HSD1

I think that woman is an Indian teacher at the american school. As well as the dangers of foreign influence and intervention there is the other side of the coin too - homegrown fundamentalism. Stuck between those two forces, it's no wonder Afghanistan is a mess. If we ever had our own country there would be no guarantee we could ever keep foreigners and fundamentalists in check.

Kids from mixed slavic families probably wont have any trouble fitting in. As long as our older coconut generation dont start whinging or trying to kick them out and British culture doesnt try and claim these kids and fill them with cr*p. I remember when I was a kid making friend's with a guy who's mum was East African and we never cared that he was mixed race. Other indians used to give him grief for it though. I've also come across mixed Sikh-SouthEast Asian folk who've been fun to get to know and they used to be great to have a laugh with. One of the few things I guess the younger Sikh generation gets right. Slavs dont seem to have that domineering, paranoid and derogatory attitude that the Anglo converts and mixed Anglo kids have. The fact that we have no past or current hostilities with these people helps, shared views as well as them being obviously influenced with a Punjabi upbringing. Of course there may be a few hang ups in the future for the part Eastern European Sikhs but nothing I can foresee. Half freshie and chav kids on the other hand are a completely different scenario. The fact that a love of drugs factors into the relationship and the controlling nature of a British upbringing might really damage these kids. Add to that the Social, who have a thing about Sikh kids and just putting them into care, we may have a lot of problems. Seeing as the Sikh grandparents are likely to be abroad it would be even harder to save these kids. I guess it wouldnt be hard for community elders to get a network of Sikh foster parents and possible adopters ready for the inevitable. But I doubt that the Gurdwara comittees would do anything on that scale. Is there any other way of keeping these kids involved?

Maybe these kids have better or more reliable organs? The dodgy medicine thing does sound perfectly plausible. Shame quality controls are that stringent. BTW why would you get an injection without knowing what's in it? It's your body, you shouldnt trust anyone. I wouldnt even let someone in the NHS give me an injection without telling me what it is.

I knew about the buildings but I thought that was more to do with stupidity and poverty rather than tourism. Who's responsible for all this? We're bigger slags than the Arabs or Thais.

Obviously there is only so much I can put on here. I cant cover every angle nor do people enjoy walls of texts. There is an element of free choice. But when you have mothers and older women who go on about how fair skin is always naturally more beautiful or fathers and male elders who talk of Britain as a land with streets paved with gold and British culture being intelligent, open and tolerant when they have never lived anywhere else and live in heavily desified areas, you have to ask how much is inadvertent brainwashing or deliberate attempts at getting their kids to buy into finding a way up the British social ladder no matter what. As for what happens to you in supermarkets, they're probably afraid you're going to say something and pop that bubble they've built. Better off just pretending you dont exist. I find it quite funny how girls like that do have a reaction when they see a smart apnah with a good looking gori though. Eyes like daggers! lol. A lot of what I said above also applies to boys as well. Girls sometimes get the feeling that they are hard done by where as boys get it easy. If you coddle your lad and turn him into a brat, no girl will want him. Being leary and a git wont make you a hit with the kind of women you want. My friend showed me her facebook message inbox and for all the stupid ones from sulleh and goreh/kaleh there were a few from freshies from East Punjab including teenage boys who were saying things like 'I smoke dope all day every day, how bout you give me your number and be my girl?' It doesnt help that our lot can be pigs just as much as any other set of guys out there. I am not saying go to the other extreme and become shy and reclusive, but develop a sense of manhood that wont make you act like a dog in public. The fact that some Sikh guys arent even taught that shows that the Sikh model for raising kids isnt always working. If we do let Sikhs kids just get on with it, we have to know why it doesnt happen in a widespread sense already. The older generation have to face the fact that its not the 19th century any more and arranged marriages that used to be for people who used to spend all their lives in the same village dont cut it in the real world. It's gone from something set up by mature, wise and intelligent elders for helping young people find someone not from the same village to a sometimes dangerous game of russian roulette. Now if we do just let kids get on with it we have to face some other things. I've been to get togethers where women had fights because one of them used to know a bloke and the guy's new wife isnt keen on her being around. I'm sure guys are like that too. A while back a Sikh girl and her new boyfriend killed her ex boyfriend who happened to own the Sikh channel. This is something we need to get over or bypass if you want people to find their own spouses. Otherwise the violence will escalate and end up being another thing we get stereotyped for as well as fracturing communal cohesion. Getting over caste or family differences is another thing. If they are Sikhs it shouldnt matter what caste they are or whether your families may have had it in for each other in the past. Just let them get married. Old folks are going to be long dead whilst the kids are the ones who'll have to live with the choices.

