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Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in a borderless world.
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By that I don't just mean borders between nation states like the horrendous Ratcliffe
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line but also borders of taxonomy and categorization which divide people and ossify traditions.
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What would it be like to be an unbridled seeker, to be able to pick up your bags and go on
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a journey without worrying about visas or passport controls, to enter into dialogues
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with people where your intellectual quest is your only agenda and barriers of birth
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and ethnicity and class and identity don't matter?
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Well, it turns out that a few centuries ago a man today known as Guru Nanak did just that.
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He travelled to places that are today dispersed across nine countries and he travelled not
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as a founder of a faith as we know him today but as a seeker in search of truth and dialogue.
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Times have changed since then, centuries have passed, the brutalities of history have created
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walls between us not just on land but in our hearts and minds.
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In such a situation I wonder what would happen if someone attempted to retrace the path of
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest for today's show is Amardeep Singh who was for most of his adult life a fat cat
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MBA busy being a corporate satrap but then he gave it up at one point to travel through
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Sikh sites in Pakistan or other Nanakpanti sites and we'll explain the distinction soon
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and produced two books called The Lost Heritage and The Quest Continues as well as two documentaries
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These will be linked from the show notes.
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He is now engaged on a hugely ambitious process that of retracing the travels of Guru Nanak
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across what is today nine countries.
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This is all coming together in a documentary series called Allegory, a tapestry of Nanak's
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Before I begin my conversation with Amardeep though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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If you enjoy listening to The Seen and the Unseen, you can play a part in keeping the
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The Seen and the Unseen has been a labor of love for me.
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I've enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe
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and hopefully yours as well.
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But while the work has been its own reward, I don't actually make much money off the show.
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Although The Seen and the Unseen has great numbers, advertisers haven't really woken
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up to the insane engagement level of podcasts.
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I do many many hours of deep research for each episode besides all the logistics of
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producing the show myself, scheduling guests, booking studios, paying technicians, the travel
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So well, I'm trying a new way of keeping this thing going and that involves you.
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My proposition for you is this, for every episode of The Seen and the Unseen that you
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enjoy, buy me a cup of coffee or even a lavish lunch, whatever you feel it's worth.
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You can do this by heading over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contributing an amount of
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The Seen and the Unseen will continue to be free on all podcast apps and at sceneunseen.in.
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This is just a gesture of appreciation.
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Help keep this thing going.
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sceneunseen.in slash support.
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Amardeep, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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Thank you, Ahmed, for giving this opportunity.
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We really appreciate being here with you.
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Amardeep, you know, before we get started, tell me a little bit about your history and
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how you came to this because I was sort of, you know, when I first heard about this project,
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when we were both invited to the Wither Bar Literary Festival a month or so ago, I presumed
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you must be a professor of history or something of that sort.
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And then I look at your bio and I'm like, wait, NBA from Chicago and you know, what's
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You know, life has its own ways of manifesting and taking you in different strands.
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Yes, it's a non-traditional path.
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I'm walking a path of an unstructured life today, trying to give it a structure.
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But then I have spent, like everyone else, go 25 years of my life in a structured environment
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of the corporate world, right?
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And I educated as I was studying in the Dune School.
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I did my engineering, did at University of Chicago MBA, worked at last and in two, bro,
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Gronk and Greaves and then gone to American Express where I spent 21 years.
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I was a regional head for Asia Pacific.
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All this period was a very structured life, 9 to 5, 9 to 9, you know, followed whatever
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You had hierarchy structure and that's what you were doing.
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You were one piece in the Big Jigsaw puzzle, that's it.
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And then something happened in 2014 and I walked out of the corporate world actually
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not knowing what was going to happen in the days to come, but I walked out with a bit
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of an egoistic attitude because my, in corporate world you do, your egos are very high and
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that's how you succeed, right?
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And I walked out because my job was moving to Australia and I didn't want to go, period.
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So I thought, you know, I've...
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You were based in Singapore, you are based in Singapore.
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So I started from India, I was in Hong Kong and then 20 years I've been in Singapore.
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2014 I walked away saying that I'll, at the peak of my career in the corporate world,
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I'll get something else.
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But that was not meant to be.
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And when I was going through that process, I would be lying to myself if I would say
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that I was not disillusioned.
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I was heavily disillusioned, the treadmill had stopped, I was still, my mind was running
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at the same pace and I didn't understand what was happening.
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In fact, for a few months I was lying on my bed, just looking at, observing the fan going
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in the one direction and trying to see why it rotates in the other direction visually,
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But you didn't understand, right?
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But then now when I look at my life, we are now in 2020.
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So 2014, 2020, good five to six years have passed by.
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I can rationalize now everything that has happened, but in the moment there was no rationalization.
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And the rationalization now is that I'm walking on an unstructured path, not knowing there
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are projects that are manifesting in my mind, and we're walking those paths and giving structures
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to those projects because you have to do an unstructured approach to get the data.
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The short of it all is that when I walked out, what people don't realize is that you
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just can't make a change one fine day.
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Because if you try and do the change in one fine day from an MBA engineering background
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to presumably you're thinking I'm an historian.
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I'm not, neither am I an anthropologist, neither am I, I'm a, I'm a theologian, right?
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Neither I'm a photographer, but I'm, neither I'm a videographer or neither am I a filmmaker,
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but I'm doing all that, right?
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So how does that happen?
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This change will not happen one day.
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If it happens one day, you will be totally disoriented.
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You will not be able to manage it.
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What people don't realize is the process behind it unconsciously that was happening for 30
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years that led you to this change on one fine day.
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And I can now look back and see the structure in that, in that process.
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And I do give this message to the youth is that I always say that don't follow your passion.
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Most of the people say that follow your passion in today's world.
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I said, don't follow your passion.
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There's a huge difference between following and creating because when you're following,
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you don't really have a structure behind it.
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You don't juice it out.
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You're just following it because sake of following, you're just filling in your gaps, right?
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When you create a passion, then you are going to become the passion.
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So when I was in the corporate world or before that in college, I mean, I had this habit
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of just picking up something.
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I was picking up history and I was just kind of juicing it out.
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At the age of 17 years, I started reading history.
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Good at five to six years into the reading of history for the regions that interested
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me was Punjab, Kashmir, Afghanistan.
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And then my corporate career started and I got spiritually oriented.
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I delved into the scriptures of my own faith and then the Sikh faith, and then I delved
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into many other scriptures, juiced it out, then I got into music, juiced it out in four
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or five years and stopped it one fine day.
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I had this habit of just stopping it one fine day when I think the challenge.
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When you got into music, what do you mean?
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I started studying musicology and then slowly started playing and understanding the Granth
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Sahib's, you know, Raag systems, so the Indian classical system.
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And that led me to understanding the verses a bit deeper, but I just suddenly stopped
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And I stopped it at a time where I lost faith in the elusive divine, the big power.
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I lost faith because certain events that were happening in my life.
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And I can always say losing faith is important because it allows you to then delve deeper
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and then re-emerge with a new faith, which could be different.
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And I lost faith and I found answer in Kabir's verse in Granth Sahib, you know, Kabir says,
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khalak khalak, khalak mein khalik.
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Creation is God himself.
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So what are you looking for?
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What is this quest of yours?
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When I realized that, actually I just dropped dead everything and I picked up the camera
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and I started appreciating the creation itself.
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In a short time, my photography reached a certain level and then I realized that many
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photographers contribute to magazines, but they seldom are able to express their deeper
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insights what went behind the photographs.
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So I started doing those travel writings with the deeper spiritual insights and then magazines
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What I'm trying to tell you is then all these skill sets were parallelly prepared while
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I was in the corporate world doing nine-to-nine job and I was doing it unconsciously.
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And then came 2014 when I walked out because of a certain decision, I thought I don't want
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I'll stay in Singapore, not realizing that that was not meant to be the door was going
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When the door was shut, these manifestations, these skills that I had acquired over layers
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by creating passions successfully in a successful period, I would look back and I would find
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the next passion just behind me and I would pick it up, you know, because you prepared
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yourself with one and you just turn back and the next purpose is right behind you.
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You have built it up to a level where in 2014, I just thought, let me go to Pakistan.
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And the story starts from there that just going to Pakistan leads to where I am today.
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That's a fascinating journey.
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And I have some related thoughts.
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One of course is I couldn't agree with you more about follow your passion being a dangerous
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Like on a note totally unrelated to you, what I often find is that when people say follow
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your passion, they fall for what is known as a survivor bias, that they'll see someone
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who is very successful having followed their passion and they don't realize that if it's
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a creative field, especially 99% of the people aren't going to be that person, they're not
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going to make it that far.
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And you know, the cafes at Varsova, which are frequent are full of people who have been
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struggling for years, even decades and the film industry here.
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So I, you know, I kind of see it all around me.
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It's sort of dangerous advice to give and it's also fascinating how, and you've described
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this before on how you built up to where you are layer upon layer and you've just described
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those layers of history, photography, sort of musicology and you know, which is also
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now another piece falls into place in terms of understanding your work because in your
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documentaries also there is so much very interesting and apt use of music.
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Before we get to, you know, you're going to Pakistan and how that journey for which the
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rest of your life seems to have been a preparation at that point, before we get to how that journey
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began and so on, let's take a quick diversion because you mentioned Kabir's phrase about,
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you know, the creator being in everything all around us.
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And you have also spoken in the past about how people have this misconception of Nanak's
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religion as being monotheism when it's actually monism and what Kabir's phrase seems to express
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is also monism of a sort.
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Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
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So I think now we're getting into theology, right?
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It's a very interesting point.
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I mean, I, I was born with nothing in my mind.
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I was conditioned by my society, my parents, what's right, what's wrong.
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And we all go through the process, right?
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And one fine day, you start delving into the path yourself and then you go to ask yourself
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Am I being, have I been taught the right thing all this time?
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And one of the things that I realized in my journeys is that Nanak has not been really
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Nanak wrote in our Indic language, he's a master of languages.
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And the Granth Sahib, if you see, there are, people think it's Punjabi, sorry, if you know
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Punjabi and you try to read Granth Sahib, you'll not understand head or tail.
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It's a composite of languages from Bengal when Jaydev is writing, Namdev from Maharashtra
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is writing, Farid from Pakpattan is writing in Pakistan, it's Seraki, it's Bengali, Sanskrit,
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Kurmukhi is mere, mere script, which we confuse, we don't get into it.
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It's an amalgamation of many languages.
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Kabir from UP Bihar area is writing in it.
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So what I'm trying to say is that when you look at this whole composite, you find this
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is being compiled in the time of the Bhakti movement.
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And Bhakti movement, there are two strands.
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One is from the Indic faiths.
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I will not brand this into Hinduism or something else because Indic faiths were bigger, right?
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So Indic faiths had many systems inside it.
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I mean, if you look at the Darshan Shastra of the Indian philosophical system, you know,
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they have Sankhya, Yog, Vedant and so on and so forth.
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One of the branch is that everything is one and then there are many other branches and
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Sufism came from Islam and got amalgamated in the Indus belt into what became the, Islam
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got amalgamated and became the Islamic version of Bhakti, which is Sufism, right?
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So we've seen all this churning happening.
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And Nanak walks in this land of the Indus River.
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So Nanak is right, talking about his verses about various languages.
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And then we have the Britishers who come into the India and they give us the gift of England
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English language and they translate our texts.
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And we today, without delving into the deeper values of our own texts, have started looking
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at translations to define who we are.
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There's nothing wrong with translations, but translations have limitations.
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So when I've gone through all this understanding of Nanak, I've not found a single book.
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I'm making a huge statement here, found not a single book, say this, that has described
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in English what his philosophy truly was.
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So Nanak is always described as he was the one who founded the monotheistic religion,
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Sikhism and so on and so forth.
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Well, he didn't find, he didn't found anything.
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He just was a man on quest, right?
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But monotheism is a concept that comes from Abrahamic faiths and Abrahamic faiths being
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Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, where they say God is one.
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There's a son of God, there's children of God, but children cannot be God, God cannot
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Like what Kabir says, khalak, khalak, khalak me khalik, God isn't the creation, creation
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Nanak says, before omkar, he writes a numeral one, why didn't he write two?
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Why didn't he write something else?
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One cannot as a numeral, and he writes numeral, one numeral cannot be two or cannot be three
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or cannot be four, right?
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And he's emphasizing that this entire omkar is one.
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We are one, yeah, ek omkar is one, one ecosystem.
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And that one ecosystem primarily means you are me, I am you, we are all one.
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That is not monotheism.
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And there's not a single book that says Nanak was the advocate of monism, because when you
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go down that path to understand Nanak, why did he put the numeral one in the starting
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of the scripture of Granth Sahib?
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You understand in the Granth Sahib also there's a verse of Bhagat Ravi Das.
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I mean, I don't believe in any caste system, but we need to actually bring that in because
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people, that's how they understand.
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Now Ravi Das was a chamar, but yet he had profound verses.
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And he says, tohi mohi mohi tohi antar kaisa.
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What's the difference between you and me?
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He's asking a question.
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Now it can be you Amit and me, or it could be the divine and me.
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Kanak katak jal tarang jaisa, gold and the bracelet, substratum is the gold, the bracelet
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is a form, or jal tarang, you know, waves on the base ocean, there's no difference.
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So Nanak is an advocate of monism.
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And that's the piece that has been not understood.
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I think that's the piece that you were asking about.
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So Kabir's voice is the same thing, Ravi Das's voice is the same thing, Farid's voice is
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And that's why Nanak consolidated all their voices into the scripture that became Granth
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And it's also, you know, picking up from what you said, it's also very interesting and something
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I've discussed in previous episodes with Manu Pillay and Madhvi Menon, among others, something
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that Sanjoy Chakraborty has written a very good book called The Truth About Ourselves,
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which is that what we think of as Hinduism is actually Brahmanism.
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It's a very ossified version of it, just one belt of it.
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And you know, you correctly spoke of it as the Indic religions or the Indic traditions.
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And what essentially happened was that when the British came here in an effort to understand
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this deeply complex universe that they had thrown themselves in of, you know, our subcontinent,
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they created simplifying narratives, often with the help of the local elites, who obviously
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pushed what suited them.
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So you suddenly had a certain version of Hinduism, which is more like Brahmanism with an ossified
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view of the caste system, a very simplistic Varna kind of thing, thrust in.
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And the tragedy is that today we look back at that as if that is Hinduism and as if that
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is a definitive truth, while the truth is that many of the Britishers who created these
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narratives not only knew very little, but someone like James Mill hadn't even been to
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India at the time he wrote what has now become a foundational text about India for us through
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And you know, and in a sense, I find that that has also happened in the popular consciousness
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with Sikhism, whereas people now think of Sikhism as something different from Hinduism
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or something completely apart.
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And the truth is, and I found out the beautiful metaphor of this in the Indus belt in the
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Indus river, which you have described as a place where faiths melted into each other.
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You know, tell me a little bit more about a sort of the culture of that belt and how
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like you point out Sufism, Bhakti, what we'll talk about later as Nanakpanti are all part
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of the same traditions.
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So the Indic belief systems had the beauty of coexistence of varieties of thoughts.
