HSD1

Probably not as good as a physical copy. You'll need power for your computer to read the book. No idea if it lets you print it or if it has DRM. But the price is incredibly cheap.

Now available for 77 of your Queen's pence if you have a kindle device or computer. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Confessions-American-Sikh-corrupt-ebook/dp/B00ANSWUPM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1360329462&sr=1-1 Or a dollar elsewhere.

You can inform them but their naivety and apathy wont stop them. Who in their right minds sends young women off like this though? I've never heard of it before. Eastern european and chinese women usually have to be abducted and drugged to work in the sex industry according to the victims, but here we have Sikh girls just walking into it thinking they were going off to the uk to work as maids/waitresses and that every westerner/middle easterner is a Mr Darcy or Sharukh Khan. Hate to break it to our sisters but it's not only Indians who can be rapists and sex criminals. Do East Punjabis even use the internet and come on these forums or watch these videos? Is it really worth your daughter being used by greeks, chavs, fauji junkies, polaks, off the boat kaleh and all the other dregs of Western society for the off chance you might get some money? Like I've said before, wouldnt you rather your daughter/sister worked in a factory in East Punjab instead. Even some Korean investors said EP had potential and worth building industries in. Once their women were brought as trophy wives by yanks or were used as sex workers in other countries. After industrialisation and economic development they dont have these problems. Wake up to reality, you cant keep running from East Punjab. As for the families who wont own up to their daughters being abused and refusing to take them back - name and shame them. This is just like kuri-mar. If this happened to UK Sikh girls I would be down at the visa sellers office until they sorted it out. And God help them if they didnt. Badal, if he had a backbone, would shut them all down and throw them in prison. Use their assets to bring back the victims and rehabilitate the them. Are there no Sikhs left in East Punjab? We shoot all this war porn about our ancestors up our veins yet we cant even protect our own like they used to? What the hell is going on?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Affairs-Britains-Collusion-Radical/dp/1846687640 Came across this book. Looks interesting, has anyone here read it? Does it mention the Second Anglo-Sikh War or Syed Ahmad? For years, violent Islamist groups were allowed to settle in Britain, using the country as a base to carry out attacks abroad. This was tolerated in the belief that they would not bomb the country where they lived and that, as long as they are here, the security service would be able to infiltrate them. At the same time mosque after mosque was taken over through intimidation by the fundamentalists. Police and others in authority refused pleas from moderate Muslims with the excuse that they did not want to interfere. There was even a name for this amoral accommodation: the "covenant of security". We now know that jihadists will indeed blow up their home country and that the security agencies signally failed to infiltrate the terrorist cells while they had the chance. The part played by officials in the growth of terrorism in Britain is a relatively small-scale affair compared to what went on abroad. Successive UK governments had nurtured and promoted extremists for reasons of realpolitik often at a terrible cost to the population of those countries. Mark Curtis, in his book on "Britain's collusion with radical Islam", charts this liaison. He points out how reactionary and violent Muslim groups were used against secular nationalists at the time of empire and continued afterwards to back UK and Western interests. The price for this is now being paid at home and abroad. I am writing this review in Helmand, where a few days ago I went on an operation with British and Afghan troops against insurgents whose paymasters, across the border in Pakistan, have been the beneficiaries of US and British largesse. Curtis points out that two of the most active Islamist commanders carrying out attacks in Afghanistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalalludin Haqqani, had particularly close contacts with the UK in the past. Hekmatyar met Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street when he was a favourite of MI6 and the CIA in the war against the Russians. Haqqani, while not the "Taliban's overall military commander fighting the British" as Curtis says (he runs his own network parallel to the Taliban), was viewed as a highly useful tool in that conflict. The Western use of the Mujaheddin as proxy fighters is well documented. It resulted in the spawning of al-Qa'ida, the spread of international terrorism, and the empowering of ISI, the Pakistani secret police, who became their sponsors. Curtis examines the lesser known by-products of this jihad: the dispatch of Afghan Islamist veterans, with the connivance of Britain and the US, to the wars in the Balkans and the former Soviet republics in central Asia, and ethnic Muslim areas of China. Vast sums of money from the West's great ally, Saudi Arabia, helped fund the Reagan administration's clandestine war in support of repressive military juntas in Latin America while, at the same time, buttressing the aggressive Wahabi faith embraced by many terrorist groups. The use of hardline Islam by the West was particularly prevalent at the time of the Cold War. In many instances, however, the targets for destabilisation were not Communist regimes but leaders who had adopted left-wing policies deemed to pose a threat to Western influence and interests. The UK attempted to combat "virus of Arab nationalism", after Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in Egypt and nationalised the Suez Canal, by forging links with the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation involved in terrorism. The nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by the democratically elected Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadeq led to a British-American organised coup which was facilitated by Ayatollah Seyyed Kashani, one of whose followers was the young Ruhollah Khomeini. In Indonesia, the removal of Ahmed Sukarno in another military coup by the UK-US was carried out with the help of Darul Islam. Its followers went on to massacre socialists and trade unionists. In each of these cases the clandestine backing of Britain and the US strengthened Islamist groups at the expense of secular bodies and moderate Muslims. These groups then went to form terrorist groups whom the West would later have to confront in the "War on Terror". Here in Afghanistan, its most ferocious and violent front, moves are once again under way to negotiate with Islamists as the West seeks an exit strategy from a conflict increasingly costly in lives and money. The UK, more than the US, has been pressing President Hamid Karzai to come to an agreement with the insurgents. This goes beyond reintegrating the foot soldiers - a sensible policy - to a settlement with the leadership of Haqqani, Hekmatyar and Mullah Omar. The Pakistani ISI is eager to help broker such a deal and Karzai, who no longer believes Western politicians have the stomach for a long-term military commitment, is veering towards this as the option which will keep him in power. The Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, minority communities who had fought the Pashtun Taliban in the past, warn this will re-ignite the civil war. Human rights groups fear hard-won civil liberties, especially for women, will be sacrificed in order to cut a deal with the Islamists. For Britain and the West the result is likely to follow the past pattern of the history of involvement with extremists: short-term gain followed by long-term loss as the international jihad continues to grow and gain ground. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/secret-affairs-by-mark-curtis-2038691.html

