Bhai Taru Singh - Joban Jaandhae Naa Ddaraan

This is a shabad from the animated film Bhai Taru Singh from Vismaad Productions.

I couldn't find this clip anywhere so I have got it from the DVD

This clip contains two shabad
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This Shabad is by Bhagat Sheikh Fareed Ji in Salok Fareed Jee on Pannaa 1379

joban jaa(n)dhae naa ddaraa(n) jae seh preeth n jaae ||
I am not afraid of losing my youth, as long as I do not lose the Love of my Husband Lord.

fareedhaa kitha(n)aee joban preeth bin suk geae kumalaae ||34||
Fareed, so many youths, without His Love, have dried up and withered away. ||34||

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This Shabad is by Guru Arjan Dev Ji in Raag Maaroo on Pannaa 1094

maaroo vaar mehalaa 5 ddakhanae ma 5
Vaar Of Maaroo, Fifth Mehla, Dakhanay, Fifth Mehla:


ik oa(n)kaar sathigur prasaadh ||
One Universal Creator God. By The Grace Of The True Guru:

thoo cho sajan maiddiaa ddaeee sis outhaar ||
If You tell me to, O my Friend, I will cut off my head and give it to You.

nain mehi(n)jae tharasadhae kadh pasee dheedhaar ||1||
My eyes long for You; when will I see Your Vision? ||1||

Sikh Course 17th Jan 2009, Ilford

Saturday 17th Jan 2009 was the date for the latest Sikh Course. The course was held at Singh Sabha Gurdwara, Ilford.

Over 130 people attended the course. There was a great atmosphere during the course, with plenty of questions and answers and great debate.

There was a good mix of people from University students to elderly member of the community. There was even a celebrity in attendance...

The next course will be held in Wolverhampton, UK

Beard friendly food

Alot of food's have labels on them to show various properties of the food. For example the UK has a traffic light system to show if the food is good for you or not. There are a set of ingredients on the label so we can see what makes up the food we are eating. There are also other labels to show how much sugar, salt and calories are in our food.

Unfortunately there is one vital piece of information that is missing. This is the bread friendliness of the food we want to eat. Bread friendliness is a rating to do with how much of the food could end up on or in a consumers beard when eaten normally. This is a big issue for people with beards and therefore a big issue for Sikhs.

We propose a labelling system from 1-5 to be shown on foods where 5 is the most friendly food. So in our system ice cream will be given a 1 rating. Advice for eating 1 rated food will be as follows.

Only eat when alone or if you have a mirror or a few tissues handy

I hope our campaign for better beard friendly food labelling will be successful. If you have your own beard unfriendly foods please could you put them in the comments so that we can classify them correctly.

Capitalism. Must buy!

The current credit crisis have got me thinking about how crazy our current financial systems are:

Here are a lay man's observations about how it works.

Why do we have to work? So that we can buy things

Why do we buy things? So that we feel happier

Why don't we stop buying things when we are happy? Because we are never happy / satisfied with what we have got and always strive to get the new "better" thing.

As a result we have to work more and more so that we have the money to buy the things we want.

This is the premise on which our economy is based.

So what happens if we can't buy things? First we will not be happy because we cannot buy things. Secondly people who make things that we normally buy won't be able to sell so they will be out of a job.

If people lose their jobs they will have less disposable income so they will not be able to buy things... and so the cycle continues.

So the whole economy will collapse if people stop buying. scary don't you think?

American National Debt Clock - A sign of the times

I was just reading a story on the the bbc website about how the US national debt clock couldn't cope with the size of the US's national debt. The electronic board had to be modified with the dollar sign ($) replaced with a (1).

The Debt Clock problem has a few similarities with the Credit Crunch problem...

1. People could see that the debt clock was reaching it's limit but they didn't do anything about it. Similarly a lot of people could see the problems leading up to the credit crunch but no one did anything about it.

2. Once the Debt clock ran out of digits the fix was a short term fix of replacing the $ with a 1.
Similarly the initial fix for problems of the credit crunch was to throw money at the problem rather than looking at the root of the problem.

Sikhi To the Max - Tips - Easy searching

I am not fluent at reading Gurmukhi so I have always found it difficult to use the Sikhi To The Max software.

Last weekend I was given an invaluable tip to make finding Shabads much easier. (Sorry if this an obvious tip but it has helped me so I hough I should pass it on)

In the search section of SikhiToTheMax click on the option 'First Letter (from start)'. This will let you type in the first letter of each word of a line.

For example: If you are looking for the Shabad with the following line in it

jis kae sir oopar thoo(n) suaamee so dhukh kaisaa paavai ||
When You stand over our heads, O Lord and Master, how can we suffer in pain?

Then all you need to do is type in the first letter of each word in the line like so

jksaqs

Press search and the above line will appear as the only search results.

This is so much easier and quicker than typing each word every time.

This tip will work for the online line and the standalone version of sikhitothemax.

The Sikh Course

The Sikh Course has been developed to tell people about the fundamentals of the Sikh religion.

Here is a quote from the website.

Discover the fundamentals of the Sikh faith in a FREE one day course. The Sikh faith is an unknown to many people and yet it is full of gems which can dramatically improve your life and the lives of those around you. To register and find out more, simply visit: sikhcourse.com

The next course is at the Chapeltown Gurdwara, Leeds, UK on 13th September 2008. It is well worth going.

Jonah Takalua

Jonah Takalua is a 13-year-old school boy in year 8 at Summer Heights High. He is of Tongan descent and lives with his father. Jonah, however acts up at school, treating his teachers with disrespect and bullying younger students. He is at serious risk of being expelled. Summer Heights High is Jonah’s third school after being expelled from two others in eighteen months for setting fire to a student’s locker and defacing a staff member’s car respectively. Jonah attends “Gumnut Cottage”, a remedial class for students at Summer Heights High who have reading difficulties and he is stated to have a reading level of an eight year old.

quote from http://www.jonahtakalua.com/

I felt compelled to write something about Jonah after watching Summer Heights High on BBC Three and Youtube.

On the face of it Summer Hieghts High is a normal, albeit a very funny, send up of various fly-on-the-wall documentaries. However throughout the series, it tackles many issues that affect urban schools and society.

Some of the issues that are covered through the Jonah Takalua character:

How Polinesian children are treated in Australian schools. (Generally how minorities are treated in schools)
How teachers are intentially or unintentially racist.
How school inititives for disruptive kids are shallow and not supervised properly.

There are probably more which I haven't picked up on.

I think the Jonah character struck a cord with me because I could see many friends and other kids from school in the character. These were kids who were very bright but did some stupid things and fell into a spiral in which they got into more and more trouble.

This is such a sad situation because the kids failed to live up to their potential and in some cases it could affect them for the rest of their lives. In alot of cases they were very talented like Jonah with his breake dancing and rapping.

On a lighter note the series has some great one liners in it and is very funny.

Thanks to Chris Lilley for this series and I hope to see more of Jonah in the future.

"Puk you, Sir"

New SikhiToTheMax

The new version of SikhiToTheMax has arrived. You can download it free from here.

For anybody who doesn't know, SikhiToTheMax is software that includes a fully searchable version of Shri Guru Granth Sahib Ji. Along with Gurmukhi, there is also English translations and Romanised script.

I was surprised to read that the original version of SikhiToTheMax was never officially released. It seems that everyone had a version of the software and every Gurdwara has it on the projector in the Darbar Hall.

Give it a go and see what you think.