JUST A LITTLE BACK, we celebrated 550 years of the Guru. Now, we are in a new news cycle, the one about Covid-19. It is always a peculiar exercise to revisit an old news cycle from a new one, but invariably very rewarding.

We were excited at the opening of the Kartarpar Corridor. And a blast of seminars. And innumerable lectures. And kirtan darbars. And painting contests. And that dubious semi-sarkari exercise of finding 550 True Nanak Naam Leva! We thought we have done a lot to spread the message of the Guru.

Drenched in Sikh exceptionalism, we were so proud of being Guru wale! Now, we are posting messages and photographs about how Sikhs held so many langars for those hit worse as a result of coronavirus-triggered lockdown. The Sikh exceptionalism is almost a religion by itself, even during Covid times!

But before we even talk about Covid-19, we need to revisit the 550 Years With The Guru news cycle..

Little did we ponder about what this message of the Guru was. Since we live in the throes of news cycles now, the 550 year milestone is already behind us, but oh my god! what an occasion it was! We made a spectacle of it.

The Guru was just a billboard mania for us. Then we had an entire train of news cycles coming at us. Now, all that is behind us, of course. Guru Nanak’s message is no more Breaking News for us. We have been there, done that. Clicked a selfie, too!

No, not with the Guru, but with our ego!

In fact, even at that time, we actually had to make an effort to accommodate the news cycle about the word of the Guru. We were busy with anti-Pakistan rhetoric, the 2019 election news cycle, the ‘whither is the Indian economy’ news cycle, and then Kashmir. Ennui takes us over very soon. We long for inanities, festivities, spectacles. Selfie-occasions.

We were actually happy that the 550 years milestone came along. We thought here’s massive material for our WhatsApp groups, Facebook battles, Twitter chats and incessant stream of messages.

So we made space for the Guru.

It was possible (and of course, damn difficult) to make the Guru’s message inform our every action every single day of every single year of our life. But it was much more easier, and spectacle-friendly, to turn it into a parade: Celebratory projects, marches, nagar kirtans, kirtan darbars, runs for peace, walks for the Guru.

All we had to ensure that these should be bigger, better, glamorous, full of razzamatazz, and properly advertised, including on social media.

Everything reduced to an image, the image replacing everything. It was all imagery. It’s a different thing that the Guru’s word remains relevant 550 years later. The imagery has already faded.

Take the Corridor. Instead of understanding and analysing why deeply entrenched forces in India and Pakistan agreed to a transnational corridor when little had changed on the ground, we convinced ourselves that it was the collective power of the panth that brought corridor to reality.

We were happy to see our shenanigans being relayed on live television, beamed on global channels. We indulged in obstreperous arguments and cacophonous debate about who should get credit, about why devotees should need a passport, why should people pay $20 fee, will Navjot Sidhu go, should the PM have a separate stage, will Amarinder keep citing ISI angle, blah blah.

Because we were interested in all these things. Not in the word of the Guru.

These questions consumed the masses no end. They fought and abused and bloodied each other on the social media. Everything about every question was the definition of hyper. And it was all being done in the name of the Guru.

Now, imagine, what would have happened if we had really engaged with the message of the Guru?

While engaging with a Guru who envisaged a casteless society, we have the gall to live caste, and live with caste, every day, and yet call ourselves Guru Nanak Naamleva.

On 550th, if we had really meant to engage with his message, we would have been discussing and arguing and fighting with each other about whether we should recognize and formally acknowledge and state our failure in dealing with the caste question, and should the community decide to make a massive announcement to itself and to the world that the day of the Guru shall be the end of the caste system in the community?

We knew we needed this shock therapy. We would have had scholars telling us that such a goal would be utopian, that we needed to take several steps towards that goal, and we should instead fix 2069 for this announcement. That debate would have gotten us into a mess so tangled that we would have needed the blessings of the Guru to untangle ourselves, but it would have been much more fruitful to land in that mess and go through the exercise.