Sikhs just watch Sky News to see what's going on in the world and that's all they see. We cant even acknowledge when someone is out to get us let alone understand what a conflict really is. How can there be conflict when the world is full of unicorns and rainbows and jellybabies and the Khalsa rules the world lol?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/launching-ecommerce-startup-middle-pakistan-142535807.html I wonder how this compares to setting up internet businesses in East Punjab?

Came across these pictures of Afghanistan from before their troubles. http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2013/01/28/podlich-afghanistan-1960s-photos/5846/ Couldnt find any pictures of Sikhs or Gurudwaras amongst them (but there are some pics of jalibeyah) but definitely interesting to see what Punjab's neighbour used to be like. Here are some more: http://www.pbase.com/qleap/afghan

I would say about a third of all Sikhs I know are like this. About a quarter are the opposite. The rest couldnt care either way. It's not surprising so many love the British Empire. Some Sikhs were always part of the British Empire (Malwa) and growing up here it's not like we hear the bad things about them.

I like the article. I do. But there are some things I feel need to be said. Like supporting the Native Americans is one thing. But what about following that through? Idle No More has shown the ugly side of the colonisation that Sikhs dont bother to understand, that the whites took the land by force and want to keep it that way as seen by the reaction of their descendants. A bit like how Sikhs say India is so great before news breaks that a Dera or Police have beaten a whole bunch of Sikhs. The way we see things and how they are in reality are miles apart. Would Canadian Sikhs who talk about how great their country is acknowledge things like this: And it goes beyond facing the fact that there are so many untoward types in the supposedly open and loving Canadian community. Sikhs pride themselves on their history and stories. Saving Hindu women from Afghan invaders who we happened to be at war with and who were crossing our Punjab is a well told story. Our ancestors were a decent bunch, mostly. But did you know that 30-80% of all Native American Women in the US and Canada will be raped before they are 30 by non-Native Americans? It's a bit rich of us all to be patting ourselves on the backs for what our ancestors did when this is going on under the noses of Sikhs over there. Even if Sikhs did want to stop it how would they? Get some guns and a pick up truck and patrol around reservations? If there is a shootout I can see the media and public opinion falling on both sides but mainly on the side of the poor whites getting shot by the bearded browns. Where as our ancestors couldnt give a hoot who they pissed off, the thought of the wrath of the squatting hosts would be more than enough to make Sikhs not get involved. We have Sikhs who cry their eyes out when they see Palestinians on tv, but dont bother to care for the First Nations living down the road from them who have endured foreign occupation for centuries not decades. Ironic, no? You have Sikhs who travel to Palestine and do god knows what. Would Sikhs be willing to perform the same for Native Americans? We have lawyers dont we? We have rehabilitation programmes for drugs/drink dont we? We have media outlets there dont we? We have money dont we? Wouldnt the right thing to do be to train Native Americans to protect themselves? But which Sikhs would really go out into the real world and do that.... It's not as if our own community dont practice their own kind of personal racial hangups either. Remember that Native American women who had converted to Islam and came on SikhSangat to learn about Sikhi? Remember how badly she was treated by posters on there? If Sikhs are so smart they would understand where people like her are coming from and get why she asked things the way she did. They didnt. They tore into her like an American cavalry regiment and seem quite pleased with themselves when she was banned/stopped posting. That would never have happened to a white person especially of AngloSaxon background. Then there are those rumours of what Yogi Bhajan/3HO did to the Native Americans they came across. Yeah we can say what we want about the whites, but when our own Punjabis begin practicing the same colonial nonsense that our ancestors would have hung them for, I can only wonder what the hell is going wrong. Like the author of the article said, nothing brings Sikhs together like a good fight, especially if we are the underdog. The question is, have centuries of white washing colonialism and the comforts of a peaceful lifestyle poisoned us to the point that all we can do is bark and not bite? EDIT: for some reason I cant post the pictures.