This will probably start happening in Punjab (if it hasnt already) due to the tourist fetish they now have.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-photos-saudi-arabia-doesnt-want-seen--and-proof-islams-most-holy-relics-are-being-demolished-in-mecca-8536968.html More photos and information here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mecca-for-the-rich-islams-holiest-site-turning-into-vegas-2360114.html http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/why-dont-more-muslims-speak-out-against-the-wanton-destruction-of-meccas-holy-sites-8229682.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/medina-saudis-take-a-bulldozer-to-islams-history-8228795.html

Well that sucks then. Just another thing that Pakistan seems to get right and we dont.

So the west causes a problem and then whinges about it? Hardly surprising. The obvious way to deal with an abundance of men is to make them emigrate and get married wherever they end up. Plenty of faujis here have married polish or chav girls. Countries that have ridiculous amounts of women are seeing them leave to find husbands. Supposedly Russia has this problem.

Yeah, but a lot of Sikhs think the wider community loves us and wont say anything. Then when they show their true colours we are completely unprepared and get involved in these long drawn out processes.

It's because we teach a skewed form of our history and we dont quite get the world we live in. If you live in a predominantly muslim area you cant expect not to be dragged down with them. In the 80s Sikhs used to encourage their boys to get educated but told the girls they might as well just get jobs after school as their husbands would look after them financially. This caused a 'class gap' to form where boys were well educated and had gone to unis and mixed with white girls where as Sikh girls had gone and got jobs and stayed working class. The paki boys werent that smart but were more on the same level as the Sikh girls and they could relate. Sikh girls were too stupid to see what was going on. A lot of other Sikhs didnt care. Living so close to them and not knowing the other tricks the sulleh have just goes makes most of this grooming go over most Sikh's heads. Even today the way religion is taught gives girls a skewed view of men that they convince themselves that what they see is true even though the reality is different. Teaching your girls that everyone is the same and that everyone is good just leads to a quixotic viewpoint in these girls. They hear that and grow up around Sikhs who get up to all sorts and are far from the perfrect model of humanity that we like to convince ourselves everyone else is like. They also grow up in poor ghettoed areas and make the mistake of linking their poverty in upbringing to Sikhs as community rather than realising the realities of immigrant development and their own recent history. Once they go out in the big bad world and come across some gorah or sulleh or kaleh they are like lambs to the slaughter. All a gorah has to say is 'oh you guys are the ones with the golden temple right? oh man you guys are so cool and you fought for us in the world wars, man I would love to know more about you guys and increase my spirituality' , and whereas a typical asian girl would think 'oh great a perv with an asian fetish', sikh girls are like 'omg! he says he likes my religion so he cant be a racist! wow I could save him and make him a Sikh and my family would love him and we could get married and have piles of mixed race babies and everyone would love us and we just be perfect! I would get to know a white family and feel accepted and not be an immigrant no more! Oh Waheguru Waheguru Waheguru!', rather than realising he probably says it to any girl who will listen. The girl gets into a relationship and gives the guy the one thing he wants. If he sees there is no sexual/social/money reason to stick around he just tells her it wont work out and goes off to give the line to the next girl. If there is a reason to stick around they end up like those couples you see in London. The Sikh bint then has to evaluate what just happened if she gets dumped. She's too perfect so it cant be her (lol). The bloke is perfect so it cant be him (lol). Sikhi is perfect so it cant be that. Of course it's those dirty smelly Punjabis in the wider family and community! They ruin everything! They should have worshipped the bloke and gone overboard to make him stay and not driven him away! At this point the girl goes in overdrive hating on her own community and causing the rest of us grief until she gets used and dumped a few more times before it sinks in what is going on. At that point she wants an arranged marriage to a rich Sikh bloke if some gorah doesnt see a reason to get married to her first. Even if girls know this they still fall for other tricks. People like to hit on a girl from a different race and if they cant get their way they call her racist. No one likes being called racist right? Dumb girls fall for that as well. Sometimes this boils down to an intelligence thing. Sulleh on the other hand try the forbidden thing or play on girls boredom or unhappiness within their community. Trying to get girls to be more religous aint going to help. Involving and including them in the community and not raising them solely to be good housewives would help. That doesnt mean trying to stick turbans on them or keeping them in the Gurdwara all weekend. It means doing things that real culture does. But hobbies and wider culture arent flavour of the month amongst us. Kaleh play off being cool and again use the thing about giving girls something they dont get in their own community. When their living in a council flat with a kid they suddenly arent so proud of what they've done but it's too late by then. At the end of the day look after the women in your family and wider community. Keep an eye out and do something. Nothing criminal, but reason with them. Show them what is really going on and how they are being used. Raise them with the self respect and intelligence they need to not turn into victims. Raise your sons to want women like that.

