral term. That is how I used it in the above example. In another context (type 2) it denotes someone who is backwards, small minded and non progressive. They do not necessarily have to be from pends. I also use pendu to describe people from the same ancestral pend as my family as in 'my pendu' (type 3). So before any inferiority complex kicks in, realise that I myself am from a pend and have some pendus (as in type 2 above) in my own family, some of whom are not from pends but a lot of whom are. Hope this clears matters for you! Do have a read of that paper I attached to my last post. It helps put things in historical perspective a bit. So we realise that this is not a new phenomena.

I've come across this notion as well. There have been some studies indicating that this takes place within those deemed to be urban classes as much as the pendus. When you look at old post annexation literature, the situation seems to have been similar back the (will female killing). Read the paper attached for examples. You've hit on an important topic (in my opinion). There is something about being uneducated or superstitious and having a very 'sketchy' grasp of cause and effect (at least in contrast to what we would consider post-enlightenment though). I hate to say it (and will probably be shot down for it), but there also seems to be something about female psychology that seems to give them a predilection towards world views that aren't based on logical inferences. This seems to cross cultural boundaries? Although exceptions exist men seem to be more inclined to thinking more linearly? Actually this is probably the effect of western education as plenty of desi men seem to believe in weird, superstitious stuff as much as the women? infanticide.pdf

Here we have a fascinating window into a Sikh's experience of the modern warfare he was witnessing in a Gurmukhi letter written in France to a Mahant Partab Das in Patiala (possibly a priest of sorts who was pushing proBritish propaganda to the soldiery?): This letter was detained.

Here is a letter from a hospitalised Pathan soldier (Yusuf Khan of the 40th Pathans) writing from Brighton. Interestingly the censors deemed the contents sufficient cause to detain the letter: Letter 156

“Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.” Thomas Henry Huxley

Does this mean the farmers of Panjab are generally doing well and making a reasonable living?

Again, maybe we need to get away from the idea that we can definitively date such material beyond a doubt. What we can (possibly) say with some assurance is that it was completed sometime in the first half of the 18th century?

It is, on one hand, quite strange how whitey makes a lot of noise about aborting females, but one the same hand the issue of mass abortions regardless of gender that takes place in the west is not considered anything worthy of comment (perhaps America is an exception to this?). So what is the underlying message? That blind abortions, where pregnancies seem to be considered akin to minor inconveniences or unwanted side effects of recreational sex are okay, whilst female foeticide is ghastly?

If it mentions the assassination attempt on Guru Ji at Nanded, we can exclude 1701. So we are looking at 1711 or 1741. Although some sections could have been written before 1708.

Well I read something regarding this in Prem Sumarag but the view seems to be one that most orthodox people would vehemently oppose today.

Truth is you can't trust others to be fastidious as you yourself might be. Some people aren't that way inclined to go that extra mile to find out about ingredients. I've even see sweets with gelatine being given away in Gurdwaras. I don't think it is intentionally done but in the way some students study enough to just get by whilst others go an extra mile and dig deep into a subject, humans will exhibit different levels of attention to detail in different domains. As I said, it is unrealistic to expect other people to be as focused on this as you might be. Some people just naturally plod along without paying too much attention, some people go into microscopic detail about things. A dishonest 'get out card' in an emergency is to tell people that you've just taken some tablets for something and are prohibited to eat for a while.

No one would dispute the fact that desis usually have a much more active and heightened scam mentality and ruthlessness. They think we are idiots because we mostly don't. That petty mentality might be useful on individual levels but on a community level it is what prevents apnay making big, coordinated moves.

Sometimes it's good to let convos develop as they naturally do. There is a relating thread through all this. Those freshies came here for opportunities and a perceived better life in the UK. Essentially people back home are dense when it comes to grasping the reality of the big bad world. A large measure of this is the conservative nature of Sikh media which itself generally helps keep our people as simpletons looking outwards for a better existence. A part of the solution is the development of modern, engaging media streams which educate apnay about realities of this world. A modern Sikh media which would also serve as a unifying tool amongst our disparate people. This could also play a part in helping to create a Sikh economy that itself could generate employment and opportunity. If some technological things were kept in India, they could be kept cheap. We are seeing a move eastwards already with comic art for instance. So, believe it or not, all these issues are related. You have to look carefully for the links.

