HSD1

i thought that maharaja ranjit just made it up as he went along. his governors, lords and magistrates also had a lot of leeway in what they could do. regardless of this it was still a fairly just system of government and far outstripped the 'smash and grab' attitude the british had across the border.

so lets have a poll on the colour of the word sikh and the eye then.

so sikhs are a minority.........and? were the portuguese not a minority when they went and made an empire? (and look at how many people suffered - all that rape, torture, murder etc all in the name of converting 'heathens' to christism; another thing islam shares with their semite brethren). now consider this. there were a lot more muslims in the world than sikhs during the second world war. yet the number of muslims who fought against the nazis was nowhere near as much as the sikhs, nor where they as effective. as for the algerians, moroccans tunisians etc, what makes them "muslims"? surely just saying they are doesnt make it so, like when you mention punjabi "muslims". also, most of them were in the french army before the war, rather than joining up during the war. they had no choice. as for their reason for carrying on fighting, isnt it clear? after the war, the germans said that rapes and crimes against civilians were as barbaric in the french controlled sector as they were in the soviet one. and most of the perpetrators were north africans. you go on about sikhism and female infanticide, but what about islam and rape/kidnap/mistreatment of women? or the homosexual rape in iranian prisons (so much for an islamic republic)?. if the germans had won in north africa, the entire muslim world would have joined them. turkey was making noises at the pinnacle of german expansion, and the iraqis tried to help the nazis. the muslims helping the nazis were far more numerous than the other way round. another thing you forget is that the sikhs did not condone what happened to the jews and gypsies. they had no idea that was happening. all the sikh ss refused to fight on the eastern front to make it clear their quarrel was with britain. if the musis knew about auschwitz, they would have volunteered to work there. no sikh body offered support to the nazis. the same cannot be said of the muslims. and why do muslims say that everyone not like them are nazis? *yawn* change the record, that song is getting old. how is state controlled genocide the same as a culturally accepted attitude? millions of embryos are killed in abortions all over the world. and guess what - its a woman's choice. killing embryos is no different to having a pile of kids and forcing them to grow up in impoverished conditions with little opportunity in life apart from strapping explosives to themselves and blowing up a bunch of people they dont know. finally, as a musi, you should know that in islam it is considered a sin to accuse or insinuate that other muslims are not muslims. your comment about punjabis, probably based on some kind of b*stardised arab muslim/european belief system you have going on involving a dislike of people you consider inferior, just goes to show how ever you dress up your comments, there is the simple underlying 'stench' on your posts. whatever issues you have, go sort them out. you will find no exorcisms here.

they banned it as well? do they all have ocd over there or something?

i dont like the green in the sikh awareness logo. could we have a vote on that? i'd like it to be yellow btw.

lol, yes, when you said 'you just have to know how to find them', the fact is that a lot of people dont. we have to remember that not all the people who visit this forum are sikhs, and some dont have good intentions. it might be best to just start a thread and ask people to pm if they want to know more.

good points guys. but i feel that times have moved on as well. if we were saint soldiers again, we would still face many problems and not be able to regain what our ancestors once had. what we need to be is 'saint-soldier-scholars' and by that i mean we need to sharpen our minds. the world we live in is one where geopolitics is first and foremost, and to survive you need to strive to skew events and set the stage so that the battles are just a formality (or fun!).

not really. back then if you went and learnt to shoot all day or practiced sword skills, most people would think that was a good use of time. now the kids just play call of duty. we were a lot more militant back then, but we never realised how adaptable and intelligent the forces of the british empire and centralised hindu fanaticism would be in disarming us. now they have changed the rules of the game so much that i'm not sure a complete return to the militant way would get us back to where we were.

great ideas. so what do the mods/admin think? some of these sections would have to be members only though by the sounds of it.

..........well the sikhs did join up because they wanted to fight the british and free punjab. what reason did all those muslims have to support the nazis?

so will this involve using websites or journals or factual books? shame the gurudwaras dont stump up the money to provide for some sikh research dept at unis or attached to the gurudwaras themselves. i think the problems we face now are a lot more complicated, and we cant just shout a Jaikara and go charging in with swords and matchlocks to solve them unfortunately. what we need is an uber-leader like sant ji, who is sant-sipahi, but is also knowledgeable about the west, and can come up with tactics that cover every angle. the new leader would also have to be able to allow his/her lieutenants to take care of their area of responsibility without having everything micromanaged from the top. that means creating sikhs who are capable to fill specialist roles responsibly and willing to serve under someone else without thinking 'I SHOULD BE THE BOSSMAN NOT THEM!'. if you look at sikh societies at uni, they last about 3-4 years, as the older lot refuse to let the ones below run things and leave without sorting out what should happen. then there are gurudwara committees which are trying to create a new class of religous people in the panth by making sure their sons will take over. some of their sons run around in groups and get up to all sorts. but once again, how do we raise such sikhs? i think it all revolves around who runs the gurudwaras: they control the future of the panth. having given it some thought, i think one thing that annoys me is the difference between east punjab and england. i remember the last time i went there and some things are just unbelievable. sikhs moping around, not much development, laziness, biharis acting like they own the place, nothing to reflect e.punjab's economic development etc etc. when i came back i had to go to a certain english city, and i saw all these colonial buildings, towers built with the spoils and blood of the punjab, posh people with all those opportunities in their lives, institutions older than sikhi and part of me felt so annoyed that what happened 150 years ago led to this massive difference in our race's fortunes. like i said before, a sikh is just as clever/talented as any english person. but the english have skewed things so that they have opportunities so even a stupid posh person does well where as most sikhs have to make do on the lower rungs of the world order.