It's a real shame how people are still being duped by these sort of international arranged marriages. In the UK there are strict laws preventing non-EU spouses being brought over even if one person has a full UK passport. People in India shouldnt still be falling for this.

The problem with novels that straddle the line between fact and fiction is that the average reader doesnt have the brain to differentiate and those who are smart will see an agenda. No matter how you say it, we are all prejudiced and opinionated and this will always come across. In the west we see this with Christian fiction which is 'based on a true story' but when you research the backstory, it is wildly different. I've been writing some scripts and alternative history novels based on Sikh history. I have found that to avoid the issue of bias I just state facts if they can be backed up but have them in the background to my fictional story so that people who may watch or read could tell the difference (hopefully). If you want to write a novel, why not make up the story and heroes etc but include your research as backstory and background? That way the reader can differentiate the fictional story/characters you have made up with the research about Guru Gobind Singh Ji? It will be like having two novels in one and will avoid the usual criticism thrown at these kinds of novel. I dont doubt your heart is in the right place and that this project will be great but some people react differently to other people's notion of a good idea. We already have enough problems of people just making stuff up about our Gurus so you will need to tread carefully.

That's just a relatively good looking woman using her image as a successful actress to sell a commercial product. Girls want her figure, boys want a girl like her, women want to be youthful or toned like her, men want their wives to look like her etc etc. If you gave her a choice between selling her image like that or having to find a rich husband and be a housewive like in the 1930s, she would probably want the former. It doesnt help that we have people like Sunny Leone and Hard Kaur who are far worse, slagging off their heritage in the West, but can reinvent themselves in East Punjab and be successful and widely accepted by Sikhs. No, the racists just fled to other towns and villages during the 80s/90s so there was no longer the racial issues of the 60s/70s. Sikhs like to say the English love us but it was clear that with the white flight from Southall/Hayes and other Sikh areas that we are being tolerated at best. With the recent immigration and growth of new wealth and middle class from the BRICs it just meant there is more chance of contact between the racist Brits and 'foreigners'. Racism and racists always existed before hand. The war on terror and the apathy to torture and civilian casualties in the Middle East adds to the feeling of dissociation from the wider community among some musis.

Sikhs kids in the UK cant even mow their lawns let alone farm. I doubt the ramgarhias can make tables that well either. The thing is what is the point of running off? East Punjab has changed massively in the last few years. Indian immigrants smoking tobacco near Gurdwaras and not speaking Punjabi, african students in the universities murdering South Asian students and getting police protection when the Punjabi students try to teach them a lesson, russian and english mobsters setting up drug factories and smuggling in all sorts of drugs, russian women running around looking for husbands, western layabouts/hippies/weirdoes just lounging around the villages, goreh inlaws playing sahib, failed industrialisation in Ludhiana, an elite who are mean and cruel based on the idea that their prosperity is based on good actions in a past life rather than luck and hardwork etc. You'll just be going from the fire to the frying pan. We live in a globalised world. A bomber can set off from one side of the world and be dropping bombs on the other side within a few hours. You could go to sleep in your home and wake up to see that a foreign company has bought your village and land for their portfolio and the local police and paramilitaries are being paid to kick you off. A bank account could be hacked by someone on a different continent and a life's worth of work and saving could be gone in a moment. There is nowhere that is safe, there is nowhere that is 'pure'. Wherever we go we will face issues and these will catch up with everyone one day. A few acres in Punjab are going to look odd with the way that people are going mad for house building there. Who the houses are for I dont know as so many are leaving Punjab, but in trying to run away from the rest of the world you may find that it has already found you. Anyway, if the British think they can kick out all brown people then I hope they are ready to accept all the Brits who will be kicked out of foreign countries. All those middle class 'fake it till you make it' types in Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi and Turkey etc arent going to be welcome. That's just muslim countries. Sikhs in other parts of the world arent going to be happy about the treatment of their relatives and do you think the Brits would enjoy being holed up in their piss-soaked little island? Think about these things.

