Soulful Journeys Within

http://indiapost.com/article/lifestyle/3802/ Letters from a Sikh kid Sikh parents living in the Diaspora have for a long time felt the need of a book that would explain the message of Sikhi in simple terms to the friends and teachers of their school going children. Recently I picked up a lovely book, Dear Takuya, Letters of a Sikh boy at the local Gurdwara. The protagonist of the book Simar is a nine-year-old California kid who during his summer break shares his story as a Sikh boy with Takuya, a pen friend in Japan. In sixteen, simple and tenderly voiced letters, Simar sums up his own struggle for acceptance as well as the principles of tolerance, forgiveness and love for everyone that he learns at a Sikh youth camp. Reading Simar's letters is like reading the journal of your own child. Jessi Kaur has shown a keen understanding of how young boys think. September 11th has changed United States in many ways. It has particularly impacted the Sikhs who live here. Numerous Sikhs have b...

Back to school or Back to schedule? It is almost mid of September, schools have started and our families are settling in to this year's schedule. Two of our older children entered High and Junior High school. Even if our children are in the same school as last year, the timetable is always slightly different. Maybe classes start earlier this year, or later. Or maybe it's the before and after activities that are different. For the 7th and 9th grader, the night before registration, I spent a chaotic evening filling out two cards each and several other forms, all asking for exactly the same information. It was just like last year, and all the years before, even down to the part where my fingers begin to hurt and I begin to talk to myself, "Don’t they have good programmers like me at this school district who print the auto filled forms for parents from the school system and have them make the changes if necessary?" On the day of the registration, first I took my daughter ...