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Rather than giving my understanding of it, let me quote you the source because primary
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sources cannot be disputed.
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And I'll give you two quotes.
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Let's start with Kabir himself, who finds a, who's, I mean, Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh
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scripture is the largest repository of Kabir's writings.
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Bijak comes much later.
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That's a place which is largest repository and Kabir says a very interesting thing.
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So you brought in the Indus, so I'm going to make a statement and bring Indus inside
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Kabir says, Hindu Turak, Dohu ko samjhaon.
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I'm explaining to both Hindu and Turak.
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So let's step back for a moment.
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Why is he not saying Hindu, Muslim, Dohu ko samjhaon?
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If he's talking about religions, then he should say Hindu, Muslim, Dohu ko samjhaon.
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He's saying Hindu, Turak, Dohu ko samjhaon.
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Now today's context, when I use the word Turak, the present generation immediately
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And I say, you just got it wrong.
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Turkey is a nation in the modern state.
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Turak, Babur was a Turak, right, Lodi was a Turak.
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Turak is a civilization that had its unique characteristics that existed on the west of
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the Sindhu River Indus.
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There was a civilization that existed on its east.
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So Sindhu River was a defining boundary where two cultures met.
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And of course, when you meet, you amalgamate, right?
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So what are the peculiarities of the two cultures?
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Let's start with language.
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On the west of it, it's language from right to left.
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On the east of it, it's left to right.
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On the west of it, it's monotheism.
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It's an Abrahamic faith.
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There's only one God and God cannot be creation.
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Come on the east of it.
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There's a potpourri of belief systems and everything can coexist, the Indic belt.
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And therefore people get confused.
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Monotheism is also a part of it, but it's a subset of it.
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Monotheism is also a part of it.
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Multitudes are also a part of it, but that's the Indic belt.
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And to understand that, let me pick up the second verse from Nanak himself.
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He says, jhe ghar, jhe gur, jhe updesh.
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If you delve into the Indic darshan shastra, the philosophical system, the philosophy system
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of the Indian subcontinent, you'll understand that darshan shastra classifies our historically
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the old philosophical system into six pillars, right?
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I'll not get into depth of it, but it's divided into six pillars and it's a depth of study
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There are six philosophical systems.
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There are six spiritual systems.
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There are six spiritual systems.
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Each philosophical system has a different updesh, monism inside it.
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Then he says, gur, gur, echo.
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Guru ka guru ek hi hai.
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Gur, gur, echo, ves, anek.
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Then he says, he gives his final line in that.
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Gur, gur, echo, ves, anek.
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Baba jhe ghar karte keerat hoi.
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So what he's saying is accepting everything.
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Nanak is accepting everything.
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But what he's saying is a profound statement of the bhakti culture
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that was emerging at the time when Nanak walked with Baba Fareed 250 years before him.
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Jai Dev in Bengal, Naamdev here in Mahashtra.
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They were all somehow getting connected.
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And they were the proponents of the bhakti system.
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So he's talking about in this Indic system, all was coexisting.
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That's what I'm trying to say.
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So he's talking about Kabir who's defining a boundary
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and Nanak who's defining what the East was really.
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Now when you put this whole thing together, Indus is a defining point.
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And on this side, you had many systems that could co-exist.
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But when you bring in boundaries around it
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and you bring in utilization of a faith for the benefit,
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that's where Brahmanism starts coming by, right?
#
Now Brahmanism has been opposed in the Indian context by many faiths
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or many belief systems.
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So they were all opposing this ownership
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that God can be only reached through me,
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the concept of Brahmanism, right?
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So these Indic religions had a coexistence.
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And what the Sindhu belt basically did was
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when the Turki people started coming in,
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you know, if you go to UP, you'll find where two cultures,
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the Hindi and the Islamic aspect,
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they used two words, saptah and haftah.
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Saptah becomes haftah because in the olden times,
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in the Persians, sah is pronounced as ha.
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So Sindhu became Hindu.
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When the Turkic civilizations came to the defining point of Sindhu,
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On that side was a different culture
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which they were coming to assimilate into.
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I don't use the word conquer.
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There's nothing as conquering.
#
Boundaries were not there.
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They were coming in to assimilate.
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There were tugs of war happening in terms of faith,
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in terms of assimilations.
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Many things happened in this thing.
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So they were assimilating here and they saw a different culture
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and that's why the word Hindu came in.
#
And I will just say one thing that I've observed,
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you know, these are my own observations.
#
When the earliest migrations of a lot of Punjabis happened towards US,
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if you see the newspapers in the California belt,
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what they say, I'm not saying Sikhs are Hindus or Hindus are Sikhs.
#
I'm not going to do all that discussion.
#
I'm just telling you what I've observed.
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The papers say Hindus are coming to America.
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They were all Sikhs from Punjab coming in, turban-wearing Sikhs, right?
#
What I'm trying to say is that, yes, in the early days,
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the Hindu in the Indic belt was not a defined religion
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as we are calling it today.
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Today, it's become a defined structure.
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You've got to take the word Hindu as coming from Sindhu River
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as people on the Indic side living here.
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I think that's something very hard to digest today when you bring it in.
#
A lot of people don't like it.
#
And what strikes me is that on the one hand,
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there is a happenstance of colonialism
#
and the British trying to keep the narratives which are convenient for them
#
because it fits in with their whole tactical policy of divide and rule.
#
we also find this natural impetus within faiths themselves
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to sort of ossify in certain directions.
#
For example, one, you've got the separation,
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this separation in people's minds of Sikhism
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from the other broader traditions that they were once considered to be part of.
#
And on the other hand, you have, for example,
#
the movement of Hinduism towards Brahmanism,
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which itself seems a political movement.
#
And even within Sikhism, you know, the Khalsa strand of it taking prominence
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and therefore some of the other diversity among Nanak's followers
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somehow kind of disappearing.
#
Why do you think there is this tendency?
#
Is it something inevitable?
#
Is it going to happen to all intellectual traditions
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that you develop your own dogmas and customs and rituals
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and then they get ossified and then that defines a religion
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instead of being merely one expression of it?
#
No, I think any faith goes towards defining of a boundary.
#
That's a natural process that happens, right?
#
So there's no faith that's excused from it.
#
But in the context of Nanak and his believers,
#
one needs to put a bit of a historical context to it.
#
When he walked the path along the Indus belt,
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so he traveled far and wide,
#
but his major influence was in the Indus belt
#
because I have walked the Indus belt from Kashmir in Pakistan side
#
right down to Sindh, Balochistan through Pakistan's Punjab and Khyber.
#
And we can talk about my works later on,
#
but I can confidently say probably in seven decades,
#
I'm the first one to have walked so deeply inside,
#
definitely more than 180 cities and villages.
#
And I've seen strands of cultures that are still living there.
#
I've been into Afghanistan, I've filmed in Afghanistan
#
and I've seen strands of surviving cultures.
#
There are very few people left,
#
but there was a thriving culture that was there till 30 years back.
#
The war has disrupted everything
#
and there are only about 850 what I call as the Nanak Panthis left there.
#
The only point I will try and make is the moment you move from the India
#
or the Punjab of India and move towards the Indus belt in Pakistan
#
and go down to Sindh, Balochistan and then go into Afghanistan,
#
the one thing that you find in the people still who are living there
#
is that Nanak is an integral part of the entire non-Islamic society,
#
which is a very interesting observation
#
because when you're going to look at it today
#
in the context of where the believers of Nanak are in India,
#
so there were two strands and 47 people came here
#
and for whatever reasons, the boundaries kind of got restricted.
#
A lot of people still believe in Nanak,
#
they go to Gurdwara and all, everything.
#
He's there in people's heart,
#
but I don't think people are really understanding his philosophy, right?
#
So it's just become another idol or another worship factor,
#
but people are not getting into depth of it
#
and then the Sikhs have now become the only kind of perceived followers of Nanak.
#
But when you go into the Indus belt,
#
you find Dada Revachand, Bansri Lal, Santosh Kumar, Santok Singh, Ram Singh,
#
all followers of Nanak and then you go into Afghanistan,
#
the boundary of distinction between Hinduism and Sikhism
#
as we define in India is not there.
#
Now when I look at that, so then I ask myself,
#
I have read about these things
#
because when you read the Persian sources after Nanak,
#
before the emergence of Khalsa, I'm not trying to demean anything.
#
Khalsa emerged for a reason, there was a need for there, right?
#
But till then, the panth was in the Persian sources known as Nanak Panthi.
#
The Persians are writing about the panth of Nanak.
#
Yes, in that panth, there were many strands, many strands were there.
#
Sutra Shahis, the Udaasins, the many other strands were there.
#
And then came the Khalsa strand.
#
There was a reason for that.
#
It saw its glorious chapters.
#
But somehow, the factors in my understanding
#
which have caused disruptions are a culture
#
that was existing along the Indus Belt
#
where the faiths were amalgamating.
#
And I see that in Sindh, there are darbars and then there are gurdwaras
#
and you see there's a lot of syncretic aspect coming in.
#
1947 is a point of deflection.
#
I would say if you take the whole landmass,
#
what you see today as Punjab and India
#
is only about less than 5% of the entire landmass
#
of the Indus civilization where our forefathers came from.
#
The Nanak's believers were right from Kashmir down to Sindh Balochistan.
#
And that 95% of the land went away.
#
And one fine day, you were thrust into a new land
#
and you got disseminated into Maharashtra, into Tamil Nadu, into UP.
#
My father from Kashmir landed into UP.
#
And I've seen my own family's people.
#
The first obvious thing is your generation becomes quiet
#
because they've experienced the Holocaust, right?
#
Second generation becomes confused because you were quiet first.
#
Second generation, the information is not passed on.
#
And some of them, islands get up and they start probing these questions.
#
And I see myself as one of those islands.
#
But when I look around, what I see is that the dissemination
#
of the people into a wider society
#
resulted in a need for assimilation and acceptance.
#
It's a natural phenomenon, right?
#
Your faith is different.
#
Here it's a different, there are civilizations along river belts.
#
And the two major civilizations in the North India
#
was the Indus belt and the Gangetic belt.
#
Gangetic belt had a Hinduism which was more,
#
the Indus belt from the times of Nanak, Baba Fareed and others
#
had moved towards more bhakti tradition.
#
And that's where the caste system was being shunned.
#
The equality between men and women was being talked about.
#
It was being talked about the equality between faiths.
#
Nanak was saying, Nako Hindu Na Musalman.
#
It is very differently inherently from the Gangetic belt.
#
And then these people are thrust into this belt.
#
Now you are on the fringe as yet in terms of faith system
#
because only a few years had passed by since Nanak
#
and this uprooting happens.
#
So as you land there, the generation starts assimilating.
#
I think that's what has caused a lot of moving away
#
because people are confused.
#
People don't understand.
#
We've not done the passing of the philosophical message.
#
That's caused the distancing, I think.
#
So, you know, I have a couple of follow-up questions on this.
#
But before we get to that, you know,
#
I've heard you speak about an encounter.
#
You had with someone from the Udhaseen faith in Bihar,
#
which you said moved you greatly and moved me as well
#
when you told that story.
#
So, you know, why don't you tell us?
#
Well, you see, there was many traditions that I said
#
were in the strands in the Nanak Panthi culture.
#
And what's right or wrong, I will not get into
#
because, you know, now I'm getting into the realm of faith,
#
you know, and people have opinions.
#
So to the viewers, I'll humbly request that don't pass judgements
#
because I'm only talking from what I've observed in my works.
#
We've not talked about my works as yet,
#
but so I don't know if people have the context of what I've generated.
#
But from my works, when I've really walked the paths
#
and I observe a lot of things where it takes me
#
and transports me back into time.
#
And in the Sikh history, when the Sikhs were facing the persecution,
#
right, the Khalsas were facing a persecution in the Punjab
#
after the weakening of the Mughal Empire
#
in the period wherein Nader Shah invades,
#
Ahmed Shah Abdali invades eight times.
#
In that period, it's a very, very dark period of Sikh history
#
because there was a reward for a Sikh's head in the lands of Punjab.
#
So the one who would swear to wear a turban and be distinctly visible
#
had a reward on his head.
#
Sikhs were living in jungles that time.
#
They were doing gorilla tactics, right?
#
And in that period for their defense,
#
the Sikh community cannot forget that the broader Nanak Panthi culture,
#
the non-Khalsas took care of their shrines, their places.
#
And I say it's not there in the Sikhs.
#
It was of the every strand that was there in Punjab.
#
They were believers of Nanak.
#
It was our collective composite culture, right?
#
So the Udasin sect did do a lot of contribution.
#
They managed the sites in the time when they were not being persecuted
#
because they didn't look like Khalsas, right?
#
But the way history moved on
#
and with the definition of the boundaries of who a Sikh is in the modern context,
#
which happened about 100 years back,
#
it's a different topic altogether.
#
But when you define something, right or wrong, I'm not going to get into that.
#
But if you define something, you also define what you are not, you know?
#
So defining has a negative side to it also.
#
You also define who you are not.
#
And when you start defining yourself in terms of black and white,
#
you also define who the others were not, right?
#
I think that led to a bit of distancing.
#
So the over period of time in 100 years, the Udasin culture moved away.
#
And I was moved because I did meet one of the,
#
in my filming of the Alegría Tapestry of Guru Nanak's travels,
#
I try and go into a lot of these strands of the past
#
where the broader believers of Nanak,
#
to understand Nanak, you cannot understand him from Gurdwaras alone.
#
There is space for Gurdwaras.
#
But Nanak was traveling to Sufi sites, Hindu sites, Islamic sites,
#
Jogis, where they were meeting.
#
And therefore, you have to get into every place where he had been.
#
So when I go into those places, I meet lots of different kinds of people.
#
I make an effort to even go to Kanfatta Jogis
#
because he was having dialogues with the Sids.
#
So I have to now, in 550 years later on in his lifetime,
#
have to also interact with them.
#
So when I interact with the Udasi order in Bihar,
#
I mean, this person interestingly made a very interesting statement.
#
He said, unfortunately, the way things have gone,
#
we have been ousted from the faith.
#
And he was hesitant to speak about Nanak.
#
And I said, you know what, you've got Nanak all over your dhera.
#
Why won't you speak about it?
#
He says, because we've been ousted.
#
And then he said a very interesting statement.
#
He says, all right, you make a judgment that we do this XYZ.
#
Look into your own self.
#
Don't you do this? Don't you do that?
#
And then you pass a judgment on us.
#
And he says, had you not ousted us,
#
you know what my vision as a youth was
#
when I was a 15-year-old child and I became an Udasi?
#
All throughout my life, I was wanting to take Nanak's philosophy
#
into every temple of India because it's the most important philosophy of oneness.
#
But then when I heard him, I said, yeah, I mean, this guy is saying right.
#
So if I don't have any religious objectives behind it and no agenda,
#
then just look at it objectively as to what a person says,
#
I'm no one to pass judgments on history, but it is what it is.
#
And you know, it strikes me looking at Nanak as a layman.
#
It seems that rather than think of him as the founder of a specific religion,
#
which is distinct from all others,
#
he seems to be more a figure like Kabir.