Eh? I'm the one who sees the weirdoes and stares them down, if they know you know they wont do anything. Its just that all this attention we've got lately isnt doing us any favours and being weak attracts more predators. But if you take someone's pic and tell them that if they come back they'll be dealt with it only goes so far. I cant be in the Gurdwara everyday and I cant be in every hall or room where the kids like to go and play by themselves. It's not like the Gurdwaras take security that seriously either. That's why we need to be aware of a possible new front and nip it in the bud by having an established system to deal with it. You know our lot though, they'll just say we're scaring off the goreh and stopping paedos becoming Sikhs and that kind of stuff. They cant tell the difference between someong looking at kids and a perv with 'that look' on their face. They had their heads in the sand for twenty years of grooming, why are the majority going to change now?

Just the way Britain is now. I hope the people back home in Punjab are listening as with all the immigrants there, this kind of racial conflict could happen there too. Us lot in the UK will just have to deal with it. Dumb goreh and dumb muslims, both as bad as each other. Best not to get involved and look after ourselves.

Lets face it, this is just the usual noise about white is good and brown is bad. The fact that they wont even differentiate between Asians when they are trying to find racial motivation just shows what is going on. In a country where companies target middle aged white women with holidays to the Caribbean to have sex with young boys or where you can come across people talking about what they got up to on holidays in South East Asia it seems that the main issue is the colour of skin of the person doing the kiddyraping and the colour of the kid. If it's white on non-white or white on white or non-white on non-white they dont care. But if it's non-white on white, suddenly the usual chestbeating, hair tearing and shrill whinging comes out. A few months ago a white school teacher ran off with a underage white school girl. Grown women in the news/tv/press all talked about having crushes on their teachers whilst at school and wouldnt have minded getting the same 'preferential' treatment. But if the teacher had been some Asian bloke? I dont they would have had the same reaction. I think Sikhs need to kind of see that this isnt going to be resolved in their favour by an external force. If it goes back to sulleh picking on SIkhs and Hindu girls the goreh will just shrug their shoulders and say 'typical brown folk'. They only began to care when these people began targetting white girls. Also the issue of Sikh apathy to grooming may not go unnoticed by paedo networks that existed before the sulleh ones. The last thing we need is for those lot to get these ideas as well. Judging by some of the weirdos you see coming to Gurudwaras nowadays it may already be starting.

True. But if they thought we were haphazard or hadnt thought it through or might lose in the long run then they might have just sat on the fence. Even better would have been to rope in some European or African countries who had grievances and had them on side. If Sikhs had inflicted some major defeats on the British, the French might have smelt blood and decided to get some payback for Britain keeping them down. Or Russia. But we'll never know. International and South Asian diplomacy wasnt something Sikhs practiced that well back then.

