News & Update

Everyone wanted to know the life secret of Mississauga’s Sant Kaur Girn as she celebrated her 104th birthday today.

At the age of 104, she has got three sons, nine grandchildren, 11 great grandchildren and one great, great grandchild.

Today India Rainbow Community Services of Peel, where Girn is a member of Adult Day Program, hosted a special ceremony to celebrate her 104th birthday.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper also sends a certificate of recognition to wish her many happy returns.

“I want to know her secret though …,” joked Gurpreet S. Malhotra, executive director of India Rainbow, who presented the certificate from the prime minster.

On the occasion, Girn also cut the birthday cake in presence of family members, seniors and community workers.

Born on April 15, 1910 in Guru Ka Chak, a village in the province of Punjab in India, Girn had three older sisters and a brother. All of them lived to past the century mark.

“(Girn’s sister) just passed away last year at the age of 110 in India,” said Harjit S. Girn, 67, Girn’s youngest son. “They are all same … none of them was less than 100 years. My grandmother was 112 and my grandpa was 110 years of age.”

Harjit said his mom is a pure vegetarian and never ate meat, eggs or consumed alcohol.

“My father was an army officer. So most of the time my mom spent in the fields working hard to raise me and my brothers,” said Harjit.

Girn migrated to Canada in 1980 to join Harjit, her youngest son, after the death of her husband. Her other two sons live in England.

After being diagnosed with dementia in 2012, she joined India Rainbow’s Adult Day Program.

“She is over 100, but still actively participates in various activities … and sometimes she also dances and sings old Indian songs,” said Sandeep Lachhar, program lead at India Rainbow. “In my knowledge she has been the oldest person at India Rainbow.”

At three different locations in the Peel region, India Rainbow provides comprehensive preventative and rehabilitation services to South Asians who have cognitive impairment, chronic disability or illness such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, arthritis, diabetes, stroke and muscular dystrophy.

Source: www.mississauga.com

The Blueberry Story: The teacher gives the businessman a lesson

“If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn’t be in business very long!”

I stood before an auditorium filled with outraged teachers who were becoming angrier by the minute. My speech had entirely consumed their precious 90 minutes of inservice. Their initial icy glares had turned to restless agitation. You could cut the hostility with a knife.

I represented a group of business people dedicated to improving public schools. I was an executive at an ice cream company that became famous in the middle1980s when People Magazine chose our blueberry as the “Best Ice Cream in America.”

I was convinced of two things. First, public schools needed to change; they were archaic selecting and sorting mechanisms designed for the industrial age and out of step with the needs of our emerging “knowledge society”. Second, educators were a major part of the problem: they resisted change, hunkered down in their feathered nests, protected by tenure and shielded by a bureaucratic monopoly. They needed to look to business. We knew how to produce quality. Zero defects! TQM! Continuous improvement!

In retrospect, the speech was perfectly balanced – equal parts ignorance and arrogance.

As soon as I finished, a woman’s hand shot up. She appeared polite, pleasant – she was, in fact, a razor-edged, veteran, high school English teacher who had been waiting to unload.

She began quietly, “We are told, sir, that you manage a company that makes good ice cream.”

I smugly replied, “Best ice cream in America, Ma’am.”

“How nice,” she said. “Is it rich and smooth?”

“Sixteen percent butterfat,” I crowed.

“Premium ingredients?” she inquired.

“Super-premium! Nothing but triple A.” I was on a roll. I never saw the next line coming.

“Mr. Vollmer,” she said, leaning forward with a wicked eyebrow raised to the sky, “when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?”

In the silence of that room, I could hear the trap snap…. I was dead meat, but I wasn’t going to lie.

“I send them back.”

“That’s right!” she barked, “and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it’s not a business. It’s school!”

In an explosion, all 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides, custodians and secretaries jumped to their feet and yelled, “Yeah! Blueberries! Blueberries!”

And so began my long transformation.