#
That even if you're not a follower necessarily,
#
like I am an atheist, but reading Kabir always moves me.
#
And I find Nanak to be a similar kind of figure.
#
Is that something you would agree with?
#
Absolutely. All the Bhagats were the same.
#
The thing is Nanak is absolutely,
#
Kabir, Nanak, Jayadev, all of them absolutely.
#
Baba Farid, they're all aligned.
#
They're all profound Bhagats who were talking about oneness,
#
trying to reform the society.
#
You find appeal in Kabir.
#
I find it too also, right?
#
But then I ask many a times, you being a Punjabi origin,
#
how deep have you gone into Nanak?
#
And we're not trying to compare two individuals, each to themselves.
#
They're both powerful people, right?
#
But how many times have you gone to Nanak?
#
Now, I know the answer would be much lesser, right?
#
And I as a follower of the Granth Sahib have delved into both.
#
And I've always asked this question as to why would you,
#
who was also from the composite culture of Sindh belt,
#
the Sindhu river belt, the Indus belt,
#
when your forefathers were actually revering the entire composite culture
#
of the Granth Sahib where all these Bhagats were there,
#
why would you not be reading Nanak so much?
#
That makes me then question, is that have we found,
#
created a boundary so hard around the practices
#
that Nanak has become inaccessible?
#
His verses have become inaccessible.
#
I think that's what has happened.
#
Otherwise, there's no reason why Nanak's verse
#
should not be sung by any other person who sings Kabir's verse.
#
But rules, regulations and other things have made it hard now.
#
Now, I'm again not trying to say what's right or wrong
#
because we're getting into the realm of religion,
#
but purely from his verses and his meaning,
#
it's an unfortunate outcome that's happened.
#
We can't blame anyone else but ourselves.
#
Another sort of interesting thing that you were pointing out
#
when we had, you know, coffee before this recording
#
is how Sikh history has often been elided
#
and, you know, not given adequate attention
#
on either side of the border after partition.
#
Tell me a little bit about, you know, sort of why that has happened.
#
So your question about history,
#
just a bit of a background for the viewers,
#
is that the work that I've done as my two foundation works
#
is first in the book called Lost Heritage of Sikh Legacy in Pakistan,
#
second one is The Quest Continues Lost Heritage of Sikh Legacy in Pakistan,
#
in which I've mapped the remnants of the Sikh legacy
#
across 126 cities and villages in Pakistan
#
across Baltistan, Kashmir, Khanbibaktoonwa, Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan.
#
Of course, I've been very passionate about documenting for posterity
#
and that's why I've taken so much of risk to walk so deep inside,
#
probably as a first person of non-Pakistan origin
#
because my parents were from that area.
#
I walked deep inside and I was able to get this documentation done.
#
But in the process, as I released my first book,
#
I remember there was a history teacher,
#
history professor sitting in the Delhi release,
#
a non-Sikh and she actually made an interesting point
#
and she said, Amardeep, what you've just shared with us is absolutely right
#
and I as a history teacher can validate this
#
because in the Delhi University,
#
we only make a passing mention of the Sikh history,
#
which is limited to the Sikh gurus
#
and a brief mention of Ranjit Singh and that's it, brief.
#
And you make me think as to why don't we delve deeper?
#
And the answer to that question of hers or the thought of hers was,
#
I said, I have thought about this myself too
#
and I feel that my community is a cucumber between the sandwich.
#
And when I say my community, I'm talking about the wider context,
#
Every Punjabi who got uprooted,
#
every Sindhi who believes in Nanak who got uprooted,
#
Every family of Punjab would have their eldest son as a Sikh, right?
#
That's why they used to have them in the past.
#
So my answer to that was that we are a cucumber in the sandwich
#
because I feel in India, not that it's officially said,
#
but I feel we don't teach the Sikh history
#
because 80% of the glorious chapters churned in the lands
#
that became Pakistan in 1947 and that is not our land.
#
The great empire of Ranjit Singh and so on.
#
80% of the glorious chapters,
#
right up till Afghanistan border,
#
Jamrod Fort where Hari Singh Nalwa died,
#
after 1000 years of invasions,
#
he plugged the further invasions through the Khyber Pass.
#
No other invasion has happened thereafter.
#
British came from the other side, didn't come from Khyber Pass.
#
But Hari Singh Nalwa is the deciding point.
#
But that history doesn't find any place in India
#
because it's a history that churned in the lands that became Pakistan,
#
which is no more part of India.
#
And when I walk in Pakistan,
#
the history books do not mention the Sikh history period.
#
There's a silence around it.
#
And I've seen the Punjab University books in Lahore,
#
in the university books, two volumes.
#
They talk about the demise of the Mughal Empire,
#
the coming of Nader Shah Ahmad Shah Abdali
#
and then comes the advent of British.
#
The entire period of the Sikh chapters is silent.
#
And you look at that and you wonder why.
#
And then I think it's because it's a period after 1000 invasion
#
where the ruler of the state was not a Muslim.
#
Now, it was a very secular empire.
#
Ranjit Singh was a very secular person
#
because more than 50% of his forces were Muslims.
#
His foreign minister was a Muslim.
#
So many brave generals of the Muslim faith actually died defending his empire.
#
And yet, he doesn't find a mention
#
because he is not a believer of the Islamic faith.
#
So, it doesn't find mention in Pakistan.
#
It doesn't find a mention here.
#
And that to me is the unfortunate thing that our community,
#
therefore, I feel very passionately that
#
if we don't write and protect our history
#
in terms of visual remnants and other things,
#
how will my next generation remember?
#
How will we revive those art, architecture, cultural footprints
#
from these various strands that I see across the remnants in Pakistan?
#
It's important to bring that perspective into these documentation
#
so that we don't lose those strands.
#
And that's why I've been actually dedicating myself onto this path.
#
And this also sort of reminded me of,
#
you know, you've written about how Guru Arjun
#
got Samiyamir of Lahore
#
to lay the foundation of the Golden Temple at Amritsar
#
and how later when Guru Arjun was sort of imprisoned by Jahangir
#
before he was eventually executed,
#
Samiyamir and Wazir Khan got together to petition for his release,
#
which kind of shows how, you know,
#
there was so much sort of syncretism in it
#
and the differences between these religions and its people
#
weren't as ossified and hard-coded as it seemed to be today.
#
And you mentioned earlier families where the tradition was that
#
Hindu families with the tradition was that the first child would be a Sikh.
#
And I'm told my own family was one of those.
#
So, the practice stopped a generation ago,
#
which is kind of fascinating.
#
And all of this comes because of, you know, that phrase
#
that both of us have used and I want you to talk about a bit more,
#
You know, you've pointed out,
#
and we'll talk about your, you know, travels through Pakistan after this,
#
but you've pointed out that people often have a misconception
#
of how many Sikhs there are in Pakistan.
#
The cookie-cutter answer, as you've said,
#
is 12 or 13 thousand from the 1500 who were left after partition.
#
But your answer is that if you don't define the followers of Nanak as Sikhs
#
and you look at what you call Nanakpanthis,
#
there are many, many more than that.
#
I mean, I'm often always asked this question.
#
And I think Pakistan does not understand this context of the Indus Belt.
#
Sikhs themselves are ignorant of it now.
#
So, they tend to see only the Khalsa count.
#
People who are turban-wearing like me,
#
and I'm a proud adherent of the Khalsa tradition.
#
But I'm known to decide who else is a believer of Nanak.
#
So, when I say the entire culture along the Indus Belt,
#
all the Sindhis, all the Balochis have been the believers of Nanak.
#
I mean, I see them all in Pakistan still.
#
And what people don't know of is, you know,
#
there are more than 250 Gurdwara still operational in Sindh and Balochistan, right?
#
And so, when you look at that, you say,
#
you know, there's an entire culture that's yet living there
#
and we are not recognizing them.
#
So, that entire belt is what we call as the Nanakpanthis.
#
My estimate is that there are over 800,000 Nanakpanthis still in Pakistan.
#
When I meet Dada Revachand in Sukkur in Sindh,
#
and he shows me the translation of the Granth Sahib
#
that he's done in Sindhi script, 24 volumes,
#
although he's a small minority in Sindh of the Nanakpanthi culture.
#
But that shows me the passion with which he actually believes in Nanak, right?
#
In fact, you've written about how Hindus in Sindh call themselves Ahijdari Sikhs.
#
And Bansri Lal in Mingora who manages the Gurdwara,
#
by all definition of East Punjab,
#
he will not be considered a Sikh, but he is a very devout Sikh.
#
So, I think that poses a question as to where our boundary today is and where it was.
#
I consider myself very fortunate that having been born
#
and being conditioned with what's right, what's wrong,
#
as I walked these paths in these lands,
#
I found the remnants, the strands of the intangible culture yet alive.
#
That makes me say that, okay, this was the society.
#
Is this what you mean by what you said earlier
#
about losing your faith and then regaining it?
#
I mean, you have to grow in a conditioned environment,
#
and then you have to drop the barriers and the conditioning.
#
It's like breaking the shell, right?
#
And you have to then now start re-looking at things.
#
I am still a proud Sikh.
#
I am still a proud Khalsa.
#
But the only thing I am saying is the definition of what I understand
#
of the faith of the Indus belt was so beautiful, so broad,
#
and Nanak was the entire fabric of it.
#
That needs to be re-looked in the India's context
#
where the communities have got disseminated,
#
and people don't understand this.
#
So, I think for that, I consider myself fortunate
#
and thank the divine that you gave me this ability to walk the lands
#
and interact and stay with those people.
#
I spend days and nights with them.
#
My heart pains when I look at how the culture is now in small pockets.
#
You know, when communities get in a Holocaust, when they move out,
#
the ones who chose to stay, they become inwards.
#
So, they start protecting themselves more.
#
But that's where lies the beauty.
#
Because when you parachute inside that society seven decades later,
#
you find that they've protected a strand that is lost elsewhere.
#
That's gone elsewhere else.
#
So, here you still find it still protected because they become inwards now.
#
They built a fort around themselves.
#
They don't want to lose that.
#
And you manage to get inside that, you parachuted from nowhere,
#
and you suddenly see and say,
#
ah, this is what my father used to talk about.
#
This is what I used to hear about.
#
This is what I've read about.
#
And I'm finding the living strands of that.
#
And it was a very, very progressive society.
#
And I want to deviate a little bit into the remnants of the art
#
and try and understand the culture.
#
So, in the ruins, in my second book, The Quest Continues,
#
I've shown a lot of pictures.
#
I don't try and interpret a lot of stuff, you know,
#
because I've chosen not to do that.
#
I want the viewer to interpret it themselves.
#
I'm not trying to handhold you and take you through.
#
I'm just describing my journey,
#
but I've given you so much of visual material in there
#
that if you are having the open mind to look at them
#
and not discard it because it goes beyond the domains of your conditioned mind,
#
then you will find a lot of answers in it.
#
But you will have to find the answers.
#
In my calls, in my talks, in my discussions with people,
#
I will, wherever there's an opportunity, give my thoughts,
#
but I don't write it everything.
#
So, I'll give you two things from art and talk about the culture itself.
#
So, I find in one of the places of worship,
#
a fresco of a woman leading a hunt.
#
It's in the second book.
#
And she's leading a hunt and catching hold of a black buck deer.
#
And there's a man sitting on a horse behind,
#
chilling it out with a hawk on his arm.
#
So, there are two things that I take from it.
#
Black buck, that means, was there in Punjab too.
#
That's why you're hunting in Punjab.
#
Today, you don't have it because the environment has changed in the 200, 300 years.
#
The environment has changed from forests.
#
A land of five rivers would not be an agricultural land.
#
They'll be heavily forested, right?
#
We read the Umda to Tariq, the day-to-day account of Ranjit Singh's period.
#
They're going into forests.
#
That forest is totally gone.
#
It's an agricultural land.
#
Punjab today is absolutely manicured, pedicured land, right?
#
But there were black bucks moving around.
#
The Ranjit Singh's troops have hunted lions and tigers there, right?
#
One is the wildlife thing.
#
I'm coming to more of a deeper meaning out here.
#
This fresco probably is 200 years old.
#
200, 250, I can't put a date to it.
#
I'm just saying probably, right?
#
That means 250 years back,
#
the society in the Indus belt was believing in women's empowerment
#
because she was leading a hunt.
#
Man was chilling behind.
#
Women's empowerment in today's world is 250 years old.
#
It's 250 years late, sorry.
#
In Punjab, our forefathers were much ahead.
#
Today, we have regressed.
#
Today, Punjab cannot claim to be the place where there's women's empowerment.
#
But my forefathers were much more forward.
#
That's what I take from that art.
#
Otherwise, that art would not exist there.
#
I mean, one wonders if the art is an outlier.
#
I mean, I did an episode with Madhavi Menon on the history of desire in India
#
and it's certainly true that there were many different kinds of expression
#
given to desire and women could have lived different lives.
#
But I am really not sure looking through history with the limited knowledge I have
#
that women were ever empowered.
#
I would always kind of be in.
#
In the context of Punjab,
#
I would not agree because empowerment starts from a philosophical seed first.
#
If philosophically you don't believe in empowerment,
#
art as an expression cannot come out.
#
So first, let's then step back.
#
Nanak says in his writings,
#
why do you call her inferior?
#
Who gives birth to the greatest of the kings?
#
Why do you call her inferior?
#
Nanak is talking 500 years back about women's equality in the society.
#
Well, you know, on the one hand, this sounds fairly enlightened
#
but on the other hand, one could also argue
#
that this takes a paternalistic view of a woman in the sense saying
#
that she is valuable because she gives birth to men.
#
But at the same place, he's writing in other places also
#
about the glory of the woman, right?
#
But through the male gaze, right?
#
Through the male gaze, like in this example.
#
I think there are many other verses which are talking about her status in the society.
#
Of course, there's a maternal aspect,
#
there's a nurturing aspect of the female species.
#
And today, I'm not trying to say women's empowerment,
#
today's context of that everyone needs to be in the workforce and this and that.
#
I'm not passing any judgment on that.
#
But they were being put on a pedestal with the natural instincts kept into the...
#
And certainly relative to the times.
#
So, I think there is the art,
#
as I look at it, it had its some imprints into that.
#
Of course, there's a lot of...
#
Society is not perfect.
#
But these are the glimpses that you get
#
because there are cracks in the society, right?
#
There are always cracks.
#
The second one I want to talk about is very interesting fresco again.
#
You find frescoes inside some of these ruins of spiritual sites
#
of a Gurdwara that I saw,
#
Shravan Kumar holding his parents in the two tokris
#
on the two baskets and walking.
#
Now, I look at that and say, wow.
#
So, Shravan Kumar is not about any religion.
#
It's not about any religion.
#
It's about respect to your parents.
#
That transcends every religion.
#
It's a basic fundamental duty, right?
#
And Shravan Kumar finds a space inside the artwork of a Gurdwara.
#
will he find space in the artwork of a Gurdwara today?
#
Probably not because he's not wearing a turban.
#
That makes you think that,
#
okay, here's a strand which I see in the past of what the culture was,
#
what the society was and where we are today.