Instead, we even failed to abolish caste based gurdwaras, which are nothing but deras where so-called low-caste Sikhs cannot even enter. There is a tacit support of community leaders to the phenomenon, just as there is tacit support for caste-based cremation grounds.

So far, we have been running away from this question of caste. We are an openly casteist society that marries and socialises as per caste, lives caste every hour of the day and night, and yet loudly proclaims itself to be casteless. It is a truth everybody knows. That makes us utterly hypocritical, unafraid of the Guru. And we dared to celebrate the 550 years of Guru Nanak with aplomb and show!

And we think we have hoodwinked the Guru. The gall that we have!

For a Guru so revolutionary, we projected him sans any edginess, shorn of all his aggressive approach to truth and to truth-seeking. For a guru who does not compromise one wee bit, we projected him as someone who is so accommodating that we shall find a place at his feet despite our charlatan behaviour.

He argued. He intervened. He dug his heels in. He stood up to falsehood.

He cared little that someone was a Moghul badhshah. And he cared little that the man he loved could only offer him the poorest form of leavened bread. As a child, he could question the shallow rituals of tying a holy thread and as a preacher he could question the rituals of aarti.

Even in those times when means were fewer and terrain was uncharted, he travelled more than most do even today with all the comforts and means available in the world.

He had a family, left it behind, and then went and spread enlightenment because he could not allow the darkness to prevail. Human beings everywhere were his family.

The man’s a pure threat — a walking, talking threat. His words are revered. He can inspire men and women to question the state of affairs in any regime. We project him as a problem solver but the man can be a real problem creator.

He teaches us to question. He trains us in how to seek answers. He prepares us to fight for the truth. And he makes us fearless. Is there another way of defining a revolutionary, the kind regimes everywhere are afraid of?

And yet, it is the regime that is celebrating the man.

How come we have allowed that to happen? Because we have now moulded the Guru in our own image: flexible, adjustable, accommodative, fits any definition, is suitable for all.

Look at the effort and resources spent on showbiz style celebrations to mark the 550 years. They wanted us to embrace a Guru Nanak of the coffee-table book.

The regime is not afraid of the Guru’s message spreading far and wide. Instead, it has appropriated the message. Look at the effort and resources spent on showbiz style celebrations to mark the 550 years. They wanted us to embrace a Guru Nanak of the coffee-table book.

We deprived ourselves of the Guru Nanak who would have wanted us to engage with the actual problems and challenges of our times.

We ensured that there was no link between 550 years of the Guru with the state of the millions in Kashmir, literally barricaded from the rest of the civilisation on this planet with concertina wire rolls and confined inside their homes, their streets stuffed with jackboots of the state? Who among us seriously thinks that Guru Nanak would have watched the celebrations without being terribly, terribly anguished about the fate of Kashmiris?

The Guru spent the last years of his life cultivating the land at Kartarpur. His metaphors come from peasantry. ਮਨੁ ਹਾਲੀ ਕਿਰਸਾਣੀ ਕਰਣੀ ਸਰਮੁ ਪਾਣੀ ਤਨੁ ਖੇਤੁ। How are we engaging today with the state of those who pursue the same vocation? What is the community’s response to farm suicides? To deaths of men who go down the gutter to make sure sewage drains are not clogged? To a system where the dirtiest of jobs are reserved for a particular lowered caste? All in the land where the Guru lived!

We talked day and night about Guru Nanak who preached ਵਿਦਿਆ ਵੀਚਾਰੀ ਤਾਂ ਪਰਉਪਕਾਰੀ but did not engage with the predatory fees and costs being imposed on those seeking education in the universities of the land where the Guru dwelled. These score and a half of private universities and their fee structures were approved by governments that we voted into power time and again. These same governments celebrated the centenaries of Sikh gurus and our historical milestones, splashing massive funds. When did we resist such predatory fee structures?