Since then, I have visited hundreds of schools. I have learned that a school is not a business. Schools are unable to control the quality of their raw material, they are dependent upon the vagaries of politics for a reliable revenue stream, and they are constantly mauled by a howling horde of disparate, competing customer groups that would send the best CEO screaming into the night.

None of this negates the need for change. We must change what, when, and how we teach to give all children maximum opportunity to thrive in a post-industrial society. But educators cannot do this alone; these changes can occur only with the understanding, trust, permission and active support of the surrounding community. For the most important thing I have learned is that schools reflect the attitudes, beliefs and health of the communities they serve, and therefore, to improve public education means more than changing our schools, it means changing America.

One recent afternoon, two dozen teenagers stayed late at Hoover Middle School in Potomac, Md., for a presentation on Jewish culture. They tasted matzoh brittle, spun dreidels, colored Purim masks and watched a video of a rabbi blowing a ram’s horn.

Some clowned or texted, but one student named Hana Kaur kept a watchful eye on the room. She shushed the gigglers, passed out the masks and read from a large screen that explained Passover and Rosh Hashanah.

Kaur, 14, is a Sikh. The daughter of immigrants from India, she wears waist-length braids and a silver bracelet as signs of her ancient faith, which male Sikhs honor by wearing turbans. She is the driving force behind the school’s new Cultural Awareness Club, and her leadership sends a subtle message.

The club is part of a polite but purposeful mission by Sikh community leaders in suburban Maryland to create a positive image of a religious minority that has long been the object of misunderstanding and hostility in the United States. Concern flared after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when some Sikhs were mistaken for Muslims and harassed. It re-emerged on Aug. 5, 2012, when a white supremacist gunman attacked a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, killing six people before fatally shooting himself.

“After the second tragedy, we realized there was still much ignorance about us and our beliefs. People associated our turbans with fundamentalists who believe in violence against America,” said Rajwant Singh, a dentist and official of a Sikh temple in Rockville. “In schools, Sikhism was not taught in religion classes.”

So members of the community sought out teachers and encouraged their own children to help educate others about who they are. “If young Sikhs are seen as leaders now, people wearing turbans when they run for office will be more accepted,” Singh said.

Sikhism is a monotheistic South Asian religion, founded in the 15th century, which combines spartan self-control with meditative spiritualism. More than 90 percent of Sikhs — about 22 million — still live in India, but several hundred thousand have immigrated to the United States since the 1960s. In the Washington suburbs, many have been drawn to jobs in research and technology, settled down to raise families and built communities around domed temples called gurdwaras.

Rather than trying to blend into American society, many Sikhs have made a point of standing out. Men wrap bright yellow or orange turbans around never-cut hair, even at the cost of ridicule and danger. National Sikh organizations have fought aggressive legal battles with various government agencies, including the TSA and the Pentagon, over the right to wear turbans and other religious symbols during airport screenings and while serving in the military.

Sikhs expect their children to be equally proud of the faith symbols they wear, including topknots for younger boys and turbans for older ones. After 9/11, when some Sikh students were taunted as Muslim terrorists by classmates, the community’s response was not to ease up on the rigorous dress code, but to push for national anti-bullying laws and promote their faith more vigorously as distinctive but nonthreatening.

“We follow a code, and wearing the uniform is part of our mandate. It is not something you can discard for inconvenience,” said Rubin Pal Singh, a board member of the Guru Gobind Singh gurdwara in Rockville. “This uniform is what makes us unique. If a child does not want to wear it, it can be difficult for the family and the community.”

But Singh and other Sikh leaders in the Maryland suburbs are pursuing a more nuanced strategy of outreach to area schools. They have met with teachers, produced videos and texts on Sikhism and invited school officials to temples for training sessions and worship ceremonies. One result is that many Montgomery County middle and high schools now include lessons on Sikhism in their religion courses. Another is a new cadre of experts and allies within the system.

David Owens, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Hoover, attended one of the training sessions at the Rockville gurdwara several weeks ago and said he learned a great deal.