From reading books about the Anglos Sikh Wars, the Nihangs in Afghanistan, wars during that time period, maps of Sobraon, British correspondence, European accounts of Punjab and other information about that time period. Then it's just a case of connecting the dots. Talking about Sobraon reminds of some stuff I read about the Battles for the Taku Forts in China and the plight of Russian infantry in the Crimean War, there were similarities but also differences that make them interesting - if I find the articles I'll post them in the history subforum. True, but he said that in the 1810s whilst the Punjab Army was modernising. It sounded like he wanted to teach the British a lesson for what happened in Amritsar rather than thinking it through. The British were in the ascendancy whilst the Afghans were on the wane. Whilst the Sikhs modernised it made more sense to sort out the Afghans and leave the British to later. If we attacked the British whilst Afghanistan was still a threat we would have ended up with a war on two fronts. Judging by what happened to the Sikh Misls when they fought the Marathas an attack on Ludhiana wouldnt have worked out too well. When Sikhs besieged Maratha strongholds the Ms managed to hold out as they had artillery and European officers and training. Sikhs had limited artillery and had a hard time getting supplies or feeding so many horses outside of Punjab. When the Ms took the field, we had the advantage and their European training/officers/artillery didnt count for sh*t. It didnt take them long to figure out that a string of well garrisoned and equipped forts would keep them safe as well as giving up the idea of beating Sikhs in pitched battles or skirmishes. The British would have carried on the same strategy and Sikhs would have had to overcome their shortfalls through modernisation, something that hadnt been achieved in the early 19th century until the mid 1820s. The golden period for an attack on India would have been 1829 - 1836. We had modernised, were superior to the Afghans in technology/organisation/command and the British hadnt been able to bring steam technology to their forces in South Asia. Even if we had done it then, the Dogras and foreign officers in the Punjab Army would have been an unknown quantity as would the muslim majority of Punjab once large numbers of Sikh soldiers left to fight in other parts of India. There was also the question of what India would have looked like if Sikhs had won the Anglo-Sikh Wars.

Which information?

