TheBattleDrums.com

Disclaimer: Long blog ahead.

I want you to use your imagination and paint a picture of what I’m about to describe to you……

Imagine a Sikh…….. In fact, imagine a perfect… Sikh. A Sikh that wakes up at the early hours of dawn, does ishnaan and sits down to do paath. A Sikh that constantly remembers Waheguru. A Sikh that is filled with humility, sincerity, humbleness and service. Imagine if you will, a Sikh with such a character and personality that anybody that comes in contact with this Sikh realizes that this person is different from the rest of us. Imagine a Sikh that stands for justice and fights against oppression and tyranny. Picture if you will, the perfect Sikh. Now quietly open your eyes….

That’s how we started the class on Sunday… The class was then asked to quietly jot down everything they saw. And once they were done, we put these responses up on the board. To their own surprise (and now hopefully yours), when asked what was the most common theme on the board, someone yelled out “a man!”

99% of my class, when described the image of a Sikh, saw some sort of male personality. Whether it was a Guru, a shaheed, a relative or themselves. ONE brave girl timidly said “Mai Bhago”. ONE girl. Prabhleen Kaur (Aneja) probably deserves to be this week’s Champion Child since I didn’t declare a champion child in class this week. GUDRJOAB!

This was a perfect lead into a discussion about the psyche of people. We often subconsciously behave in ways that if spoken about we would probably disagree with. For example, subconsciously almost all of us are racist, but if someone asked us if we were racists, we would probably be offended.

The girls in this past Sunday’s class were extremely intrigued and came to the realization that several things in our traditions, practices and communities were gender biased and over time as a people we had subconsciously made them the norm. Even to the point where the girls didn’t think to question it or even to think twice about it anymore.

The girls vocalized their thoughts on how it’s at least a 1000 times harder to grow up as a Sikh girl than it is to grow up as a Sikh boy. And I couldn’t agree more… the lack of support systems for our growing women, the absence of any sort of encouragement and the seldom discouragement completely destroy the concept that growing up as a Sikh boy is tough. (sorry fellas)

We spoke about what our Gurus had done to abolish many of these gender biases by giving examples of Guru Gobind Singh Ji’s bodyguard Mai Bhago and Mata Sahib Kaur who revolutionized the Amrit Sanchar process (from charan pahul to khanday dee pahul). Another mentionable here is the fact that Guru Sahib diminished all gender biases by referring to all human beings as the soul brides of Waheguru.

We concluded the class with more questions: How come we’ve never been to a dastar bandhi ceremony for a Sikh girl? How come a female Parshaad sevadaar is a rare sight? How come we rarely ever see a female doing Chaur Sahib at the Gurudwara? Who does a girl go to when she has questions about her hair?  Where does a girl go when she starts to second-guess her faith? These were all questions the boys had never even thought about. Even some of the girls had never thought about these questions. And I’m glad these are coming to the forefront, so even if we don’t reach concrete solutions today, we’ve at least managed to instill some consciousness into the minds of our youth.

Our discussions ended with trying to find solutions that we could implement here at our own Gurudwara and in our own community. I think the usual mindset is to “think big” or “start small first”, but even in this global community, I’m starting to like the concept of “start small and stay small”. Commit to absolutely changing something you absolutely have control over and don’t stop till you make that happen.

HOMEWORK!!!

Homework assignment from now is to write AT LEAST a half a page of reflection every week. Don’t just state what the class was about or copy and paste your notes, instead try to reflect on the class discussion and reach some conclusions of your own. MANDATORY assignment!

okaybye

p.s. The girls seemed to be a lot more involved this week than the guys. The guys in the class seemed to be afraid to say anything at all, which I found extremely amusing. J

The following links are for further reading:

http://spiritofthesikh.blogspot.com/2010/10/half-panth.html (this was the in class reading)

http://www.sikhchic.net/current_events/womens_equality_why_arent_we_spearheading_the_struggle

p.p.s. i might not always remember to tag every one, PLEASE feel free to tag yourselves or anyone else. Apologies.