Where did we debate about what kind of an educated youth our universities and colleges are churning out? Where is the debate about the dignity of labour? When the world saw caravans of migrant labourers, unemployed, hungry and with no money, walking hundreds of miles to reach their homes in poverty-stricken districts and villages of India, did we wonder about the contrast between what we were celebrating just a while back, and what we were watching right before our eyes? This was Guru Nanak speaking to us, asking us if we had framed the right questions for the right issues at the right time!

When we talk about kirt and kirti, the only question we as is whether migrant workers should go home, whether we should frustrate their wish to travel because we require them in our factories and farms, and whether we should arrange buses and even flights to bring them back.

A real debate about the message of the Guru would have forced us to engage with the decimation of trade unionism at our workplaces, but we were so afraid of any debate about a Sikh construct of ‘kirt’ and ‘kirti’ becoming about an issue appropriated by the Left, just as the Left is forever worried that its ideas will get hijacked if a communist leader mentions the name of the Guru in the context of the dignity of the ‘kirti’ masses.

As a community, the Sikhs would rather shut off their eyes and not acknowledge the pronounced proclivity of our Gadari Babas towards the great ideals of the Left, of the dignity of labour, or of people’s power, almost in competition with the mainstream Left that wants to scrub off any Sikh identity and credentials of these iconic revolutionaries. This false faultline between Bole So Nihal and Inquilab Zindabad is fed by this competitive cussedness.

How did we achieve the remarkable feat of celebrating 550 years of the Guru without the community responding in any meaningful way to the concerns of today’s young, educated women who are questioning notions of patriarchy and fighting back, often all alone? We have chosen to be blind to girls fighting lonely battles for equality on university campuses, in work places, in salary structures. The women of Punjabi University, Patiala and Panjab University, Chandigarh won those fights, and without most of us lending a hand, without the community owning up their struggle. Which side do you think the Guru must have blessed?

The bollywood-isation of a great occasion of the Sikh community will haunt us. If we had been more reflective of the state of the common Sikhs of the Guru, we would have understood His message. Where was/is the inward look? Where’s the sense of a connection with the Guru at a very deeper level?

The celebrations did happen inside gurdwaras, and in the presence of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji. But we only cared about the imagery generated. We made sure everything was big, chunky, glitzy, bling-studded, with gold or emerald thrown in. We basically allowed a government-backed corporatisation of Guru Nanak. All we did was to make it the biggest show on earth. We were flailing about for that tag, we little puny men!

The profit-oriented pharmaceutical sector in India is a scandal with dimensions that has no parallels even in the much-maligned corporate world. In Guru’s own land, in the very villages and towns where the Guru lived, poor people are dying for lack of treatment not because the treatment does not exist, not because it is not available near their place, but because they cannot afford it. And in many cases the treatment is not so costly because it actually costs so much, but because pricing policies are such.

Now that the world has been hit by a pandemic, these fissures have come up in great relief, and anyone with any amount of devotion to the message of Guru Nanak should be very angry at what we offer the poor and the deprived who find themselves sick. Predatory pricing means predatory practices against human beings. This is akin to human hunters hunting human game.

Imagine the followers of Guru Nanak, who said ‘‘ਏਤੀ ਮਾਰ ਪਈ ਕਰਲਾਣੇ,’’ not even talking about the issue in the 550th Year of Guru Nanak. Raise your hand if you think the Guru would not have talked about it so loudly, so cogently, so humanely, that we would have been on the verge of a revolution.

The Gurus left us a Guru for the present times — the Living Guru in the form of Sri Guru Granth Sahib. We have a Guru we can talk to every hour of the day. We have a Guru that talks to us in every situation we find ourselves in. What kind of a conversation are we having? The Guru in the gurdwara, well decorated, air-conditioned with rows of string lights making it look all so beautiful, and we in our homes, snug and comfortable. The rest of the world can go to hell!