This is something that I remember has been discussed in the past but usually in reference to Sikh tactics as a whole rather than the Akalis specifically. What it boiled down to was obsolence - the Akalis like the Zulus or Highlanders or Pindaris or Asantes etc before them were fighting an enemy who knew them better than the Sikhs knew themselves. The 19th century was one of those eras of rapid change where those who didnt keep up were swept away. The Akalis failed to learn what was going on in the world or how to react to it and paid the price. Rather than being due to Maharaja Ranjit Singh's realpolitik, the high attrition rate of the Nihangs was due to the melee nature of their tactics and the scale of the battles they fought. To discuss Sobroan we need to think about the Punjab Army as a whole and the traitorous Dogras, and how that fits into what happened. Firstly, Sobraon was a defensive cantonment built long before the Sikh Empire. It was designed to prevent people crossing, probably from East to West and was designed to be defended by a small number of infantry against an enemy who wouldnt have large scale artillery or firearms. By the 1840s it was an obsolete defence. It couldnt accomodate more than 10000 men. In that era, if you were defending a river crossing or bridge you would defend the opposite side to the one your enemy would be on. Why? Well you would force their artillery to come right to edge of the water to see your positions and if the enemy infantry tried to cross they would run the risk of getting their gunpowder wet once they crossed to the other side and lose the ability to use their guns. Bridges could also be blown up. By trying to defend on the same side of the river as their enemy, the Punjabis were trying to maintain a 'beachhead' which is a far more difficult task. Add to that the fact that the East India Company had steam ships which could sail right up to the positions at Sobraon to bombard them or disembark troops behind the defences, you really have to wonder why Sikhs defended such an untenable position. The answer is that the Dogras knew what they were doing and the Sikhs didnt. How does that bring in the Akalis? Well, they were outside the command structure of the Dogras and were relatively free to do what they wanted, but still chose to dig in at Sobraon. Big mistake. Secondly, the Akalis didnt know how to build defences to prevent attack from large groups of ordered infantry with firearms as they were too used to fighting Afghans. The British remarked at Sobraon how the Sikh defensive positions werent standardised. Some were incredibly well built, probably by well drilled and experienced Punjabi regiments who knew what they were doing and had training on it. The Akalis just seemed to throw bushes and palisades down and call it a day. One British cavalry regiment managed to actually fit through a gap in the defences because they had been so badly made! This gap also had no defenders - they had gone to the dugouts near the river. The flippancy and lack of discipline amongst Nihangs wasnt doing them any favours. They had gone from being a danger to themselves to putting everyone on their side in danger. Thirdly, Akalis seemed to be ignorant of how artillery had changed even though they lived in the same country as one of the best artilleries in the world. In the 18th century, cannonballs tended to be made of solid metal. They were designed to bring down walls. Against infantry they were fired into the area in front of the enemy - the shot would then bounce and hopefully take out a whole column. Imagine it to be like bowling in cricket. The Akali idea of digging pits was a good one. The enemy artillery wouldnt be able to quite see where the Akalis were and wouldnt be able to bounce a shot through them. The alternative was to fire a shot into the hole which is no easy task even for experienced gunners. To illustrate this point, imagine you have some skittles (the sticks not the sweets) arranged in a square at the end of your garden. If you have to throw underhand (like a cannon on the floor would) you can practice to get the ball to bounce and take out a greater number than if it landed in the middle. But imagine you then dig a hole, and put the skittles in there randomly or to one side. A bit more difficult now isnt it? Unfortunately for the Akalis, as good as this idea was in the 18th century, by the 19th century the idea wasnt just obsolete it was downright dangerous. Mortars and howitzers had been invented that lobbed shells in a high arc to land vertically on the enemy (imagine in the skittles analogy that you are now allowed to throw overarm). Punjab had plenty of these new type of artillery and had used them to devastating effect on the Afghans and Chinese. The Akalis had been present at some of these battles, but it never occurred to them the implications if their enemies had these weapons. Add to that the new type of shells that were around. Canister/grapeshot/shrapnel/quicklime shells were in use by all modern infantries back then. The Akalis should have known this. If one of those shells landed in a hole filled with Akalis it would do far more damage as the hole amplifies the effect of the blast and reduces the chances of anyone inside being able to avoid a shell. In the skittles analogy, this would be like switching from an ordinary ball to a waterballoon. The regular regiments built trenches that were much thinner and with dugouts so they were less likely to be hit (smaller surface area) and even if they were the effects wouldnt be as bad. After the artillery had finished and the battle started, the Akalis probably expected the British to come and jump in their holes and fight man to man as the Afghans did. The British, seeing a bunch of guys in a hole with few firearms, decided to just shoot them from above and avoid a melee and maintain their order. The Akalis failed to understand their enemies on a basic level or to even differentiate between their enemies strengths and how that would make them act on the battlefield. The British didnt understand why the Akalis dug these pits, one even wrote that the Akalis knew they were going to die so they had decided to dig their own graves! Obviously it's not true that the Akalis knew they were going to die and wanted to be buried like the English buried their dead, but the Akalis had dug their own graves in metaphorical way whether they knew it or not. Those who survived the above didnt have a great time as the bridge to other side of the river was down. Most Sikhs didnt know how to swim, probably due to not having to in regular life or the dangers of Punjabi river wildlife. Again, another chink in the armour that is used to tear a wound more grievous than could have been imagined. Finally, putting aside the reality of what happened, what about tactics? We all know about two and half strikes. Find their weak point and attack, surprise them and attack and half a strike for a pitched battle. The Akalis had got so comfortable that they thought they would win with a bunch of half strikes. Why did the Nihangs not set all of India on fire when the EIC had most of their troops in Sindh and East Punjab? Why did the Nihangs not adopt the French Republican column tactic? Why did the Akalis not take up horse artillery? Why didnt they crossover to India with the above tactics and turn the Grand Trunk Road into a highway of death? With their rear being attacked and supplies being ambushed and civil revolt likely to be incited by the Nihangs, Napier/Gough/Harding etc would have to send troops to garrison their rear and protect their supplies. The Nihangs could have done to British travelling from Calcutta to Ludhiana what they did to the Mughals and Afghans travelling from Delhi to Kabul in the previous century. But why didnt they? Where was the leadership? Where were the brains? Where were the fresh tactics that had always given us the edge? Why did they do such stupid things? Unfortunately understanding our own history is fairly hit and miss with our lot. Plenty have their own agendas and I dont really care. If you believe that Akalis were infallible and that the reason we lost the First AngloSikh War was due to lack of religion or people not saying their prayers or drinking alcohol or beards not being long enough than you can, I wont argue with you no matter how stupid those points are.

Come on Pali, dont be like that. Prophecies always come true - Maharajah Duleep's zombie is going to go to Russia one day and convince the Tsar to invade India and liberate Punjab just like the Sants said in the 80s. The 1880s.

I once matha tekked to Ganesh when I was a kid. Turns out it was just a VHS copy of Dumbo though so it's all good.