#
I'm not passing judgment as to what has led to there,
#
but it allows you to go back in time
#
and then start asking certain questions.
#
That's what I'm doing again and again.
#
I'm not writing everything in my books,
#
but I'm requesting the viewer to delve into the pictures and see for yourself.
#
In fact, some of the pictures I found really fascinating in your book is
#
in your chapter on the Baba Dhan Singh Gurdwara at Kot Fateh Khan,
#
you've shown frescoes of Shiva, Nandi and Ganesh
#
and then Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.
#
And you know, again, that was something I kind of had to spot.
#
You don't have much commentary on that.
#
You've just laid it out for you know,
#
people to see and sort of think for themselves.
#
In another chapter, you show Nanihal Singh's Haveli
#
where you know, there's a Rang Mahal on the roof
#
and there you see Krishna listening to music and so on and so forth.
#
How did you train yourself to be able to look at these frescoes
#
and sort of identify who the characters are
#
or even other nuances like elsewhere,
#
you have, you know, identified a building and said the bricks that were used here
#
were of a time of Ranjit Singh's time.
#
So we can date it accordingly.
#
What was some of this knowledge part of the layers of knowledge
#
you were building up before you embarked on this quest
#
or was it during this quest that you kept refining your understanding?
#
So first and foremost thing you're talking about Nanihal's Haveli
#
and you talked about Krishna and you talked about other things.
#
Yes, you find a variety of art form,
#
but I just want to point out there's one picture in there.
#
Go and look at the picture again.
#
There's also a Masjid in that.
#
So it's not all I'm trying to say it's not one view, right?
#
So in his bedroom, which is I'm assuming it's his bedroom
#
because it's living place.
#
He's got arts of the entire culture, the composite culture of Punjab.
#
So let's not just see the present Hindu aspect of it.
#
There are Sikh Gurus there, there is Masjid there.
#
So they are reflecting the culture of Punjab in their bedroom.
#
I think that's the key thing out here.
#
As far as the identification of bricks and the other many other things,
#
I think it's not your question is not about the bricks itself,
#
but the many layers that we're talking about.
#
It doesn't happen overnight.
#
As I said, don't follow your passion.
#
When you create your passion, every moment is a question.
#
Every moment is a question.
#
In my talk to you right now,
#
I'm probing certain things inside my mind, right?
#
Yeah, every moment becomes a question
#
when you start creating your passion.
#
And therefore, every moment becomes a learning space.
#
I am not born historian.
#
I'm an electronics engineer who's done MBA,
#
who's walked the path of the finance industry.
#
I was the revenue management head for Asia Pacific.
#
I'm not trained for these things,
#
but I have forced myself to start asking questions
#
in those creating passion sub-segments of my life
#
of four to five years that I was doing very passionately.
#
And when you start doing that,
#
you don't know what question will come to your mind.
#
So I'm not trying to go into a classroom environment,
#
but I'm curious enough to look at things
#
and try and find answers.
#
Okay, so why is this brick thinner
#
than the bricks that I see today?
#
In the thin bricks, I find certain bricks are bigger in size
#
and certain are smaller in size.
#
Now you're going to have to look at that.
#
Why is this larger and why is this thin?
#
What period are they coming from?
#
Because bricks are made in kilns, right?
#
And people buy them and they make monuments.
#
Now you're going to look at the brick sizes
#
to say which period it belongs to.
#
There is a certain size of bricks in the Punjab region,
#
which is known as Mughlai bricks.
#
Thin bricks, but broader.
#
Then Ranjit Singh's period, the kilns,
#
the cast for the bricks changed to smaller size,
#
So you look at the two,
#
you can say this is Mughlai period or Lodi period
#
and this is the Ranjit Singh's period.
#
And then you look at the British bricks,
#
which become thick, what we use today.
#
Much like the British themselves as we now know.
#
So no comments on that, but yeah.
#
So that's how you start, you know,
#
probing and the only thing I can say is that
#
knowledge is a process of layering.
#
No one can claim to know anything and everything.
#
I don't know anything and everything,
#
but the layering will allow me to assimilate knowledge
#
from the works done by the people in the past.
#
And hopefully I'm adding my layer
#
for the future generation to take away something from it.
#
Knowledge comes in layers
#
and knowledge will keep assimilating in layers.
#
is the seeker showing his or her commitment
#
to delve deeper into the layers of knowledge
#
to understand what the person is after?
#
Very profound words and I would add to that
#
and say podcasts also come in layers.
#
We will now take a commercial break
#
and come back after the break
#
to add a layer of your personal journeys to Pakistan.
#
If you're listening to the seen and the unseen,
#
it means you like listening to audio
#
and you're thirsty for knowledge.
#
I'd urge you to check out Storytel,
#
the sponsors of this episode.
#
Storytel is an audiobook platform
#
that has a massive range of audiobooks from around the world.
#
Their international collection is stellar,
#
but so is a local collection.
#
They have a fantastic range of Marathi and Hindi audiobooks.
#
I do a weekly podcast there
#
called The Book Club with Amit Verma,
#
in which I talk about one book every week,
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giving context, giving you a taste of it and so on.
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And as long as Storytel sponsors this show
#
within this commercial itself,
#
I will recommend an audiobook
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that I liked on that platform every week.
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My recommendation for this week is Where India Goes
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where I discuss just this with Shruti Raj Gopalan.
#
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#
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Where India Goes by Diane Coffey and Dean Spears.
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Download the Storytel app or visit Storytel.com.
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Remember that Storytel with a single L, Storytel.com.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Amardeep Singh
#
about his fascinating work looking at Sikh legacy.
#
Amardeep, let's kind of talk about your,
#
you know, the first of your two projects, so to say,
#
which was traveling through Pakistan,
#
which resulted in these two books
#
and these two documentaries.
#
And, you know, you start your book Lost Heritage
#
by sort of injecting a personal note into it
#
where your father Sundar Singh in Gorakhpur
#
receives a, you know, a postcard from Rawal Pindi.
#
Tell me a little bit about that.
#
And was your sort of family history
#
where there's a lot more history
#
which goes back to the trauma of partition,
#
was that part of what drove you on your quest?
#
Yes, there's a personal aspect to this whole quest
#
which has transformed from a very personal probing
#
to documenting for the broader communities.
#
So it's a transformation of a personal quest.
#
I didn't go into Pakistan, to be honest, to write any book.
#
Because when I left the corporate world,
#
I just thought I'm actually in between something
#
and the doors were shut for a little while
#
and I think divine was trying to push me in this direction.
#
And when I decided to walk in, the gates started opening.
#
So divine was waiting for me to take the step
#
and then started opening the gates.
#
But in that opening of the gates,
#
I stepped in with a simple quest
#
as to my father was not able to go back
#
to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan's Kashmir.
#
And my mother was from Abbottabad.
#
Both of them could not go.
#
So I wanted to, and there are no more, right?
#
So I wanted to see if I can go in and see the places.
#
And then the layers of my own building
#
on creating of passions that I was doing
#
had prepared me over the time as a photographer,
#
as a small visual narrative writer,
#
as having enough knowledge about history,
#
about spirituality, about not just my faith,
#
many other faiths, all the layers were prepared.
#
And when I stepped inside,
#
the gates started opening up for me.
#
But I only went in with a personal quest.
#
But what I saw and I felt that I came back
#
with 36 cities and villages in a span of 30 days,
#
I said, wow, this is a huge land area
#
that I've actually traversed in just 30 days.
#
And should I just sit back or should I write this for posterity?
#
Because like me, which was a personal quest,
#
you said your father was from Sheikh Upura.
#
I'm sure you have a desire too.
#
I'm sure there are many others who have a desire.
#
I'm sure there are many Muslims on the other side
#
who have a desire to come to UP and Bihar.
#
It's a human need to kind of connect to your roots.
#
And the hardened boundaries don't allow us to do that today.
#
So if a divine energy has blessed you,
#
should you keep it back to your own quest?
#
Or should you open it up?
#
I may not be able to take you into your personal journey,
#
but I can give you a glimpse of the journey
#
that makes you curious enough
#
and you don't know how these things will develop.
#
And I've often said in my talks is
#
I am waiting for a day when a Hindu will get up and say,
#
I will document the Hindu legacy in Pakistan.
#
A Jain will get up and say,
#
I will document Jain legacy in Pakistan.
#
And I'm waiting for a day when a Muslim will get up in Pakistan
#
and say, I will document the Islamic legacy in East Punjab.
#
The day we've done that, in 10 volumes,
#
we will have the Punjabi legacy.
#
Till that time, I'm only one piece of the equation.
#
So you are planting seeds for the wider communities
#
to now start exploring their roots.
#
And this is a natural formal path of putting layers of information
#
where these things will grow.
#
And I thank myself that in the five years that I've seen,
#
and I'm not the only person who can take credit there.
#
Many forces have come together,
#
but I look at the picture of the first book,
#
the front cover picture of the broken Dera Chau Baba Guru Nanak Gurdwara,
#
the historical Gurdwara.
#
Between 2014 when I went there
#
and when we are sitting here,
#
last year it was announced that Gurdwara will be maintained.
#
Like that, many others have been decided to be maintained.
#
I don't take the credit for it.
#
But I know in the quarters that I've dealt with,
#
the initial reaction was,
#
why have you not shown Nankana Sahib in the front cover?
#
But I said, I have shown it inside.
#
I've shown the things that are working well.
#
I've shown where the opportunities lie.
#
And to me, these are opportunities.
#
And my feeling is, it's my heritage which is lost
#
because another Amardeep may not be permitted.
#
Another XYZ may not be permitted.
#
And therefore, it's lost from us.
#
And I want us to think that there's a potential inside this.
#
And that potential is what can then transform and bring about change, right?
#
So I think the answer to your question is that we have to do the right thing.
#
We can't control every outcome.
#
But if we do the right thing,
#
I think it leads us to the right direction in terms of bringing about change.
#
And it kind of seems to me that when you travel through Pakistan,
#
you went simultaneously on three different kinds of journeys.
#
One is an intellectual journey of trying to understand what happened
#
and all the dissipations and to figure out what remains.
#
One is sort of, in a sense,
#
a spiritual journey of understanding Nanak's legacy and Nanak's message, so to say.
#
And I'll ask you about both of those later.
#
But you also went on an emotional journey
#
where you're revisiting what is part of your past.
#
For example, Muzaffarabad.
#
You know, you point out that, you know,
#
the postcard that your father in Gorakhpur received
#
was from a long-lost nephew who had been separated from your aunt in Muzaffarabad
#
when, you know, the two kids, 10 and 8, were separated from their mother
#
and then they landed up on the other side.
#
You also talk about your bua, Inder Kaur,
#
throwing her infant girl off the bridge in Muzaffarabad.
#
And she died, of course.
#
And you actually went to that bridge.
#
You actually saw the place where all these corpses of your community
#
and some of your family had actually lain there.
#
What are sort of your feelings when you're visiting,
#
not just foreign towns, but also parts of your own past?
#
It's an interesting question you ask, right?
#
Basically, you're asking what's my emotional state, right?
#
In a sense, and does it evolve?
#
Like, are you then able to, like, these quests are happening simultaneously.
#
At one level, there is an intellectual understanding.
#
Like, you write about how you have decided at an intellectual level
#
that you're not going to pass judgment on characters and history.
#
You're just going to document what happened and what there is.
#
But at another level, you are deeply affected.
#
So, I think let's start with the second piece.
#
It's a question I ask myself, right?
#
I'm going to give you an answer which is going to be absolutely 180 degrees
#
on the other end of the spectrum of what you are thinking
#
or what everyone thinks.
#
The reality is when you go on this quest,
#
I never went to write the first book.
#
You've got to understand that.
#
I never went to write the second book.
#
I never went to make the two documentaries.
#
The only time I've consciously went,
#
the two documentaries on Sikh legacy in Pakistan,
#
the only time where I've consciously went in search of something
#
knowingly that it may not be possible because the task was too huge
#
is the making of allegory at Tapestry of Gundanak's travels, right?
#
That's the only thing that happened only in the last one year.
#
But before that, for four years, I've done everything unknowingly.
#
So, I've gone inside because the energy opens up.
#
I go inside and I start probing.
#
I have the history in mind.
#
I have the other stuff in mind.
#
But when I go to the place, the curious mind of mind
#
does not have the bandwidth for any emotions
#
because I'm wearing 10 antennas on my head at that point of time.
#
I'm wearing the antenna of that emotional handshake
#
and the coming together of people and the welcoming aspect.
#
You know, that's the human aspect.
#
People welcome you and other things, right?
#
That's one thing you have to manage.
#
Second, you've got to manage the...
#
There are questions and there are doubts as to this man has come inside.
#
Why has he come so deep inside?
#
There are agencies that will be questioning you
#
and there'll be other people questioning the people who have doubts on you.
#
Why have you come here?
#
You've got to manage that aspect
#
because that can become a barrier in your quest, right?
#
You've got to manage your time
#
because there's a cost associated with that time, right?
#
And you've got to move fast.
#
And you are doing 36 cities and religions in 30 days.
#
You've got to move fast.
#
You go into a monument, there's a whole village that gathers there.
#
In that village, you don't want to be there for long
#
because they are seeing a Sikh for the first time after seven decades, right?
#
I'm visible a Sikh, right?
#
So, you've got to get in and get out fast.
#
And you've got to look at the frescoes, the ruins, the remnants,
#
absorb all that aspect.
#
There's a lot happening in a short span of time.
#
In that whole scheme of thing, in the moment, there's no scope for emotion.
#
You can't sit and ponder by the bank.
#
This is where people think that you're on a holiday.
#
No, you're on a holiday.
#
36 cities and villages, 30 days.
#
You're going from one end of the country to the other end of the country.
#
You're getting up at 3 a.m. and you're on the road.
#
You're coming back at 11 o'clock backing up the data.
#
It's a huge, humongous task.
#
There is no scope for emotion.
#
And I'm glad there's no scope for emotion
#
because the day there's emotion in the field work,
#
your field work is biased.
#
Field work has to be always emotionless.
#
Then you start looking at the layers when you come back.
#
Does emotion come later?
#
When you come back and you start looking at...
#
And you lie down on your bed and you start looking at the ceiling above
#
and you say, what happened just now?
#
Something happened, right?
#
And you say, my God, this was like a journey of a lifetime, right?
#
And then you say, oh, I saw this aspect.
#
And you start interpreting it.
#
And then you start writing down.
#
I never went to write a book.
#
Then you start writing down.
#
That's where the emotion starts coming.
#
But it's a very task-oriented writing
#
because you're trying to do the whole thing.
#
What takes five to six years in a PhD environment?
#
You're doing it in just seven to eight months.
#
You're doing very fast.
#
You're just purging all the information down from your mind into the paper, right?
#
The emotion starts coming out really in this whole process
#
is when you start presenting to the audience.
#
And you see the audience is now connecting.
#
And that's where your inner state is saying,
#
That's where the emotion starts coming out.
#
When the audience emotes,
#
then you also have an emotional aspect coming out, right?
#
So that's the reality of the whole thing.