“Now I am ready for any questions the students ask me,” he said, adding that the culture club “helps clear up misconceptions, helps overcome students’ uneasiness with other cultures and creates a more welcoming atmosphere so no one feels isolated.”

In some cases, students like Kaur are acting as ambassadors for their faith, partly through strong parental urging and partly from their own evolving commitment. In a recent interview, Kaur and a dozen other Sikh teenagers said school bullying was not a major problem for them, but several added that their parents had suffered from harassment as young immigrants and that they too still faced occasional insults or awkward moments.

Jagjot Battu, an 11th grader at Gaithersburg High School, said she feels comfortable being a Sikh in a diverse, multinational student body but is occasionally mistaken for a Muslim or a Hindu. Although she attributed the problem to misunderstanding rather than bias, she said feels a strong responsibility to set her schoolmates straight.

“Most of my friends know I am Sikh, but they don’t know what that means. It’s my job to teach them about it,” said Battu. “You can’t change people, but you can try to get the message out, to open their minds and build tolerance. The world is very interconnected now, and we need to understand each other.”

Kaur, tall and articulate, has emerged as a natural leader for young Sikhs in her area. At first, she said, she was motivated by the backlash against Sikhs after 9/11, when her younger brother was called names such as Osama. More recently, when the temple shooting in Wisconsin took place, she saw it as an opportunity to “shine a spotlight” on Sikhism at a moment of national attention and sympathy. First, she and her friends made a video for schools featuring interviews with young Sikhs. Then she persuaded officials at Hoover to let her start the culture club, which began meeting in January.
At the recent club meeting, there were scattered signs that the message was getting through. Most of the adolescents in the room had trouble remembering the finer points of Sikhism or mumbled something about long hair and bracelets. But the very normalcy of their interactions seemed telling.

While Kaur and a Jewish classmate stood next to a large screen, explaining dreidels and matzoh, three boys were joking and fooling around at a desk in the back. One was a Sikh named Amit, wearing a black cloth topknot on his head. The second was wearing a yarmulke. The third had red hair and freckles. Asked what he thought of Amit’s topknot, he glanced up and said, “It’s awesome!”

Like most teenagers his age, Sagar Singh Ghag loves his video games. Homework, chores and outdoor activities were all impediments to attaining supremacy in the challenges provided by the gaming console in his house. But something has triggered a different outlook in this 15-year-old from the North Delta Secondary School.

“I loved staying home and playing my video games but now I get to talk on radio and TV, make new friends and do lots of activities that I probably never would had got to do otherwise,” said Ghag.

Jacob Hayes, a 12-year-old from Banaccord Elementary in Surrey is also seeing some changes in his young life.
“I also wanted to spend less time playing video games and more time doing productive stuff.”

Thirteen year old Punit Pank of Surrey said she has found renewed confidence to be a role model for her community.

No there is nothing in the waters of Surrey that is transforming these kids.

They are members of the newly minted 3300 Royal Canadian Army Cadet Corps (RCACC) which is sponsored by the Surrey-based “Friends of Sikh Cadets Society” to provide a dynamic program for youth.

Locally known as the Sikh Cadets, the 3300 RCACC, which is open to all aged between 12 and 18, is Canada’s first army cadet program sponsored by the Sikh community.

It was formally inaugurated last year and today is the fastest growing cadet unit in British Columbia.

This Saturday, members of the 3300 RCACC will be part of the Khalsa Day parade in Surrey adding another point of pride for the community.

Major Jim Blomme, the commanding officer for 3300 Army Cadet Program said the combined goal is to provide a premier program delivering leadership, teamwork and self discipline skills for youth.

The unit currently has 67 cadets with a growing waiting list.

“We are growing fast and it’s very rewarding,” said Harbinder Singh Sewak, a Vancouver-based newspaper publisher who took his idea of a Sikh-sponsored cadet unit to General Walter John Natynczyk, the former Chief of the Defence Staff of the Canadian Forces.