At the rate things are going we would be better off with a lottery system.

Some parts of the UK look like the Soviets nuked them anyway. And dont get me started on the mutants. jk But seriously has anyone noticed how AlQaeda in Afghanistan and Mali are bad....but AlQaeda in Syria and Chechnya are good (according to the media and govt anyway)? Some dirty mind games going on.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/blogadamcurtis/posts/PARADIABOLICAL?filter=none#dna-comments Here is the rest of the article.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aaf_1360011654 <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.liveleak.com/ll_embed?f=6690647f1bb3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I used to think that guy was relatively smart, with comments on the legality of certain things the Indian Government and the Hindu Forum of Britain were up to. After the immigration thread and his reaction to the BBC Panorama documentary I realised the guy is just a complete screwloose.

Considering how some Sikhs in America want to build Gurudwaras in the middle of areas where there are no Sikhs and many American Sikhs dont like guns and want to support their banning or restriction, it's not surprising that they are so open to attacks like this. Having said that, I've noticed 'unsavoury' types lurking around my local Gurdwaras over the last year too. I guess it could happen anywhere.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/armed-men-rob-california-gurudwara-324068

i dont know, seems like it's not meant to take the mick like Bollywood does. But it might be, it's hard to tell.

You may have already come across this site but if you havent I hope you find it useful: http://www.sikhs.nl/Main_french/LeGuruGranthSahib.htm Unfortunately I am not fluent in French so I could not understand most of it.

Damn, this is some Indiana Jones level stuff.

Interesting, very very interesting. Funny how no one has actually begun the grown up discussion you refer to though. Did you post this on SikhSangat? I have to say I have very limitted exposure to the Prof's writings. Even less to the source material he refers to in his analysis above. But there is something I would like to share, bare with me through my points. If I asked a British Sikh were Birmingham was or asked an Indian Sikh were Ludhiana was, most of them would know and most would know how to get there. If we went to Pakistan and tried to find Lahore, the number of British/Indian Sikhs able to do that wouldnt be so high. 200 years ago it would have been the other way around. My point is that we are conditioned in various ways by where and when we are brought up. Sikh writers have no idea what the future holds and writing a future-proof history is pretty much impossible. Other culture pretend that they know their history but when you dig beneath the surface you find that what most of them believe is propaganda and not credible. Hence, what may seem 'poetic' and 'not informative' may be true for us reading it today, but at the time the people reading it would not have been looking for the same information that we are as they may already know it. An example of this is Homer's Iliad or Virgil's Aeneid. These were considered to just be poetry and symbolism of classical flights of fancy and almost mythic by the barbarians who themselves destroyed classical Europe. It was only until the 19th century that the neo-Europeans finally figured out the clues in the text and found the original Troy as well other sites in Roman/Greek classical epics. Now one reason it took so long to find out the secrets is that the Europeans we know now came from outside Europe and had no connection to Classical Civilizations. Why would they care where Troy was if they just wanted to slaughter and rape their way through the Roman Provinces? This information was lost when those civilizations fell. When Sikhs wrote their epics, they had no idea of the Anglo-Sikh Wars or Partition or the migration of Sikhs. What they took for granted on so many levels would feel alien to many Sikhs today. So what I'm saying is dont write off old Sikh sources just because we dont get them - that's our fault not the authors. Secondly, the Prof relates to the evacuation of Anandpur Sahib, which seems to have been one of the Sikh's main military/political/ religous centres at the time. If this is the case, we cant expect to find much historical texts that were kept there, especially if the Sikh soldier's did their jobs properly. When the enemy is at the gates you have you destroy or hide your sensitive information. I have no doubt that this is what was done and quite rightly so (from the perspective at the time). Again, thanks Dal for bringing this up. Quite a lot there to mull over!