#
And I'm glad it is the way it is
#
because fieldwork should never be influenced by emotion.
#
then you have the ability of seeing different strands coming out.
#
A lot of people say to me that these works are going beyond the Sikh domain.
#
And I say, you know what?
#
You've not understood it.
#
You've not understood the culture of the past.
#
And these strands are the only strands that you have.
#
You can't throw the baby in the bathtub out.
#
You've got to keep the strand the way it is.
#
Right or wrong, let's not pass judgments.
#
Because my forefathers have made it.
#
Our forefathers who are collectively living, they have made it.
#
Let's try and understand from it and figure out what is it.
#
I'm going to sort of play a brief clip.
#
And of course, I'll play the audio,
#
but I saw it on a video in the second of your documentaries.
#
And that kind of moved me a bit
#
where a gentleman named Aslam at Toha Khalsa
#
talks about a massacre that happened there just before partition,
#
where a massacre of Sikhs,
#
where a lot of women gave their lives by jumping into a well.
#
And you were actually at that well.
#
And this gentleman was at that well with you.
#
And he told you what he saw.
#
And when I saw it, of course, I found it, you know, very affecting.
#
So I'm going to briefly play that audio clip and then translate.
#
Right. So here's the translation of what Aslam says.
#
He's asked where he was standing.
#
And he says, quote, right at that spot.
#
Many women were standing outside while some had jumped in the well.
#
There was no space left in the well as it was filled with bodies till the top.
#
The ones yet alive in the well were trying to immerse their head in the water.
#
And all this again, you know, when you read about it,
#
when you go there, you've written also about the rape of Rawalpindi, for example,
#
all the violence that happened.
#
And again, for all of this, you're saying that you process it later.
#
When you are there, you're just in the moment.
#
You have to get the data and you have to get out.
#
Because it's a very complex thing in the limited time frame that you're there to access the data.
#
If you can get the data, then you understand it after that.
#
But you see, this work cannot be done if the divine is not going to help you in this whole process.
#
You only have the desire.
#
Now, the desire gets me into Tuha Khalsa village, which itself is an restricted area.
#
You can't get inside Tuha Khalsa very easily.
#
I've reached the village.
#
Well, this generation that saw it is nearing its end, right?
#
There may not be anyone alive.
#
So how do you stumble upon some man who then takes you to his home
#
and his mother, who's 92 years old, Muzammal Bibi,
#
meets you and she says how great Tuha was before 47.
#
It was a big town and she talks about a Hindu and seek her friends.
#
And she's remembering the girls with whom she used to play.
#
But she was probably at that time, 92 years, 22 years old.
#
So she was 22 years old at that time.
#
And then from there, as you're walking out, you're trying to find the well.
#
She says, oh well, it happened.
#
But how do you go there?
#
People don't understand it.
#
This new generation has not bothered about it.
#
And you come out and you suddenly see an old man walking with his stick on the road.
#
And I stopped the vehicle and I went to him and I said,
#
He looks at me from his broken glasses, you know, he looks at me and he says,
#
Because he's seeing a visible seek, right?
#
And I tell him and then I asked him,
#
Do you know the well where the women jumped in 47?
#
He says, I was present there.
#
How do you describe that you will bump into someone who is an eyewitness,
#
random in a short span of just a short visit to that village.
#
And that person then takes you there.
#
These are divine blessings.
#
So your understanding of the narrative is being propelled by a divine push.
#
And then when you're there, when I saw the well,
#
I didn't have a tear coming down off my eyes.
#
It's contrary to what people would believe.
#
Because for me, that moment is what I was trying to capture.
#
And I know I will be able to lie down on the bed later on and reflect about it.
#
In the moment, there was no emotion.
#
But these emotions are being propelled by a force that's guiding you towards something.
#
And that to me is a divine intervention.
#
I think the universe is waiting for,
#
as I say again, what we started off with, creating your passions.
#
I think the universe is waiting for the commitment from you.
#
The commitment from you over a period of 30 years to say,
#
Now I'm going to open the gates for you.
#
And now wherever you will walk,
#
whatever be your desire, it will be manifesting in front of you.
#
And that's where it all starts happening.
#
So you mentioned that when you decided to go to Pakistan,
#
and I think you went in October 2014, you landed up there.
#
And you didn't intend to write a book.
#
You didn't intend to make documentaries.
#
Why were you going there?
#
So I was, as I said, in the interim of my, in the midway of moving out,
#
I moved out from Amix and I was supposed to go to Australia.
#
I was going to look for another job.
#
And finding a job when you exit at a senior level takes a bit of time.
#
And six months had passed by.
#
I was going through the process and I decided now's the time.
#
I should go to Pakistan.
#
How I got my visa is a different story.
#
I mean, how do, I'm an Indian born, but I hold a Singaporean passport.
#
But in those days, still the question was you're an Indian born.
#
Both the countries do the same thing to the people.
#
If you are, so I have a friend who's Pakistani born
#
and he had a wedding to come to in Delhi.
#
The wedding got over and from four months after that, the visa got approved, right?
#
So this is a problem of both the nations, right?
#
So, so I apply for it and I get it.
#
And the next day I land in there.
#
And then why did I meet that first person who held my hand?
#
Six months prior to my going there, I had seen someone doing something similar,
#
which was of my passion, you know, some Pakistani.
#
And I saw him and I asked him, why don't you click better pictures?
#
He says, I don't have a camera.
#
I just packed my camera and sent it to him because I am a photographer.
#
I had many camera bodies.
#
I just packed two lenses and one camera and sent it to him.
#
The point is, why did it happen six months before?
#
Because that person was already ready with there, you know,
#
because I had done something for me, for him, without him asking.
#
And when I landed there, he was there to hold my hand.
#
And one thing led to the other, to the other, to the other,
#
and you did the whole journey.
#
So he didn't go to write a book.
#
But when you came back, that's when you started thinking,
#
I went on a personal quest.
#
I have seen Muzaffarabad.
#
I had only two reasons.
#
One is I want to see strands of my history.
#
Are they still there in the remnants, tangible and intangibles?
#
Those are the monuments through which the lost heritage of Sikh...
#
But that's a Sikh history.
#
What strands of your history there?
#
Did you feel that personal connection?
#
So my history is my community's history, my Punjabi history,
#
the Islamic history, the Hindu history, the Jain history, the...
#
The Nanak Panti history.
#
Everything is my history.
#
The lands are my history.
#
I am choosing to see it from a Sikh lens.
#
But in that Sikh lens, you will find a lot of plurality actually intertwines, right?
#
When you're talking earlier about the artwork inside Noniyal's Haveli
#
and a Masjid and Krishna both exist there,
#
it's our collective legacy, right?
#
And then when I was able to go into Multan
#
and see the Anglo-Sikh, second Anglo-Sikh war monument there
#
and find out that the Eid Gah where the second Anglo-Sikh war started
#
because of Vans Agnew was beheaded there, it's not there.
#
But the place around which where the Eid Gah was there, you see it, right?
#
So you find these remnants and you start stitching the story together.
#
When you come back, you feel propelled and compelled that
#
it must be really written because it's no more your quest.
#
It becomes a responsibility for the bigger communities and the wider communities
#
and the inspiration that you can provide to them.
#
That's how the first book happened.
#
I just did it because I was in a rush to get back into the corporate world.
#
I never knew that this would become my life.
#
And I didn't know that after I got published,
#
I faced a lot of problems in publishing in the first book
#
because I'm an unknown author.
#
I'm coming from the finance industry.
#
Trying to do a huge volume book, publishers are there to make money out of it.
#
They look at a commercial aspect, faced a lot of problems,
#
but we managed to get it done.
#
A lot of people came forward and saw my work and they helped me.
#
And I thank to all of them.
#
Once we got published, I didn't realize that
#
the world was waiting to hear the story.
#
And then it just kept me on the road for good 10 months
#
and I spoke at some 70 odd seminars around the world.
#
And it didn't allow me to come back to Singapore for a good eight months.
#
People kept moving me from one place to the other.
#
So eight months I was on the road.
#
It's when I came back and then I started applying for the job.
#
Now two and a half years had passed by
#
and I was dead meat for corporate industry
#
because two and a half years is too late now, right?
#
You've been far out and leaving a senior role.
#
And that's when I started reinventing myself.
#
I said, no, I've got to restart this whole thing.
#
So I picked up a job in a startup.
#
Something that I was doing at an intellectual level,
#
what I was probably doing 20 years back in my career.
#
My mind was not into it.
#
And then the divine opened this gate again
#
because I used to dream of Jamrod.
#
I used to dream of Jamrod at the Khyber Pass.
#
I was looking at the Khyber Pass.
#
I was standing at Jamrod.
#
I was advised not to go to Jamrod in my first book.
#
And Jamrod of course for the listeners is a great fort at the Khyber Pass
#
where Hari Singh Nalwa actually died in fact.
#
And it's the fort that finally plugged.
#
It was made in just a few days
#
and finally plugged the invasions from the Central Asia into the subcontinent.
#
Because thereafter the British came after the sea empire.
#
They came from the East.
#
They didn't come from the West.
#
No one has actually come from the West afterwards.
#
That's a defining point of the history.
#
And I was standing there.
#
I couldn't go inside because I was advised not to go inside Jamrod.
#
I was at Peshawar in the night before.
#
The army school attack on the children happened that time.
#
Taliban, this thing was in the peak.
#
There are some Sikh shopkeepers from Peshawar
#
who have shops close to Jamrod.
#
And I would ask them, can you take me in the morning?
#
No one was wanting to take me.
#
They didn't want to take risk
#
because I look different.
#
I hold the camera body and I could be a sitting duck, right?
#
I could be easily abducted, right?
#
No one wanted to take me.
#
And I got up in the morning.
#
I just got into a car, went there.
#
I couldn't go inside because that fort is with the army.
#
And I clicked a picture from the outside and I came back.
#
But between the first book and when the energy of the second book developed
#
as I was giving the talks around the world,
#
I used to get dreams of Jamrod.
#
I used to feel that I was so near and yet so far.
#
I just stood across the road and I clicked a picture.
#
And you know when you feel something very strongly and passionately,
#
the universe again answers.
#
I was doing it for three months.
#
My mind was not into it.
#
And one day I get a call from the embassy of Pakistan in Singapore.
#
And Mr. Nasrullah Khan calls me.
#
He says, come and meet us.
#
He says, you know what?
#
You did this first book.
#
You went around the world.
#
You called us to inaugurate the book in Singapore.
#
I did call them, right?
#
I must say that you've taken a very tricky subject
#
and you've taken it around the world and you've not politicized it.
#
I said, there's nothing to politicize in it.
#
I can't change the history.
#
But what can I learn from it and what can we all learn from it
#
and what can we motivate each other is the objective out here.
#
And if we can actually openly talk about it,
#
then we will all be in a better space.
#
He says, no, I do hear you because you went around the world
#
and we have got reports from all over that you've gone.
#
Because I'm a Singaporean, so of course the reports would come on it
#
because I'm talking about a subject of Pakistan.
#
He says, I'm quite impressed that you've had no political tension
#
anywhere in your talks, right?
#
So he says, we have selected you from our embassy on a academy of letters.
#
It's like the Sahitya Kala Academy Awards.
#
They have an academy of letters saying they want to bring in some foreign nationals
#
to expose the artists in Islamabad to some foreign talent.
#
They say, from Singapore, we've selected you.
#
Would you be able to go there?
#
So I went in, I took that invitation.
#
I took a leave from my job for five days.
#
And Jan 2016, I was in Pakistan.
#
No, Jan 2017, I was in Pakistan for five days.
#
And then the energy that developed again when I was there,
#
I should still get the theme of Jamrod.
#
And I met some people who had heard me, and they were in influential quarters.
#
And then I requested to them that I'm here.
#
Please open the Jamrod Fort for me.
#
Next, I know the Fort opened.
#
Next, I asked for Attaq.
#
Next, I asked for Shabkader.
#
Everything started opening.
#
I couldn't describe this.
#
I could feel that the energy is now in my favor again.
#
And I asked myself this question.
#
Do I walk away right now for that job which I don't enjoy?
#
I just picked up the phone and called them that I'm resigning.
#
I was there for five days.
#
I came out of the country after 55 days.
#
And in that process, I went after the force that I was shown to me.
#
I just went on my own, just went deeper and deeper.
#
Ninety cities and villages, I came back and I just couldn't hold myself back.
#
I said, this is again something that needs to be shared with the world
#
because now I've documented huge amount of data about the culture,
#
the intangible aspects in Balochistan, living communities.
#
The hidden treasures inside this of the Sikh era forts and other things.
#
I just couldn't sit back.
#
I just started writing immediately, no looking back.
#
And it took me one year, got it out.
#
That was the second book, The Quest Continues Lost Heritage of Sikh Legacy in Pakistan.
#
And then I again, the moment the book came out,
#
I was now this time again like the first book
#
catapulted into these public engagements
#
that took me to over 100 seminars around the world in just about eight months.
#
So the demand was there.
#
People just kept moving me.
#
And it's really in 2018, September that I came back.
#
I didn't know what to do
#
because this space that I'm in, creative space,
#
which a lot of creative people go through,
#
it's what I recall Shiv Kumar Batalvi, who's a Punjabi poet,
#
talks about this concept in a poetry about birha.
#
Birha as we call it in Punjabi, birha.
#
And birha is that intense pain of separation from your purpose.
#
I mean, birha actually in esoteric language is talked about
#
intense pain of separation from the divine.
#
But for me, the divine was my work.
#
And when that intense pain of separation is there
#
because the purpose is lost,
#
the pain becomes very, very intense.
#
And this pain is what drives the creative process.
#
Every time I've seen in this creative,
#
in that copper treadmill, I used to just go straight.
#
Here, it's a sine curve.
#
You go, you create something, you go inside a valley
#
and that pain becomes so large that you then catapult again
#
and takes you even to a higher pinnacle.
#
How long can you do it? I don't know.
#
But the pain, the deeper it is, the more you'll catapult.
#
And I went into a painful process again
#
And the catapulting of that was basically,
#
I was aware of the first phase after my first book
#
that it was a painful experience.
#
And I was trying to keep myself busy.
#
And in the making of the second book,
#
I had some video footage thanks to Salman Alam Khan,
#
who was deputed by the establishment to follow me
#
into some of the forts, just for the forts.
#
Mr. Amardeep, please say something.
#
You're a creative person.
#
You're a creative person.
#
My job is not to do a documentary on you.
#
I'm just following you, right?
#
But you know what? The data can be used somewhere.
#
And the data fell on my lap.
#
It was again a divine intervention,
#
But I had not acted on that data for one and a half years.
#
And I came back after my second book.
#
I started looking at that data just to keep my mind busy.
#
And I saw a story emerging from it.
#
I took my own feelings.
#
And I stitched it together.
#
A novice trying to make a documentary.
#
And I all stitched it together on my own.
#
And we created two documentaries,
#
which became Peering Soul,
#
which takes the viewer in a 50-minute journey
#
to non-traditional sites of spiritual sites,
#
abandoned across Pakistan.
#
This documentary is not yet fully released on YouTube.