People seem to be aware of the issue but nothing or little appears to be being done to resolve it. Gupreet Singh Lehal who is a computer science professor of Punjabi University, has this to say: If you haven't seen it already, it is well worth watching this interview which covers some of these issues:

Captures the turmoil of those abroad trying to preserve their roots very well.

I love graphic novels. One of my favorites is The Walking Dead series. I noticed they've made it into a tv series recently (which I haven't seen). Check out this 'motion comic' which uses the images of the original publication:

Thanks for that. I was wondering, did it use familiar Panjabi words in ways you never encountered before? I think this guys writes the story in English first then translates it.

Sex selection and the rise of Generation XY A new book explores western involvement in what has become a scourge of the developing world: sex selection of babies http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/17/sex-selection-rise-generation-xy Sex selection of babies across the developing world has created many societies with too many men. Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP In 1979 China signed a $50m four-year deal with a UN body designed to help it control its spiralling population through family planning. It was the largest foreign aid package Beijing had accepted in almost 20 years. But the funds became entwined in China's one-child policy that was just taking hold, and instead of sponsoring an education drive for small families, the money was used to pay for posters in Chinese villages proclaiming "You can abort it! But you cannot give birth to it." The story of the complicity of the UNFPA, the UN's main population agency, in the tyranny of China's forced abortion policy is just one of the examples given in a book that explores western involvement in what has become a modern scourge: sex selection. Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl charts how the trend towards choosing boys over girls, largely through sex-selective abortions, is rapidly spreading across the developing world. While the natural sex ratio at birth is 105 boys born for every 100 girls, in India the figure has risen to 112 boys and in China 121. The Chinese city of Lianyungang recorded an astonishing 163 boys per 100 girls in 2007. The bias towards boys has been estimated to have caused the "disappearance" of 160 million women and girls in Asia alone over the past few decades. The pattern has now spilled over to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, the Balkans and Albania, where the sex ratio is 115/100. The unnatural skewing towards male populations has become so pronounced in recent decades that Hvistendahl, a writer for Science magazine, says it has given rise to a new "Generation XY". She raises the possibility that with so many surplus men – up to a fifth of men will be single in northwestern India by 2020 – large parts of the world could become like America's wild west, with excess testosterone leading to raised levels of crime and violence. "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," Hvistendahl writes. Already, the relative shortage of women in countries like China and Taiwan has helped create new markets in women. They include arranged wedding agencies that set up marriages between South Korean men and foreigners, often women from poorer nearby countries like Vietnam, that now account for 11% of all marriages in South Korea. There is also a booming trade in trafficking of women for prostitution out of Vietnam and a growing practice of child marriage in China, where wealthier families secure wives for their sons early by effectively buying young girls for their sons. Much of the literature on sex selection has suggested that cultural patterns explain the phenomenon. But Hvisten dahl lays the blame squarely on western governments and businesses that have exported technology and pro-abortion practices without considering the consequences. Amniocentesis and ultrasound scans have had largely positive applications in the west, where they have been used to detect foetal abnormalities. But exported to Asia and eastern Europe they have been intricately linked to an explosion of sex selection and a mushrooming of female abortions. Hvistendahl claims western governments actively promoted abortion and sex selection in the developing world, encouraging the liberalisation of abortion laws and subsidising sales of ultrasounds as a form of population control. "It took millions of dollars in funding from US organisations for sex determination and abortion to catch on in the developing world," she writes. Even now, when the pattern of sex selection has been well documented and the prospect exists of the developing world accommodating tens of millions more men than women, the UNFPA is refusing to face up to its mistakes and confront the problem, she says. "The effects of the major UN agency tasked with population advocacy distancing itself from the issue of sex selective abortion are immense," she writes, noting that the agency's foot-dragging has discouraged other global funds from engaging with the crisis.

Hang on a minute!! Earlier you said you'd been a nurse for about 1.5 years! What the XXXX? Do they let 14 year olds do jobs like that Scandapendua??? That's called child labour elsewhere!