Well the post colonisation Sikhs probably thought they were doing things the 'British way' or how they perceived the British to be. If what your saying is true then it cant be too hard to find the print and hold people accountable. If Sikh/Punjabi Institutions are following self-serving agendas then this should be easy to prove and held against them by exposing it in the wider community. A long long time ago a Sikh Emperor went to the Akal Takht for being a 'bad' Sikh and he took his punishment like an honest person would. Today, the holier than thou types are quicker with the finger pointing than they are with their wits, weapons or wisdom. Such a bizarre turn around. The more historical knowledge is diseminated the less chance there is of this. There is a reason the Anglo masses are taught a glorified and dumbed down version of their history, the truth about how the plebs were like would be too much for their fragile egos to handle. The postcolonial Sikh stuff is also in dangerous as it will be read and believed by many who will try to emulate it - thereby inducing the bland white washed types that Arabs/Europeans did with Islam/Christism in the people they conquered. Isnt that very disconcerting? If you were to merge with the Timeless One you would not be so hung up by how long things last!!! lol. But seriously, I get that but at the same time it's not like we cant achieve both. There are almost half a million Sikhs in the UK, that's a hell of a lot of us, it's not as if it cant be hard to create an octopus like structure where all the communities are interlinked but we know where the main body is. Like the Israelis or Turks or any other national group are like. The last thing we want is to be assimilated. That goes for the Sikhs in India just as much for the rest of us. No, that's not what I meant. I mean on a communal level. Like Sikhs are unhappy with being marginalised or facing institutional racism or white/hindu privelege. Surely happiness would be a result from knocking down and eliminating these obstacles? So surely these are viable pursuits of happiness? I was going to comment further on Naipaul's stuff but I have completely forgotten the points.