#
I am going to probably release it in the third quarter of this year.
#
But we have released the second documentary,
#
which is Peering Warrior.
#
That's a 35-minute documentary,
#
which takes the viewer across the forts of the Sikara,
#
where our history had churned right up to the Afghanistan border.
#
And some of the footage has never been seen before.
#
So that documentary is there on the YouTube.
#
If you search for Peering Warrior, you'll find it.
#
It'll be linked from the show notes,
#
as indeed the books will be as well.
#
Peering Warrior, documentary got completed,
#
and Peering Soul, so Peering Warrior is there.
#
And thereafter, this two documentaries getting completed,
#
my mind now was again empty, right?
#
And I'm saying what to do.
#
And that's where very quickly this thought manifested,
#
because I was already mentally prepared,
#
because I knew the narrative of Nanak.
#
And I said to myself this question,
#
the skill set that I've developed is good to be aware of.
#
What corporate has taught me is,
#
it's good to be knowing your strengths and your skills.
#
No point going around and beating around the bush
#
like it's too short, right?
#
The skill that I had developed in the last five years
#
was going into hard to access zones
#
and making things happen to build a narrative.
#
That's the skill set at the basic level.
#
So I asked myself, this was January 2019,
#
we started this project.
#
I asked myself this question.
#
Guru Nanak traveled far and wide.
#
70% of his region is today in conflict zones.
#
He traveled far and wide across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan,
#
Iraq, Iran, Saudi, Tibet, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
#
If you look at the broad canvas,
#
70% of the zone is not accessible today.
#
Pakistan you can go to Nankana Sahib, Panjya Sahib,
#
Kartarpur Sahib, three traditional Gurdwalas.
#
But Nanak's narrative is not about the three Gurdwalas.
#
Nanak's narrative is about him going to Bahaudi Zakaria Shrine,
#
him going to Hingol Raj Mandir on his way to Mecca,
#
and all those aspects we need to bring in.
#
So I started saying, you know what,
#
if my skill set is to get inside these hard to access zones,
#
can I go once again and bring together this narrative?
#
And that's how this whole thing started,
#
that I catapulted myself last year in January
#
into a journey that today we are performing.
#
It's been now good 16 months on the road,
#
and it's in the making of Alegria Tapestry of Guru Nanak's travels.
#
And I'll stop there and maybe we can talk more about it later.
#
Yeah, I want to come back to that later.
#
And you know, I find that whole project incredibly fascinating.
#
But I have a few more questions about your travels through Pakistan.
#
And one of them is this, that a lot of your photographs,
#
and by the way, your photography is absolutely excellent.
#
I mean, it's hard for me to believe that you're a self-taught
#
or an amateur or whatever, because they're just beautiful.
#
And a lot of them are of buildings and architecture,
#
and are details of those.
#
And it struck me that a lot of these are buildings and architecture
#
that you have first read about,
#
and you know, and then you see them with your own eyes.
#
For example, you've, you know, quoted Baron Karl Heugel's description
#
of the Wazirabad Palace,
#
and then you're actually there and you're seeing it with your own eyes.
#
And in some cases, they are very dilapidated.
#
In some cases, they are being maintained,
#
and you know, and in some places, they don't even sort of exist.
#
How is your sort of reaction to that?
#
Are you reorienting your picture of Sikh Pakistan all the time
#
as you travel through it, you know, sort of see it as precious?
#
First of all, let's correct this.
#
I don't think I had read more than 15% of the monuments.
#
So, I had read about, maybe it's a 15 to 20%.
#
So, of course, I've read about the Attaq Fort,
#
but I've not seen the Attaq Fort.
#
I don't know what Attaq Fort looks like, right?
#
I know about Jamrod, but I can only imagine what Jamrod is.
#
I've never seen it, right?
#
Okay, I've read about some of the Gurdwaras, Lahore Fort,
#
some of the Gurdwaras, historical Gurdwaras, period.
#
And I know about what my intangible culture
#
that my parents used to talk about
#
or what we have seen the strands from my youth days
#
and where we are today.
#
I'm aware of these things, but that's all it is.
#
As you get into the country,
#
you are not going with something that you know.
#
You're going with an empty crucible,
#
and it's a crucible of passion.
#
And then the divine starts filling it up.
#
In that moment, you start observing it.
#
Then when you come back,
#
and then you start looking at research around it,
#
here and there, how do I fill it up?
#
And therefore, in some of the places,
#
I can't tell you what the monument is about.
#
I can't because I'm not a historian.
#
I don't have the facts.
#
I don't have any published sources that are talking about it.
#
So, I'm making the most of telling you what I'm observing
#
because that can become a layer of history in time to come.
#
Wherever there's history available, I've quoted it, right?
#
So, that's how one goes through it.
#
And how do you warn against a tendency
#
to try and romanticize what you're seeing?
#
Like to just kind of put that in perspective,
#
I traveled through Pakistan
#
when I was covering the cricket tour of 2006.
#
And in fact, I, you know,
#
went to the Gurdwara and Peshawar as well.
#
But while I was traveling,
#
one tendency I noticed in myself
#
and therefore tried to watch against
#
was the tendency to exoticize everything,
#
to see significance in everything.
#
You know, while for the people there,
#
they are just the everyday.
#
They are the everyday and the mundane.
#
And there are of course two sides to this.
#
One is that an outsider brings with him eyes
#
that look past the normalization.
#
So, you can find interesting things
#
which the locals might take for mundane,
#
But the other side of it is that
#
you try too hard to imbue meaning into everything
#
that you see and the locals are like,
#
you know, who is this guy who's parachuted down
#
and he's finding this interesting and that interesting
#
with these all our lives.
#
Is that something you thought about your own process of looking
#
and how others viewed this?
#
So, it's an interesting thing, you know.
#
In my documentary Peering Soul,
#
I have inserted one song which is very much
#
a feeling of my own state
#
when I'm at a Jambur village.
#
And it's Abhita Parveen's Sufi song.
#
You made me a passionate person.
#
You infused passion in me and I became passionate.
#
Now in this world of conscious people,
#
so-called conscious and worded,
#
don't make me a piece of the Masha is a play or a spectacle.
#
But that's a very profound feeling I had
#
because when I would go into the places,
#
people would crowd around me.
#
It would cause a sense of disturbance.
#
And then there are places where the intelligence
#
There's places where people would not open the gates.
#
There are places where people would embrace you, right?
#
A potpourri of emotions.
#
But I'm making that statement in that Jambur village
#
because as I climb up on the Gurdwara building which is broken,
#
I request a person on the other side of the building of the Gurdwara
#
to allow me to enter from his home and take a picture.
#
First, he was absolutely closed.
#
And to get inside a Muslim's home in that village
#
suddenly he agreed and I was inside.
#
And I clicked a picture.
#
At the same time, there were two, three people who were shouting,
#
At the same time, the entire village had crowded around there
#
and looking at me walking on top.
#
And I looked down and I said I'm a source of play for them, right?
#
Source of tamasha for them.
#
What I'm trying to get at is that in this whole play of things,
#
you go through a potpourri of challenges.
#
And therefore, it's hard for you to kind of keep yourself focused
#
on what you're trying to do.
#
And I've said this earlier,
#
the idea is to just get as much information and get out of that place.
#
So, it's hard for me to say that, you know,
#
the exact things that I would have done if I was a researcher
#
and if I had free access,
#
maybe I would have put a staircase,
#
I would have climbed up,
#
I would have looked at each artwork,
#
interpreted so differently,
#
I would have spent maybe 10 days in a site.
#
But that luxury does not exist.
#
So, there will be a lot of critiques about my work.
#
And I say, you know what, critique it as much as you want to.
#
The fact is, the situation does not permit you to do that.
#
Today, the situation might change
#
because you've suddenly opened up the Pandora's box
#
about saying the potential that exists there.
#
And that needs to be seen in the context of what you're doing
#
as a leader into this domain.
#
So, what you are saying about is when you're getting inside,
#
you had this whole host of people looking at you
#
and how do you keep yourself aligned to your objective?
#
It's hard, very, very hard, very hard.
#
And therefore, you have to be very focused as to why are you here.
#
And in a sense also, I think,
#
what eyes you're looking at your surroundings through,
#
like if you bring eyes that are desperate to find meaning,
#
that are a collection of your biases and your feelings
#
and your, you know, impressions,
#
then that will influence whatever you're seeing.
#
Is that something where you thought that,
#
okay, I, you know, you've already described
#
that you weren't emotional during the,
#
you know, during the process.
#
So, was your thing during the process of
#
let me document everything now,
#
I will process it later.
#
You've got to keep in mind,
#
I didn't go to write the first book,
#
I didn't go to write the second book,
#
I didn't go to make the documentaries.
#
I was simply observing, I'm a mere observer.
#
But you were taking all these beautiful photographs.
#
I was, I was trained as a photographer
#
out of my quest for five years
#
when I was writing for magazines.
#
I'm, I'm capturing the moment for myself not to write a book.
#
It's when I came back, I felt compelled to write it.
#
But that moment, I'm just clicking and maximizing,
#
just getting out of that place.
#
I don't know what I'm going to do with it.
#
Would your journey have been different
#
if you had gone there for the purpose of writing a book?
#
That's what I'm saying.
#
So I don't know how different it would have been,
#
but I know it would have been much slower.
#
And would it have been as successful?
#
Because when you go in as a researcher,
#
your mindset is I'm going to now study this monument,
#
I want to look at 10 things
#
and I'm not a researcher from that context.
#
I'm trying to document,
#
I'm just trying to feel things, right?
#
And I have made something compelling out of that.
#
If I was going there as a researcher,
#
let's say I was on a grant or going through a university,
#
I would be on a very different frame of mind.
#
In 30 days, instead of 36 cities and villages,
#
probably I would have done four.
#
A book would have gone so deep inside a subject,
#
but this is about a bandwidth which is horizontal.
#
This is more than depth.
#
And you're building a layer for others.
#
There's a lot of depth if you really want to see it
#
in terms of Pakistan and Sikh legacy perspective.
#
There's a lot of depth in it,
#
but it's still at a wider horizontal space, right?
#
You can pick up Nanak Panthis.
#
I've devoted 110 pages.
#
Pick up Nanak Panthis and I always say,
#
I'm in touch with some Pakistanis
#
and I tell them that they're quite inspired
#
with the talks that I've done in Islamabad Literature Festival
#
and Karachi Literature Festival.
#
Some academicians, they are saying that we want to study
#
the Nanak Panthi culture in Sindh and Balochistan.
#
I said, by all means do it
#
because I will not succeed in doing it.
#
But I've planted the seed in you.
#
I've given you 110 pages.
#
and you start creating the wells inside it
#
to take you deep inside.
#
But if you don't create this landscape
#
which has been absent for seven decades,
#
you can't hope that someone's going to drill a well.
#
So I think that's where it is.
#
So, you know, now courtesy you,
#
I'm going to play another audio clip
#
and this comes from your trip to Lahore
#
where you met these Muslim descendants of Bhai Mardana.
#
Bhai Mardana, of course, was Nanak's companion
#
So you meet Muslim descendants of his
#
and who've carried on a tradition
#
of doing Shabad Kirtan.
#
Even though it's no longer their profession
#
as it was for their forefathers,
#
it's no longer what they do.
#
They are laborers elsewhere
#
and they're working at construction sites and all that.
#
But they've kind of kept the passion alive
#
and I'll briefly play this audio clip
#
and for those of you who listen to this podcast
#
as higher speeds as indeed I do,
#
just for listening to this,
#
please lower it to normal and then play.
#
quite moving and you also sort of,
#
I mean, I have two questions here.
#
there are these group of people
#
even though they're descendants of Bhai Mardana
#
and yet they're singing Shabad Kirtan
#
and they don't get paid for it anymore
#
as their forefathers might have.
#
Why do these traditions stay alive?
#
Who you are is your DNA.
#
It cannot be taken away by just one Holocaust.
#
You may try and erase that
#
but deeply you are that, right?
#
The more you'll try and erase it,
#
the more the inside will revolt,
#
at least for some few people.
#
Now Bhai Mardana was the companion,
#
a Muslim companion of Guru Nanak
#
who held the Rabab and walked with him
#
And whenever Guru Nanak wanted to sing,
#
Mardana would pick up the Rabab and play with him.
#
They were best of friends.
#
So, do we think that 550 years later,
#
there'll be only one family
#
of the descendants of Mardana?
#
There'll be many, right?
#
But yet I can only talk about one right now, right?
#
What I'm trying to say is that
#
the vast number of people
#
have assimilated into many other things.
#
But this island of one or two people,
#
So, I'm biased in a sense.
#
You made them because they're outliers.
#
They're outliers and they're holding on
#
because they are for some reason
#
having that seed planted in their roots,
#
That's what is holding them.
#
But majority have moved away.
#
So, I've often asked this question
#
that I've now we're getting into the realm
#
Alegría Tapestry of Guru Nanak's Travels,
#
which has been a project that we've been working on
#
And I was in Pakistan from February
#
to April, May last year.
#
And in my earlier trips I've gone,
#
I've always met this family
#
of the descendants of Bhai Mardana.
#
And I've also had an opportunity
#
of meeting many more people.
#
But what I'm going to get at is
#
the fundamental question that I've asked myself
#
in the making of Alegría Tapestry of Guru Nanak's Travels.
#
Which is a multi-episode documentary on his travels
#
the entire community moved away of Nanak Panthis
#
from the lands of Indus.
#
And yet, is Baba Nanak alive in those lands?
#
Because Baba Nanak as a physical body,
#
of course, is no more there.
#
But his thoughts, are they still alive?
#
It's a question that you pose yourself.
#
And then I've had this chance to meet many such people.
#
And before I get down to the Bhai Mardanas,
#
I have had the opportunity,
#
which people find very interesting,
#
to sit in congregations every Friday evening,
#
where the Granth Sahib's one verse is picked up.
#
And people from the age of 16,
#
young boy and girl from the age of 16,
#
to the ripened age of 80,
#
And they're all Muslims.
#
Baba Nanak is yet alive.
#
In islands, but he's alive.
#
People who have love for him,
#
they may be doing it in closed doors.
#
And I've had opportunities to go there, sit down.
#
I could not videograph them,
#
because for all valid reasons,
#
I could have been respectful.
#
But when I look at that,
#
I say, oh, he is still here.
#
This is about Punjabis, beyond faith.
#
Muslims getting together and discussing
#
Baba Nanak's Shabads every Friday evening.
#
you look at the descendants of Bhai Mardana.
#
And I remember in 2014,
#
first time I was at Dehrar Sahib Gurdwara,
#
I met the Babaji there,
#
who had come for 10 minutes of Kirtan.
#
There was no one sitting there,
#
and he was doing the Kirtan.
#
and I said, I'm deeply touched
#
that, you know, you've kept the tradition alive.
#
But I wanted to go to their home.
#
And they were very warm.
#
we would love you to take you home,
#
we can't take you home,
#
because since partition,
#
our forefathers used to do Kirtan
#
and Govindwal Sahib in Punjab.
#
The partition was so brutal that,
#
you know, we got thrust on this side.