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How do you think Guru Nanak was placed, materially? Study the inflation figures, factor in the GDP growth since, and calculate the social standing of the Mehta Kalu family 550 years ago. Why do we think Guru Nanak went off to travel in lands far and wide? ਬਾਬਾ ਦੇਖੈ ਧਿਆਨੁ ਧਰਿ ਜਲਤੀ ਸਭਿ ਪ੍ਰਿਥਵੀ ਦਿਸਿ ਆਈ।

The guru was never into miracles; he saved us from all such non-sense. He didn’t just close his eyes and realised that things were too bad, and immediately went about rectifying matters. He thought, applied his mind, did deep chintan, found out, studied and decided that the state of affairs needed his intervention, a proactive engagement that will require years of travel, writing, preaching, spreading the light of knowledge, fighting the demons of darkness and ignorance.

The guru was never into miracles; he saved us from all such non-sense. He didn’t just close his eyes and realised that things were too bad, and immediately went about rectifying matters.

When the Guru ਚੜ੍ਹਿਆ ਸੋਧਣਿ ਧਰਤਿ ਲੁਕਾਈ, he did not look for tie ups with the governments. He knew he was up against the regimes. It did not take long for the regimes to recognise the power of his revolutionary message and they were soon in conflict with his disciples down the ages. Our tradition of martyrdom is a living proof that being a Sikh is akin to being the force of resistance against repression, against injustice, against lies shoved down the throat of common, innocent, poor people.

What was that great intellectual cud-chewing that our so-called Sikh scholars indulged in? The unabashed harmony and tie-ups with the governments for sponsoring their vichar charchas and chintan-manthans is exactly the kind of stuff that should have been loathe to anyone reflecting on the significance of 550 years of the Guru.

Out there, massive wars are on. Out there, the children of poor are being cheated of their entire lives. Out there, kids from the economic strata I came from are studying in schools that are so resource-less and soul-destroying that they will never be able to tell their story, to feel what it is like to have a voice. For those who know that Guru Nanak was the voice of the voiceless, where is the debate about stealing the voices of millions of people?

The media, whose role and god-ordained duty it was to be the voice of the people, has increasingly become the voice of the voice-snatchers. Of course, all glory to those who are responding to their inner voice even in this muzzling, muffling world of hyper media, but the debate about this theft of the sangat’s common space was missing from the celebrations in the name of the Guru.

So intertwined with nature was the Guru that his message is being used by climate saviour warriors till date. ਪਵਣੁ ਗੁਰੂ ਪਾਣੀ ਪਿਤਾ ਮਾਤਾ ਧਰਤਿ ਮਹਤੁ। But we know that people’s access to drinking water in Punjab, as reflected in official figures, will put to shame any decent human being. The India-level data is even worse. For those who claim that a single death due to malnutrition is a blot on humanity, who are never tired of boasting about their tradition of langar, who make news for establishing a langar in godforsaken places where even regimes find it unable to reach, please reflect within and begin a conversation about the malnutrition deaths in Punjab, in India, in the world.

Forget the governments, we needed to set ourselves a higher agenda. On 550th, we should have told ourselves: Every such death from now on shall be on us, and we vow to face our Guru without blood on our hands.

Instead, we watched people die of hunger, their images beamed into our drawing rooms. And we did so within a very short while after celebrating 550 years with the Guru.

The Global Hunger Index figures should have been at the core of any debate on the current state of affairs within the Sikh community. Sadly, we missed the bus exactly when the Guru was offering us a ride. Don’t tell me it was difficult; you knew it already. We are the children of the Guru who had forewarned us — ਜਉ ਤਉ ਪ੍ਰੇਮ ਖੇਲਣ ਕਾ ਚਾਉ। ਸਿਰੁ ਧਰਿ ਤਲੀ ਗਲੀ ਮੇਰੀ ਆਉ। Do not offer excuses. You are under the ਸਿਰੁ ਦੀਜੈ ਕਾਣਿ ਨ ਕੀਜੈ command.

If we were looking for our Nanak, we would have found him within ourselves the day those hunger index figures had broken our heart and left us frustrated and angry and seething with rage at the regimes. But pray, we were so busy celebrating the Guru! Just look at the bling we brought to the table!