Exactly. So why are older Khalistanis still trying to sell something to individuals of certain backgrounds who will never want it as it will upset the established balance of power? The same goes for the Khalistanis who think outside countries would want to piss off India by helping seperatist movements. It's a waste of time, let them figure out what Sikhs want for themselves rather than giving them the rope to hang us with. To be honest I have never bought into the idea that Hindus are one homogenous blob, nor do I believe that the way they are today is how they have been in previous millenia. There is still a lot of difference amongst them according to caste, nationality (marathi/tamil/bengali etc) and where they fit into modern India. Having said that there is a lot of Hindus who are 'Hindustani' in the sense that they buy into Indian Nationalism in the same way that their forefathers bought into British Hindustan. Sikhs arent the only ones who have large sections of their community who look favourably upon colonialism. These guys would look upon Sikh sovereignty the same way any other previous central indian administration has - with anger. I agree that sweeping generalisations dont help but there is some truth in them when applied to certain groups within India. It is unfortunate that Sikhs in previous times didnt name and disect what they were up against so we could be a bit more specific. Well I'm not advocating militancy in East Punjab, or any kind of flaming. What I'm talking about is simple self determination. You say fixed tariffs only affect farmers but is that the case? Paying 60% - 75% for farm stuff is one thing. But what if Sikhs sold the food on international markets and got the full amount? You say they would be richer, but I see an opportunity for increased tax revenue too. We complain about how run down schools and hospitals are in EP but never talk about how to sort it out. This is isnt SikhSangat were people talk out of their asses with no idea of how to pay for half the ideas they come up with. With self-determination would also come the necessary power to reform the agriculture sector. Allow small farmers who dont want to farm to sell their land and break up big farm owners who own lots of land but dont do any work on it. Push to help medium size farms that become sustainable and arent hellish to run and change the law so that farm land can only be passed onto those who want to farm. Using increased tax revenue to fund an education system which doesnt force Sikhs to either farm or fly off to another country. Thereby weaning Sikhs from farming and giving EP the manpower for other industries. Creating industries which arent expoitative - small and young farmers who got rid of their land as they didnt want to farm could use their money to buy stakes in the industries they work in. Marx would love the idea! I think Brazil actually has businesses and factories that are run like this. It's weird how Sikhs pull faces at the notion of industrialisation but then come over to other countries to work in the very same type of jobs. China/Japan/Korea all had a generation who had to slog it out in the factories so that their kids could get an education in their own country and not have to run off abroad for opportunity. The fact that this hasnt been understood on any level in EP doesnt bode well for Sikhs, whether we stay in India or Khalistan. Seeing as India actually bans industry in EP, this is a reason for self determination. As for water allocation, those rivers are for Punjabis. Badal and the central government have shown no interest in finding out why they are so polluted. Notice how a lot of foreign farming companies are setting up shop in East Punjab. In africa these same companies have been responsible for famines. In central India, one American company sold GM seeds to farmers promising all kinds of benefits. The crop failed as it needed twice as much water than normal crops. Also the crop was attacked by pests. The expensive pesticide was conveniently made by the same company. All the Indian farmers started killing themselves and the company then demanded all unused seeds be returned to them as they are property of the company. This company has a lab in Punjab. Now Sikhs in EP, Badal and the central govt couldnt give a monkeys if the same thing happened in EP. Badal and Sikhs over there are just too stupid for their own good. It took one crazy white person to kill six Sikhs in America. It would take one crazy white/hindu scientist to re-engineer the seeds that are sold and we could have 20 million dead Sikhs. It may seem far fetched but these biological weapons do exist and every time Sikhs put our faith in others, we come out worse off. Letting Indians/foreigners/Badal run the show is going to ruin us. I'm not doing this to big up Jatt culture or whatever but to point out the pitfalls that are there. At the end of the day everyone has to eat, unless we want to turn Punjab into Somalia. If you dont believe me, the evidence is everywhere http://www.dailymail...fied-crops.html Coming to a Hindustani run Punjab near you soon. If we had self determination we would have our own journalists/scientists/laboratories to avoid things like this. But how many dimwitted EP's would know what to do if they get dumbed down educations? The main issue I havent mentioned is cultural genocide. If you got on a bus and it was empty apart from a fat man squashing a kid he didnt know by sitting next to him, you would think it was odd. India is big. There are lots of Hindus. Why are they so bothered about Sikh land/rights/culture? It seems as they just want to swallow us whole. I have the same feeling about Sikh minorities wherever they live in the world. Maybe if you cant see what I'm saying, how would you feel if Iraq/Libya and any other 'liberated' country had to sell it's oil to the USA for 60%? And as a result the musis couldnt fund anything in their own country? What has happened is that we have been too kind as a people. If you do something for someone, they get used to it. If you stop doing it they feel like they are losing out. Like Sikhs and the British Armed Forces, they got so used to having us around as cannon fodder that when we dont want to join the army in the same way they feel that we arent pulling our weight (look at the comments in the Telegraph for example in relation to the Scots Guardsman Bhullar). The fact that we got nothing out of fighting all these wars for Britain is lost on them. The same goes for the Indians, we have become so useful that they cant stand to lose us but they dont want us knowing our value so they put us down and try to grind us into blind obedience. No no, I get that. I say it to the Khalistanis I know. No one is just sitting around waiting for it. We Sikhs arent ready for self determination, if it came it would Badalstan or whatever ruling family got the reins of power. My points above are to kickstart the progression to the point were we either have autonomy in India (being in the Indian state doesnt really impact on our ambitions) or the ability to take over if something were to go wrong in South Asia. If things went wrong, the Sikhs in other countries would not be able to create a strong Khalistan as we havent even got strong communities over here. This point takes a bit of drumming for people to understand but once they get it they realise what we're on about. Bare in mind how the Jewish travels panned out. Their pre-Israeli cultural songs have a lot hurt in them, and the reason they survived so long is that they hid in plain sight or legged it when they could. Not something we should be inspired by to be honest. i.e You want a strong national character, something that can be passed on from generation to generation and be built upon, rather than the stupid history worship of people like the Javanese. Khalistan is the vehicle for this. A lot of Khalistanis are Punjabi Nationalists for lack of a better phrase (I mean they are Nationalists but not Nazis). SIkhs need to be educated on their pre-colonial history, not accept the whitewash and act like the Persians do after being Isamised. You should see how people feel after reading Amarpal Singh Sidhu's book, my friend wouldnt even believe the events were real until I showed him other books and videos on youtube about how advanced the Sikhs were back then militarily. He thought we were a bunch of yokels, but knowing the truth gave him the self confidence to leave all the caste crap behind and be a bit more well rounded in his views rather than soaking up garbage from the propaganda that our elders and the state give us. You can only expect better from someone if they have an identity that is grounded in something we can all relate to rather than being 'British Sikh'. That phrase is in itself shows where we've ended up. I dont blame you its so cold. I'm not sure if the book is still in print. I mention the Nalwa book as I managed to get a significant chunk of it on Google books by doing a search on tax rates in Maharajah Ranjit's time (dont ask). It certainly is an eye opening book. I havent gotten through the other topic yet.