i meant certain white canadians on there who just want to slander sikhs because of the blowing up of air india flight whatever.

if you go onto any anti-sikh forum, you will see how they run rings around most of the sikhs who wander onto their forums. on most sikh forums, the mods ban the anti-sikhs as hardly anyone is good at refuting their points. the whole ravidassia episode on sikh sangat or the canadian/muslims/hindu attacks on sikhi on the sikh topix forum are good examples. in order to stop whitey using the whole 'we know better than you', i think we need to mimic what they do if the panth is not able to produce enough brains to counter them. reminds me of when my RE teacher told the christian kids in my class that jesus probably looked palestinian than a blonde haired blue eyed guy. some of them even cried. so where do we start? yeah, those fundamentalist who believe that before 1984/1947/1849 all sikhs were great gursikhs who never ate meat, did nothing that wasn't related to gurbani and never broke any rehat etc etc. are nuts. the panth will always be full of all sorts, its just that back then sikhs stuck together when it mattered. now all our divisions are exploited by outsiders and over emphasised by some in the panth. those who fought at sobroan, mudki etc were of different opinions and attitudes, but they just got on with it. now, people love fighting one another over meat/historical beliefs etc. as soon as we get over the differences, we can finally get somewhere. the panth is full of a lot of characters, but the stereotype you mentioned is one we should not encourage. are you Sunny Hundal? and no, its not that either.

to dalsingh, post 64, i think the 1st pic may be of a ghorchurra, but as they had no real uniform and were irregulars, they could have worn a number of things. the other 2 pics are of akhalis, and they never served in the ghorchara. the khalsa had 4 akhali regiments (one of the more notorious ones being 'The Hot Coals').akhalis rode horse but fought on foot in these battles. are all 3 pics off of britishbattles.com? they're not very good with the accuracy of their pictures or the details of the battles. post 65: well many british accounts did speak of vicious hand to hand combat. in the warrior saints book (if i remember correctly), there is an account by an english officer of one sikh fending off 4 horsemen before he got killed by the officer. sobraon was not a good place for SV. thousands of troops in a small section of land with the river at their backs. as you can see from the picture, the ramparts were not very effective against the english attack. also in the middle of the pic is a 12 pounder being wheeled in by the brits. they would do this and use grape/canister at short range to decimate our ranks. i dont think there was a SV tactic to deal with this as the goreh used this tactic throughout both wars, and it was usually successful. for some reason we didnt come up with something to counter it.

hmm, good point. it just occured to me that if laal singh was commanding the entire army, he would have worn something to distinguish him from the gorcharra, even though some gorcharra wore full armour chestplates aswell.

'lets go burn down their pubs! that'll teach those honkey island monkeys!' btw where's your pic from?

yep, in hind sight, to make up for the dubious reasons they get involved in all these wars. christian morality my ass. you think so? many sikhs portray mcleod as a christian missionary or a special agent of western institutions trying to undermine the great sikhs of today. actually mcleod was just another white scholar who stumbled across a bunch of foreigners and made a living of giving his opinions on them. loads of them do this, mainly as they are asses with nothing better to do or any real skills. unfortunately my sources are from memory and quite vague. the one about english girls drinking was a quote i read from a british general/missionary after the anglo-sikh wars, who said that the new governors/administrators should encourage sikhs to take up other things rather than war in order to make a living, and then went on to say that something should be done to counter the attitude among sikhs that christian ladies (basically english women) are drinkers. the one about prostitutes came from a letter/diary of some english lady that were uploaded by one of her descendants or someone who found what she wrote. i found it on a blog a few years ago after i did a search on akalis. in this account the english girl was visiting lahore with some british diplomat. she tells of seeing the akhalis as fanatics and how they were wild eyed, aggressive, possibly taking stuff and not very well kept, which was similar to most other accounts by the english i found. the thing that struck me was that it then went on to say how she was approached by a sikh officer who spoke english, and after a bit asked her about whether london was full of prostitutes and if that all english women including the posh ones whored themselves to pay for britain's wars and empire. at this point she said her chaperone got between the two of them and tried to start a duel or whatever, which the english woman got quite excited about in her account, but the sikh officer was pulled away by some courtiers and the english officer and lady were told to follow some older english man around. she was a blonde, and not bad looking from the black and white pic on the blog, so it is possible that seeing a few white girls probably encouraged some of the khalsa troops to go rampaging across the border. things dont change much. if we offered the punjab police and sikh regiments in the INA a pay rise, all the loot they could carry as well as some women, they would happily fight for khalistan. its more like they look in your eyes.....they see something they havent seen in a century and a half.............then something inside of me rises, like the spirit of those brave sikhs at chillianwalla....................and then....................CHATKA! like the bloke ended up in the picture below: seriously though, i cant explain it. its like a bizzare sense of animosity, which feels at odds with how i feel about other people when i first meet them regardless of their background.