#
And the patrons who would hear us
#
all moved on the other side.
#
Basically, the Sikhs and Hindus
#
all moved on the other side.
#
So we landed in this place,
#
there was no one to hear.
#
And we are living in poverty.
#
And we just make our ends meet.
#
who has come to our home till date.
#
that if you will come with your turban,
#
our neighbors will pass judgments.
#
But every time I would go,
#
or we would meet outside.
#
But you know, in last year,
#
I was there for Guru Nanak's,
#
tapestry Guru Nanak's travels making.
#
And I asked the Baba again,
#
take me to your home now,
#
we are here for Guru Nanak's travels.
#
And then he had seen me
#
for four or five years.
#
He said, okay, come, let's go.
#
So he took us to his home.
#
we sat and we recorded him
#
I just played a while back.
#
And the beauty of the whole thing is,
#
so everyone had crowded on top
#
and they were looking at them playing
#
from the roofs in Lahore.
#
And we got a drone picture of them.
#
Everyone looking at them, right?
#
son, something strange happened.
#
an amazing thing happened.
#
He said, no one said anything to us.
#
I said, why should they?
#
Did we do anything wrong?
#
We were there as a message of love.
#
You were there to shower love.
#
Why would Shri Zaman say?
#
He said, no, you don't know.
#
So I said, no, I respect.
#
But he says, the amazing thing is
#
no one has said anything.
#
the veil of fear dropped that day.
#
I would find that, you know,
#
last year was the 550th
#
birthday anniversary of Guru Nanak.
#
A lot of people were coming in
#
and he would proudly send a picture
#
He says, oh, the following has come.
#
The following has come.
#
And I would smile and say,
#
we have just broken the barriers, right?
#
So I think that's the thing
#
that I want to give as a message that
#
The Radcliffe line has divided us
#
so badly that a composite culture
#
So basically, I think that's the strand.
#
And, you know, then there are many
#
They do it in their own quarters.
#
They're learning Kirtan.
#
The beauty of Punjab was that
#
there are pockets who would respect
#
respect the Granth Sahib aspect.
#
And there were also many Hindus and Sikhs
#
who would also, vice versa,
#
respect the Islamic and Sufi saints.
#
And who embrace multiple identities
#
So there's a beautiful book.
#
If you go a little bit down from Punjab
#
and enter into Sindh now,
#
there's a beautiful book by
#
I forget his second name,
#
If you search for Ramsey and the title is
#
Hindu, Muslim, Sikh question mark.
#
It could be the other way around also.
#
It could be Hindu, Sikh, Muslim.
#
I'll link it from the show notes.
#
Yeah, it's Hindu, Muslim, Sikh.
#
It's got a question mark.
#
The question mark in that study is
#
this English man who's studying
#
this community of the Nanak Panthis.
#
And he's questioning who are they?
#
At the moment when they have to say something,
#
they're all a part of the culture.
#
So this was the people of Indus Pelt.
#
Another sort of moving piece of music,
#
which I'm going to play now again,
#
is from a singer named Salima Khwaja from Lahore.
#
And the backstory of this is
#
from a singer called Gulam Chand.
#
And Gulam Chand was the sole carrier
#
that he nurtured all alone for many, many years
#
till Salima Khwaja came to learn from him
#
And now she carries it forward.
#
Tell me a little bit about what that was.
#
So there were many descendants of Bhai Mardana.
#
And we just talked about one family.
#
And then there was another one,
#
I think, six years back.
#
And he used to do Kirtan at the Gurdwara
#
and the Goindwal Sahib in East Punjab.
#
because of the unfortunate partition on this side.
#
But I don't see him actually
#
actively performing in places.
#
I've not seen much of his recordings
#
So he was more of doing it for himself.
#
What he was doing for a living,
#
But when I stumbled upon him,
#
And he was basically doing...
#
There were some people who had found him
#
and they were recording him
#
and some private gatherings here and there.
#
who were quite fascinated
#
by his style of singing.
#
So this is Rababi style,
#
you know, the Mardana's family style.
#
and so on and so forth.
#
So some of the locals in Pakistan
#
started going to him to learn.
#
One of them was Salima.
#
She went to him for learning Kirtan
#
Not 15 years of age, sorry.
#
She went to learn with him about 15 years back.
#
And today, the Baba is no more there.
#
But Salima has learned that tradition
#
this is by Mardana's DNA,
#
which did not pass through the blood lineage,
#
has found another place to be seated in.
#
It lives on in the culture.
#
And it's found in the lady.
#
It's crossing genders now.
#
So Guru Nanak's quest continues
#
from two males traveling
#
a female now traveling with Baba Nanak
#
in the form of Mardana.
#
So I think he's still alive.
#
Let's listen to this piece of music.
#
Once again, if you're listening at a higher speed,
#
just bring it to normal for this.
#
This will be the last such interruption.
#
you know, one of the things I noticed
#
when I traveled briefly in 2006,
#
so obviously I was essentially just a tourist,
#
is how warm the people were by and large.
#
where you actually traveled much deeper
#
and you were going from village to village,
#
how did the people treat you
#
and how did they treat your quest?
#
Let's try and answer this at a stratospheric level first.
#
and we've traveled far and wide in different countries,
#
I think first and foremost,
#
the principle is as you think, so you attract.
#
So I think before we ask how people treated you,
#
I think we need to ask how you treated the people.
#
Because if you treated them well enough,
#
they will respond the same way, right?
#
People want to live together.
#
People want to hug each other.
#
People want to be closer to each other.
#
People want to understand each other's stories.
#
The pain is theirs too.
#
The pain is yours too, right?
#
We are all collectively impacted with it.
#
And if you can understand that from a humane perspective,
#
why will people not connect with you, right?
#
I think that's the principle that we need to first understand.
#
If you're going into research work like this,
#
you need to be very, you're going to go deep inside.
#
You're going to go deep inside where others are not going.
#
oh, a Sikh coming in with a turban
#
or you coming in from India,
#
of course, you know, that's like more like Hallabullah,
#
you know, there's just Mela kind of a thing.
#
Now you're going deep inside villages.
#
That's where the true element will come out, right?
#
By and large, people want to embrace each other,
#
beyond faith, beyond religion.
#
As humans, we want to associate with each other.
#
Our conditioning might have to be dropped
#
because we might have certain conditioning,
#
this is not right, that's wrong,
#
but all that will drop as you start gaining confidence.
#
So people are good by nature,
#
but it's all about how you think.
#
But having said that, I think the job is not easy
#
because people want to live together,
#
but the sovereign nations and the politics of it
#
and what we've created and for all fair reasons,
#
The sort of narratives we feed our people.
#
Yeah, and that comes from a political aspect, right?
#
There are people who get paid to do their jobs
#
of keeping a watch on you and other things.
#
Maybe that person who's keeping a watch on me,
#
when I sit down for a cup of tea,
#
he will drop his guard and he'll become the same person,
#
You've got to understand that he's doing a job
#
and that's in both sides of the border.
#
that's where the problems start coming in.
#
But deep down, they're also human beings.
#
Having said that, when you start peeling the layers
#
most of the experiences of people going to Pakistan
#
in our domain is in Punjab.
#
And you also said you've been to Lahore,
#
maximum Peshawar, it's just a bit off, right?
#
But you will find in, let's say in Khyber Pakhtunva,
#
there's a cultural sensitivity that comes in.
#
Punjabi by nature are more welcoming,
#
Punjab will be, you know, you'll feel at home.
#
When you go to Khyber Pakhtunva,
#
the cultural aspect starts coming in, the barriers.
#
Not that people are, people are very nice,
#
but the barrier is there to break that.
#
They're speaking Pashto instead of Urdu.
#
Pashto, or even if you start,
#
let's say there are people speaking Urdu,
#
even if you're speaking Urdu,
#
it takes a little bit more effort to break the barrier.
#
People are nice, it'll take a little bit.
#
And then the cultural sensitivity,
#
you just can't barge into anyone's home
#
So that becomes a bit of a barrier.
#
I think Kashmir is a bit of an interesting space
#
because Kashmir hasn't been in turmoil state for long enough.
#
So Kashmir, I break it down into two kinds of people.
#
One is Baltistan, but I've had a lot of chance to go.
#
Baltistan, the Balti people, very nice people, very nice.
#
It's not impacted by the Kashmir issue of the partition,
#
you know, I mean, the claiming of territories might be there.
#
The people are not impacted by the crossfires and other things.
#
It's the Kashmir where my forefathers were from Muzaffarabad,
#
which is right on the LOC, just next to it, right?
#
Now there is a swapping of population.
#
There is bad blood that is flowing for long enough.
#
So I've not had major interactions then.
#
I can't say any negative interaction,
#
but neither have I had any memorable positive interaction
#
And then you go into Sindh.
#
It becomes very interesting that in Sindh,
#
as I said, Hindu Muslims seek, question mark, Ramsey's work.
#
These are people, whether they are Muslims or the Hindus
#
or whatever they are, they are the Nanak Panthees,
#
they are all composite.
#
Very interesting breed of people, the Sindhis,
#
very interesting, least understood.
#
Very interesting people.
#
But now from the northern and central Sindh,
#
now you come down to a place called Karachi,
#
where the population swap happened in 1947.
#
Who is the inhabitant of Karachi?
#
It's people from UP and Bihar who came inside.
#
And that's where the politics of the nation started.
#
Now let's not forget, when partition happened,
#
the cleansing happened on both the sides.
#
The UP Bihar people who came to Karachi
#
in the period of July, August, September,
#
their story is not about what happened to Punjab.
#
Where did it start from?
#
It starts from we moved towards our homeland in Karachi.
#
And from Punjab, in the East Punjab,
#
they faced massacres too,
#
because there was massacres happening in West Punjab.
#
So their impressions that have come down through the generation
#
is that we faced this onslaught on us
#
when we were passing through Punjab.
#
But that memory is ingrained somewhere, is my experience.
#
When I talk to people, they're nice.
#
But there's a memory which is there.
#
It's a conditioned memory.
#
No one has a historical understanding
#
of what led to the partition of Punjab.
#
Where did it start from?
#
Because they were coming from UP Bihar, which is far away.
#
Their narrative starts,
#
I got my father or my grandfather
#
experience this in East Punjab.
#
Their narrative starts from there.
#
So there's a mistrust deep down,
#
potentially it could be there.
#
And I guess the first time they meet you,
#
they're not looking at you as an individual per se,
#
but there's all this baggage of that past which is sort of there.
#
So that's how I would define it.
#
So there's a stratospheric level.
#
And by and large, whichever place they may be from,
#
it's how you think that's what you'll attract.
#
I think that's the principle.
#
But then these are layers inside it.
#
And that's what I just want to expand on.
#
And the same layers in India also.
#
Each state will have a different layer,
#
UP Bihar is different than Punjab and South India and everything.
#
But by and large in India,
#
why would someone not live and embrace a person
#
without irrespective of his religion or faith, right?
#
And you have another really nice story
#
about how you went to the Daftu Gurdwara
#
and this gentleman came to you and said,
#
listen, I'm too poor to give you a gift,
#
but I really want to give you something.
#
So here's a pouch of opium.
#
So certain things are kept secret, right?
#
I have taken even higher drugs than opium.
#
I'm on synthetic drug because these passions
#
are driven by a druggy state.
#
But these are even a higher dose of opium, right?
#
I'm on a drug state to do this work
#
where you're risking your life.
#
Yeah, it's like I don't need an opium
#
which grows inside the poppy.
#
My opium is something else, right?
#
So just coming to that,
#
there are two very interesting things
#
It's an abandoned Gurdwara.
#
Not abandoned, people are living inside it.
#
What happened, unfortunately, in partition
#
is that you've got to put the landscape correct.
#
You know, both the sides suffered.
#
Islamic legacy got wiped out of East Punjab.
#
Hindu and Sikh legacy got wiped out.
#
Jain legacy, no one talks about it.
#
Entire Thakurkar is filled with Jain side.
#
I always say to Pakistan,
#
if you really want to develop your potential,
#
also look at not just the Hindu and Sikh aspects.
#
Don't look at Katasaraj and Kartarpur only.
#
Look at the huge amount of Jain temples
#
which are lying abandoned.
#
It's a huge legacy that needs to be
#
also brought on the forefront.
#
But you need to understand who these are
#
because you forgot and not understood them, right?
#
So when partition happened
#
and people came from East Punjab,
#
there was a humanitarian crisis.
#
You needed roof on their heads.
#
People were on their own.
#
They went whatever they got.
#
Gurdwaras typically are congregational
#
and they have huge space.
#
Temples typically are small plinth areas.
#
So they could not host people inside, right?
#
A lot of people moved inside Gurdwaras
#
and made them the homes,
#
especially in remote areas.
#
Daftu is one such Gurdwara.
#
It's a fortress like Gurdwara
#
which points towards Ranjit Singh's period.
#
Beautiful structure, beautiful fresco works,
#
but it's in a bad state now.
#
First and foremost, this huge
#
gathering of the villagers came by, right?
#
And someone asked me at the entrance,
#
Sardar Sahib, yeh upar likha kya hai?
#
What is written on top?
#
And it was Guru Nanak's verse of Japchi,
#
ek onkar satnam kartapur.
#
He is the creator and so on and so forth.
#
So I basically then was standing there
#
and described to the person, I said,
#
this is saying that Allah is one, yeah?
#
I have to talk in their language.
#
and this man who's staying inside the Gurdwara,
#
he comes to me and is a very emotional,
#
one of those few moments
#
when I was really emotionally touched.
#
He tells me in Punjabi, he says,
#
he holds his hand, he says,
#
Say it in the original Punjabi if you want to just.
#
Sardar Sahib maafi mangde hain.
#
Saade kol uthe sirf do wakdi roti si ki.
#
where from where he came.
#
Saade kol uthe sirf do wakdi roti si ki.
#
Gadar wich aisi ithe aage hain.
#
In partition we came here.
#
Gadar wich aisi ithe aage hain.
#
Pinda pinda firde rahe hain.
#
Teh daftu aap hoche hain.
#
Gurdwara khaali si hain, aisi andar wadge hain.
#
Si taan toh ithe rahe hain.
#
tohari imarat nahi samal sakhe hain.
#
He's saying, in the Holocaust,
#
we came from the East Punjab,
#
we went through different villages,
#
and finally we came to taftu.
#
And we took place inside shelter inside this Gurdwara.
#
that I could not maintain your Gurdwara.
#
Because aisi uthe ek wakdi roti kamande se,
#
aise aage bhi ek wakdi roti kamare hain.
#
We were only earning one bread there,
#
and one bread we earn here.
#
We are still poor, but we could not maintain it.
#
That tells you the humane aspect of this entire crisis.
#
And then as I'm coming out and I'm leaving,
#
there's a person comes in,
#
again another old man, right?
#
Whom I'm talking about.
#
and he holds my hand before I'm leaving.
#
He says, Siddhar ji, come with me.
#
I walk with him on the side.
#
I thought he's going to talk about something.
#
And he opens his, from his shirt,
#
And he says, saade kol den vaste kujh nahi hain.
#
Thodi ji afeem hain laylo tosi.