Whose and which policies affect our Punjab, the land of the Guru, in sinister ways? What is our engagement with the world’s military weapons empire? We are a border state, located in a nuclear country openly talking about enmity with a neighbouring country that also freely talks about using its nuclear weapons. And we see no reason to talk about nuclearisation and military weapons empire even when we celebrate 550 Years of Guru Nanak? Are we raving mad, or criminally hypocrite?

We have no debate about Donald Trump and his policies. Our Akal Takht Jathedar quotes Trump’s statement about opening of churches to plead for opening of gurdwaras after Covid-19 triggered lockdown, but he does not utter George Floyd’s name. For him, Trump is a reference point when it can help his agenda.

The community has decided that debates about how US Fed Rates and interests squeeze the life out of poor regimes and how the poorest of the poor are condemned to live under those regimes, belong to the pages of some economic newspaper. We are not engaging with the explosive situation in the Middle East, because that belongs to the Defence Strategy columnists.

We have no view on the terrible things that global capital flows are resulting in. We are not worried about the new classes being created by meta data ownerships and regimes’ increasing power over human beings as a result of 360 degree roving Orwellian eye and deep, penetrative gaze of governments into our lives, particularly after empowering themselves with draconian powers following the Covid-19 epidemic.

Is the cause for which crowds trundled out in pandemic times in cities and towns in the United States and across the world so insignificant that it did not even deserve a statement by any Sikh community leader of any standing? Did it mean nothing to us that people belonging to an entire race cannot breathe, that their lives matter?

For a religion so much in consonance with modern science, we as a community should have had a stand on Edward Snowden. Is he helping save the humanity, or is he a criminal as is being portrayed by world’s big powers? Will he be blessed, or will he be damned?

The world is watching human beings destroying the only planet they have. More aware people everywhere are making it their lives’ mission to talk about, fight for and sacrifice their lives for saving the planet. We satisfy ourselves by cooking langar in a gurdwara on CNG gas and then seeing it being reported in a good for nothing Punjabi newspaper splashed across three columns. Is that the level of engagement we think will suffice to please our Guru? Is our Guru so easy to please?

And what were we caught doing? We were on a government-backed search for 550 true followers, Sache Guru Nanak Naamleva. Worse, we found it so difficult to find them.

We are dealing with one of the toughest guys on this planet to please, for such was his own life and conduct. The standards he set are goddamn impossible to live up to. And yet, we have no option but to try and live up to them. The Guru is watching how hard we try, and don’t you try to hoodwink him.

Of course, we tried to hoodwink him. We thought it is a great honour for the community to have a powerful supremo politician lead the celebrations; the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat riots were a separate subject. When decided to keep our celebrations of the 550 Years of the Guru pristine by choosing not to talk about Kashmir, about the Supreme Court’s verdict on Ayodhya that came almost at the same time as devotees were walking through the corridor for the first time.

We loved the shenanigans of gold coins and 550 trees and 550 scholars and 550 cyclists pedalling in the name of the Guru. We might have told ourselves that these must have pleased him, that he will bless us when we walk through that corridor.

We forget that we are dealing with the real, gold-standard Fakhr-e-Quom, not the earthy mortal variety. The Guru cares little about the sanctity we associated with the numeral figure of 550. His message was no less valid in his 549th year, and will not lose any sheen by his 551st birthday. And what were we caught doing? We were on a government-backed search for 550 true followers, Sache Guru Nanak Naamleva. Worse, we found it so difficult to find them.

The gall we have! Praying every day for ‘darshan deedare’ of Guru’s places, and running everyday from any serious engagement with His cause! Calling a corridor a great success!

You do not need a corridor to reach him. That’s his domain. He’ll build a corridor to you. You only need to do his work, walk his path. He’s kind, he cares. He comes and he saves. There’s no other way to Dhan Guru Nanak, irrespective of the news cycle in which you read this.