harvindersingh

thank you so much

wjkk wjkf please help me find this track. it is the sakhi about mata gujri and the sahibzada's, i'm hoping i can dowload it online. my bibi used to play it on cassette all the time, but i imagine the recorder ate the tape. all i can remember is one line. bhata lumbia tha rustha puhaar da. "the journey is long and the path is mountainous" i know my transliteration is awful, and my translation worse, but i hope someone out there recognises what i'm looking for. it is a beautiful track and i would love the chance to hear it again. my mind just keeps playing the line again and again. any information would be much appreciated. thank you. harvinder wjkk wjkf

from what i understand of sikh beliefs, the corpse has no importance, although we cremate traditionally, this is just one possible clean way of disposing of a body. thus i think there would not be any objection to our organs being donated. common sense should encourage this practise.

I apologise for the length of this post, especially as it is my first. It sounds like my life story, actually it is. But I feel it addresses the issue of whether parents can hope to succeed in sharing their faith with their children. When I was about ten years old a number of people close to my father died. Not long after this my father began to take a real interest in Sikhi, he seemed to draw great comfort from it. He grew what was left of his hair, stopped drinking and eating meat, and started studying the Sri Guru Granth Sahib. Once he had managed to convince my mother, my parents took amrit together. Not long after my father turned his attentions towards sharing his new found faith with his children. He started teaching us to read the guru granth sahib. His efforts went unrewarded. As he himself had not grown up as a gursikh he did not have the authority to force us to do so simply by his say so. Although I had learnt to recite the jap ji sahib and had started learning rehras sahib, I resented having to sit with my father to learn to recite something I didn’t understand. I could not stand my parents disapproving of me doing things that they themselves had done not so long ago. Around the age of fourteen I lost the fear of my parents, and no longer cared if my actions pleased them. So I took an insolent tone, and said many angry and hurtful things. I implied my father’s new found religious inclinations were nothing more than a manifestation of his fear of death; that sikhi was just an excuse for him to cover his ugly bald head. I was good at arguing, and coming up with questions that my father could not answer. He even started asking my questions to his teachers at santia classes. This made me even more arrogant, I thought I knew better. I was achieving highly academically, and was looking forward to complete freedom from my parents as I left for university. By this time my father had given up. Due to my twisted interpretation of what science has taught us, I left for university believing that our existence was an unfortunate accident. We existed as biological entities not dissimilar from viruses: designed to survive in order to breed and nothing else. This view helped me to justify leading my life in a purely hedonistic way. I’m too ashamed to tell of the sins I committed, and continue to commit. I felt as though something was missing, but assured myself that this was simply part of the human condition: wanting more. Then this summer holiday I successfully applied for a job looking after and entertaining children in a gurdawara, where some of my fellow employees were devout sikhs my own age. Two of them in particular had an affect on me, and I have yet to have a proper discussion with them. I had never met people as happy. No, my father also has the same content nature, but my ego didn’t allow me to see it. Working in the gurdawara everyday also had an affect on me. Sitting on the floor in the langar hall, it sounds cheesy and cliché, but I have never felt so good. However I am so weak, and my ego so inflated, that even now I continue to sin. My sins are worse now, for I know now that I am doing wrong. When I shave my face, the reflection in the mirror looks ugly. I find that naam simran is very good for helping me make the right decisions, and maybe I will eventually do what is good for me. Sorry to digress, but the problem I now have with my parents concerning religion, is I do not wish to instil false hope with in them. I stopped shaving, and started going to the gurdawara, but the day after my family pointed out they had noticed, I shaved again. I’m not sure why I did this, perhaps it is my ego, am I too proud to admit that they were right? But I also do fall into bad habits. Especially when I am with my friends; they all come from backgrounds where drinking and premarital relationships are not even a moral issue, although most of them would still accept me should I change, they would see me differently, it would be very difficult not to. Once again apologies for length and digressions from the topic, but to conclude: I think the best hope that parents have is too ensure their children the right company. Meeting people of strong faith my own age, with similar lives and thus temptations as myself, gave me a respect for sikhi that my parents, despite their best intentions and effort, couldn’t.