to protect you from horsemen's swords?! i honestly dont know. where's niddar singh when we need him?

when it comes to the size of the khalsa, the british usually enlarged our number for more dramatism. before the first war, one of their commanders said we had well over 80 regiments! we actually had 36-40. as for Feroshezah, there were two seperate sikh divisions. the first one was forced out by the british and was 10000-15000 strong. the second division turned up at the end of the battle after the first division withdrew/was routed. the second division then turned around and marched off without fighting as their commander was one of the traitors. also, the picture is of laal singh, and i think his battle dress is very similar to the gorcharra. shaheediyan: i was on about the ranjit singh period as before 1800 virtually every sikh tried to own a horse if they wanted to fight. i think dalsingh just hit this topic on the head. regardless of what niddar says, or how good SV is taught, we can never be sure if its 100% accurate. it would be very naive to think that what he knows is as good or complete as what was known before the defeat of the khalsa at gujerat.

hold on a minute. yes, maharaja ranjit singh modernised the army, but it is almost common knowledge that during the anglo-sikh wars, most sikh regiments would close the gap on the english, fire one last round, then ditch their matchlocks and charge the british with swords, shields and other short range weapons. surely they must have known some SV, otherwise charging a redcoat wall of bayonets would have been suicidal and incredibly stupid. as for the picture, the guy is obviously a gorcharra. they were feudal noblemen who were expected to produce cavalry units to join the khalsa if the crown needed them to boost the punjabi army's smaller cavalry forces. they were next to useless, and nothing compared to the full time dragoons, lancers and cuiraisers that the khalsa used. our lack of decent cavalry hindered us and forced us to use gorcharras in large numbers, even though the british were fielding full-time, highly trained cavalry units. many of these gorcharra wore armour and carried an often random assortment of equipment (they wore not inspected often). therefore, i'm not sure if SV incorporates cavalry tactics or how to fight when on a horse. akhalis on the other hand usually always fought on foot even though most of them had horses (similar to dragoons).

yes, waheguru made us perfect in our own ways, its just we slip from the path that we should walk, and its up to us to find it again in order to maintain the perfection. some people dont realise this and blame waheguru for their own personal failings, which is the one of the greatest untruths anyone can dare to say.

so you're saying islam is out of date then? well put. sikhi is the best faith according to you then.

how on earth does it imply that? waheguru cannot wrap us in cotton wool and micromanage every aspect of our existence. answer this first: what is the point of reincarnation if waheguru has a rigid plan for all of us? its up to mankind to sort ourselves out. if waheguru wanted to make us perfect, he would have. but he didnt in order to test us. and that includes the messengers. and how do i know that the guru's didnt succumb? well if your asking that, you are more retarded than i first thought. wtf? are you comparing the power that created all life, every planet, every solar system and every galaxy in every universe with some capitalist inspired company?! if you were really a sikh, you would know that gurbani explicitly says those who try and use analogies or examples to portray waheguru's power will have horrible lifetimes. oh well, have a nice reincarnation amardeep lol. comparing a CEO to the power behind the universes? lol. i am pretty good at coming up with analogies, and yours was a complete stinker.

with a club with so many members we should start printing t-shirts.

i see what your saying. but on one hand some of us are tarred with the 'haters of islam' brush, and told that musis should be allowed to do what they want. but you cant then generalise the kharkoos as being people who hated the hindustani state and were motivated by revenge. if the american govt decided that all sikhs were fair game, and a bunch of US army rangers burst into your house and killed your family, wouldnt you want to get those who did it? justice is justice. if they change the rules and target on the basis of our faith then we have to stop them. many of the freedom fighters wanted to prevent anyone else suffering what they did. there were also thousands of moneh who fought the indian army, none of them hid behind the idea of using 'holiness' to justify their actions. you also say that sikh dharam was raped by these people, and the sri lankans did the same to buddhism, then surely the militant islamic fundamentalism is the same thing? islam nowadays has lost any of its defining characteristics it gained when arabia was a superpower, and is as bad as christianity was in medieval europe. when i see a muslim i dont automatically think they are a bad person. i know of the influence that their culture and language has shaped us. but we will always be different as long as they play the kaffir card in order to unite the islamic world. when sikhs do bad things, many of us arent quiet about it, and things get done. go on a muslim forum, and you wont see any of that. as for bombing mosques/mandirs/churches, i also feel that some of the sikh youth will be used in such a way. some will be coerced by the older generation who scream about khalistan but never actually went to fight for it (i'm 21 btw so i was a little too young, before anyone points fingers at me). but many sikhs nowadays are pulled into fighting for hindus/muslims/goreh. and thats where i think most of these future idiots will come from, fighting for one bunch of non-sikhs against another lot of non-sikhs.