“I hope what we have achieved and what we are doing can be used as a blueprint to increase the pluralism in Canada’s cadet corps,” said Sewak, who also chairs the Friends of the Sikh Cadet Society.

The 3300 RCACC’s formation has triggered interest as far away as London, England, which has a sizeable Sikh population.

For Maple Ridge lawyer Kirandeep Kaur Brar, the cadet corps has given her 15-year-old son Naunihal a “new attitude”.

“I am seeing a new discipline in Nuanihal,” said Brar who drives her son to the weekly drills every Thursday and waits in the car for two hours while her boy is instilled with a “new sense of sureness”.

Jatinder Kaur Saini said she cannot think of another activity that has made her son, Armaan Singh, 13 more astute and respectful.

See what the other cadets have to say:

Bharbhoor Singh, age 17
“Since joining the cadets, my parents’ attitude towards me has change. They seem to believe in me and think I am more responsible now.”

Punit Pank, 13
“I joined because I wanted to gain more confidence and be a role model for my community and my school. This way I also get to strong, fit and healthy.”

Jacob Hayes,12
“I wanted to follow my father’s footsteps…I also wanted to spend less time playing video games and more time to do more productive stuff…The cadet corps is amazing I really enjoy it.”

Sagar Singh Ghag, 15
“I have gained confidence and enjoy it so much. I want to become an electrician or do mechanics and this all inclusive all rounded program helps me be a better citizen and person”

Simran Gillar,16
“I had an interest in the army and coincidentally found out that cadets was a great opportunity for kids my age that’s when I decided to join this program”

Gian Singh Matharu, 12
“I joined the cadets to get some confidence. I never used to want to meet people or perform or make presentations at school.”
~ Source: http://www.vancouverdesi.com/

Vaisakhi is both a religious and cultural holiday celebrated by two different south Asian groups every year in mid-April.

Sikhs in South Jersey celebrated the holiday, which fell on Monday this year, as both a harvest festival as well as the founding day for their religion.

It is often celebrated in temples as well as within the communities in the northern Indian state of Punjab with songs, dances and lots of food.

Harleen Kaur, 11, of Vineland, said she likes celebrating the occasion because it is a reminder of her roots.

Though it is a festival she has celebrated since she was born, Kaur first realized she had a different cultural heritage than her schoolmates in kindergarten, when no one else knew what Vaisakhi was.

“It made me feel special because I was the only one to celebrate it,” Kaur said. Later on though, as she grew older, she was less vocal about the celebration.

“It felt weird that everyone else had something in common and I didn’t,” Kaur said.

Kaur, along with a few other children and teens learn a lot about their culture and religion at the Sikh temple in Vineland. One skill Kaur has developed is being able to play the harmonium. The instrument is a combination of a mini organ and accordion which is a main component to traditional music in northern India.

“I feel relaxed when I’m playing,” Kaur said.

Bangladeshis and Benglais also celebrate Vaisakhi, which signifies the start of a new year.

Bangladeshis call the day Boisakhi, and also celebrate with food, dance and music. Boisakh is the first month of the Bengali calendar and so the first day, or new year, is Pohela Boisakh (first of the month).

The Bangladeshis in South Jersey celebrated Monday night with dances at a hotel in Egg Harbor Township, though celebrations in their home country began at the break of dawn.

They recreated a mini bazar with traditional foods and clothes on sale in the tennis complex at the Howard Johnson in West Atlantic City.

Many of the children participated in dances and a fashion show- showing off their culture.

Aritra Chowdhury, 12, of Atlantic City said he enjoys the celebration because its a time to meet up with his cousins and spend time with family.

Ahsanul Kabir, of Atlantic City, said he likes having the celebrations each year so that his toddler son is exposed to the culture even though he is growing up in South Jersey.

Atlantic City mayor Don Guardian stopped by briefly during the night.

~ Anjalee Khemlani
~ Source: http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/