#
You know, I have nothing to give you.
#
The little opium lying here, please take it.
#
And I started laughing, right?
#
So I was touched by that moment.
#
Let's talk about your current project now,
#
retracing the steps of Guru Nanak and his travels.
#
First of all, how do you determine where Guru Nanak went?
#
Because he didn't write about it himself.
#
Yeah, it's a good question.
#
So you are embarking on a massive project
#
in 550 years after his life, right?
#
And we are trying to retrace his footsteps
#
through visual documentation.
#
I'm very clear in my mind.
#
But I don't want to create new history
#
because I know the beautiful, pristine philosophy of Guru Nanak,
#
which is beyond the tangibles,
#
because his first profound verse itself talks about the vastness of his philosophy,
#
stands reduced and limited today to tangibles,
#
to miracles, to tangibles.
#
All these humans who had powers can do miracles,
#
but that's not what their philosophy is about.
#
They are beyond miracles.
#
They, being humans, are transforming lives is a miracle by itself.
#
They're teaching someone about how to live is a miracle by itself.
#
And yet today, we have reduced him to,
#
in this place, he took out water from the well,
#
and that place he implanted some impression and this and that.
#
It's all magic and everything.
#
His ability to implant an impression in your heart
#
and dig into the wells of your heart is forgotten.
#
So there's a big problem on how you're going to present Guru Nanak
#
first at an allegoric level.
#
This is allegory, a tapestry of Guru Nanak's travels.
#
A tapestry of Guru Nanak's travels is easy to understand.
#
It's like the fabric, the warp, and the weft of his travels.
#
We can actually link it up.
#
And we'll come to that, how you're going to determine that.
#
But the bigger thing is allegory.
#
Allegory is actually a revelation of a hidden meaning.
#
Nanak today is not understood.
#
But I have a probing in this entire journey
#
that I want to understand Nanak, who he is through these places.
#
What was he communicating?
#
And that allegoric meaning has to be revealed.
#
The beauty of Nanak is, unlike Babar, who writes his Babarnama,
#
or unlike Jahangir, who writes Tuzak Ke Jahangiri,
#
or unlike Ranjit Singh, who commissions to write Umdat Uttarik,
#
Nanak only compiles spiritual verses that tell us how to lead our life,
#
the psychology of our life, the inner being.
#
And that becomes later on a part of the Granth Sahib.
#
He writes nothing about himself.
#
And yet you then want to make a documentary on his travels.
#
So where are you going to start from?
#
Because if your objective is not to create another new version of Nanak's travel,
#
because I sometimes jokingly say that Nanak in today's day
#
is traveling further and further.
#
Even in 550 years after his life, every second day in the web university,
#
or in the WhatsApp university, or in Facebook,
#
he's reaching newer and newer places.
#
So I think Nanak needs to be left alone.
#
We need to understand his philosophy.
#
But yet we are attempting to map out his travels.
#
How are we going to do it?
#
You have to then look at what's the documented sources.
#
Now, documented sources are written by men of faith.
#
And if he has not written it, these are not primary sources.
#
Or someone living in his time has not written, these are not primary sources.
#
The first text that appears is by Bhai Gurdas,
#
who writes during the time of the Sikh Gurus, but some 50 years after his life.
#
But he writes, Guru Nanak and Mardana traveled far and wide.
#
And they went on Udasis, far and wide.
#
But he specifically mentions four places.
#
But he does not say this.
#
That's what is limited to.
#
He travels far and wide.
#
But he says he went to Sumer, which is Kalash.
#
He went to Batala, where the Shivites and the Siddhis used to sit.
#
And then he says he traveled far and wide.
#
Not big enough to make a narrative out of it, right?
#
So then you move forward in timeline and you come across the first text
#
that the men of faith have written, which is known as Janam Sakis.
#
Like the Buddhists, Jatakas are there, right?
#
So like that, the Janam Sakis are written by men of faith,
#
but seven to ten decades after his life.
#
You can't throw the baby in the bathtub,
#
because that's the only source available to you.
#
There may be human errors inside it,
#
but that's the only source you have, documented source.
#
So you take this composite literature written seven to ten decades
#
after his lifetime, and we draw a line there.
#
We said we will make an assimilation of this
#
and take out the journey that he did out of this.
#
Later on texts continue to make him travel further and further and further.
#
We've drawn a line at the hundred years.
#
So we are mapping that, and as per that, he's traveled to nine countries.
#
Today, in fact, in the 550th year celebration of Guru Nanak's travels,
#
there was a book that was released by Indian High Commission in Kathmandu,
#
and it's about the Sikh sites in Nepal.
#
And there's a lot of mention there of Guru Nanak having come here,
#
coming there, coming there, not backed by any old text.
#
And they're confusing it with the Udasian tradition
#
who came in after the fall of the Sikh Empire.
#
And Rani Jindran actually, who was the wife of Ranjit Singh,
#
was given refuge by Nepal Naresh.
#
She was captured in the Chunar Fort and from where she escapes.
#
Thereafter, a lot of these Udasian shrines come up
#
because they have old Gansaheb, the old handwritten Gansaheb.
#
Today, people are just randomly going and everyone can say anything
#
and they say that Guru Nanak came here and so on and so forth.
#
So like that, Guru Nanak has been sent to Rome, to Turkey, to every place.
#
I was in Rome and I met the Pope's office and we explored it.
#
There's some reference someone wrote on the website.
#
And once you write something, that becomes imprinted, right?
#
So 10 years back, something was written, 2006, about 13 years back.
#
And some person from the Rome, he's quoted from the Vatican
#
and the Pope and his office deny it.
#
We don't have any references here of that.
#
So here you are struggling with someone writes just out of his faith and belief,
#
nothing mentioned in text of 100 years and then suddenly Guru Nanak has now reached Rome.
#
Today, you find it hard to rationalize.
#
So in this whole context, we restricted ourselves to the oldest primary text
#
because there itself, if you can document that, it's a huge and humongous task
#
because 70% of the area geographical expanse is not accessible
#
because it's all in conflict zones.
#
You will be able to go to three Gurdwaras in Pakistan.
#
How will you go into Balochistan?
#
How will you go to Hinglaj, carry a camera to Hinglaj temple?
#
Who's going to allow you?
#
You go behind an Indus region from Indus River in the Baltistan area
#
when he's coming from Kailash Mansarovar into Ladakh and then comes into Kashmir
#
and from that area, how will you get into behind Kargil?
#
Leave alone Iraq and Iran and...
#
Iraq, Iran and it's different ball game.
#
How will you go to Mansarovar and take out a camera to film?
#
The Chinese government is not going to allow you.
#
And then from there walk up to the Himachal border
#
or walk up to Pangong So on the China side.
#
How you going to do it?
#
And yet when you walked, it happened.
#
So two questions for you.
#
One is obviously clear to me that, you know,
#
Nanak is one of the great travelers of those times.
#
But unlike others like your Heung Sang and whoever who are,
#
you know, Marco Polo who are celebrated as travelers.
#
I think a little less of his travels is known
#
probably because he didn't write about it himself.
#
So one question is how did he actually get around?
#
Those are the days before sort of mass transport exists.
#
There are no flights, there are no trains, there's none of that.
#
How is he getting around from place to place?
#
What is he exactly doing?
#
What is the nature of his quest?
#
Like clearly he is engaging in dialogue with all kinds of people
#
to get greater clarity and to spread his ideas.
#
What is that process like?
#
And the second question which we can come to later
#
is that in these times where borders do exist,
#
how did you manage to go to all these places?
#
So I don't know whether Nanak was meeting people to spread his ideas.
#
Some people may not like what I'm saying.
#
Because if we treat Nanak as a human being first,
#
then there's a quest that he's on.
#
In fact, one of the places you visited in Pakistan
#
and photographed was Nanak Tibba,
#
which is this mound where Nanak compiled the verses of Baba Fareed.
#
So it's a quest for understanding from what one can.
#
So one third of his life, he doesn't move out.
#
The other part of his life, the second or the third part of his life,
#
he goes on a quest for 22 years.
#
In the last of the three phases of his life,
#
he settles down in Kartarpur.
#
My senses, this is purely my sense,
#
having traveled on these paths,
#
and I've been a person on a quest also,
#
when you're traveling, you're meeting so many people,
#
a lot of things, you're congregating,
#
you're listening, you're imparting, you're hearing,
#
but it's a two-way process.
#
You can't just be giving, giving, giving.
#
It's a two-way process.
#
If you treat Nanak as a human being,
#
the process of growth happens by hearing and imparting.
#
Is there a mapping of that growth?
#
Like, do we have a sense of how his thinking changed during this quest?
#
Yeah, so just, let me just complete this.
#
So then you come to the third part of his life,
#
where he settled on Kartarpur.
#
I think that's where he started getting a congregation.
#
That's where he passed the beten.
#
So I always think about it,
#
why is it that the Kabir Panthis did not have a structured group that falling?
#
Kabir Panthis could have also formed an empire at one point of time,
#
I think that military aspect came much later,
#
but it was because Nanak and Kabir had one,
#
they were similar, but they did one thing different.
#
Nanak passed a leadership beten with a second guru,
#
and the beten passed down for ten gurus.
#
Kabir did not pass him.
#
So Kabir only remained at a realm where it was a bit less hard and right, you know.
#
So what I'm coming to is that Nanak was on a quest,
#
he traveled, and he traveled on a two-way process.
#
But where was he traveling is the question.
#
If you look at the structure in his mappings,
#
there is a spiritual congregation in that place where he was going to of that time.
#
Spiritual congregation either associated with myth, reality,
#
but people were coming there.
#
For him, interaction with people was the most important.
#
Whether it was at Haridwar,
#
he gave the profound message of,
#
if you're doing sharad, if you're giving water to your parents who passed away,
#
and if that can reach by putting the water towards the sun to that passed away generation,
#
then I can turn the other way around and water my fields in Punjab,
#
and that water should reach smaller distance here.
#
So he was trying to rationalize.
#
Basically, he was going to places where people would congregate.
#
And that took him then to places of Islamic, Sufi, Jain, Buddhist,
#
a lot of Hindu sites, yogis, and he would congregate with them.
#
So when you understand that, then you start questioning,
#
okay, how did he travel then?
#
Not a rocket science at all.
#
From Punjab, people were traveling to Mecca.
#
How were they traveling? There were two routes.
#
One would get them to along the Indus,
#
You can do about 20 kilometers a day.
#
And you get down to Sindh.
#
From Sindh, you go via Balochistan into Iran,
#
and then you reach to the desert route into Mecca.
#
The other one was you go down into the Arabian Sea
#
and take a boat from there and sail into Mecca.
#
So Nanak also did that same thing for a certain period of his time.
#
But the difference was that they would come back,
#
and he went on the old pilgrimage route to Baghdad.
#
But people from Baghdad would also come.
#
From there, he turned into Afghanistan.
#
People would from Afghanistan also go that way.
#
People from India would go to Mansarovar, Kalash.
#
From time immemorial, they're going.
#
The Siddha used to sit there.
#
The Nath yogis used to sit there.
#
And he went along from the Badrinath area,
#
along the passes into Kalash and Mansarovar.
#
It's just a few days' trek.
#
Through Shipki Laga Pass, they went from there.
#
So if you really break down his travels,
#
which on a macro level looks like a huge landscape,
#
actually break into small chunks.
#
But he was only going to places where spiritualists congregate.
#
And therefore, it's a 22 years' travel.
#
And do you have a sense of his intellectual evolution in this period?
#
Like he's going to all of these places.
#
He's talking to all of these people.
#
He's assimilating knowledge and ways of thinking.
#
How does this influence what Sikhism becomes?
#
It's a hard question for me to answer.
#
And it's getting into a realm of any opinion I'll give
#
could touch people on the wrong side.
#
But I'm just saying that if we treat Nanak as a human,
#
if we treat, then every human has an evolution process.
#
Nanak was a spiritually elevated person right from his childhood.
#
He was having conversations around certain mundane tasks
#
about religious practices.
#
Yes, he was absolutely evolved.
#
But him meeting Mardana and then bringing in the musical knowledge
#
and then the two walking into Islamic sites, Sufi sites, different places,
#
of course, he would have assimilated.
#
I'm not comparing myself with any Nanak.
#
But I know when I've traveled,
#
the good chunk of my career that I spent in the corporate world
#
where I was meeting people with a different mindset
#
was still making me learn.
#
But this path and this journey has made me
#
more learned, more evolved.
#
I'm nowhere near Nanak,
#
but it's made me a different person who I am.
#
When you meet and interact with people of different faiths,
#
you will understand the quest of Nanak was not Gurdwara's,
#
there were none at that time.
#
The quest was something different.
#
And to understand Nanak,
#
you will have to understand Jainism,
#
you will have to understand Buddhism,
#
you will have to understand Vedant,
#
you'll have to understand the six philosophical systems,
#
you will have to understand the naat yogis,
#
you will have to understand the Sufis,
#
you'll have to understand Baba Farid and so on and so forth.
#
So when he goes to Pakpattan and he sits there,
#
the 11th descendant of the Gaddi Nasheen of Baba Farid,
#
because Baba Farid was 250 years before him,
#
the beautiful Punjabi verses he writes,
#
Why does he collate it?
#
Because he finds a similarity in their mindsets.
#
In fact, the most valuable contribution
#
in Punjabi poetry of Baba Farid is by Nanak that he collated it.
#
Nayto, this was going through by oral traditions.
#
In fact, all the works of Baba Farid that have been done later on in Shah Mukhi,
#
which is the Urdu script,
#
much later are all taken from the Granth Sahib
#
because Nanak documented it.
#
Nanak documented Kabir's verses.
#
which today people say as Bijak is Kabir's work.
#
Go into the Granth Sahib
#
and there's a repository of Kabir's writings.
#
And that's the beauty of what he was doing.
#
So could he be doing that without evolving?
#
I find it hard to accept.
#
At one level, I'm thinking Nanak could easily,
#
as he travelled, have done a podcast called The Seen and the Unseen
#
and documented all these dialogues in audio form,
#
but alas, there was no technology back then.
#
So to get back to the second question I asked,
#
like we're recording this on March 12th,
#
you decided you'll do India last.
#
You are about to finish India.
#
You did all the other countries.
#
You did all the travel.
#
You went to these conflict zones.
#
You went to Baluchistan.
#
You went to Iran, Iraq.
#
How was that experience,
#
like both in terms of getting permissions
#
and to other places where Nanak travelled,
#
where Nanak Panti is simply not there.
#
There's no trace of it.
#
He only happened to go there.
#
Travelling into these places is very tough.
#
You cannot retrace Guru Nanak's travels the way he travelled.
#
We're talking about sovereign nations.
#
I cannot travel in that sequential manner,
#
but I can get the data and can stitch it
#
so that you and the next generation,
#
when they're looking at,
#
they see it sequentially.
#
That's the only way it's possible.
#
there are a lot of ifs and buts,
#
especially for trying to do photography and videography.
#
Is it going with a team and a crew?
#
When I did my Sikh legacy in Pakistan,
#
I just had a camera and shared my passion.
#
But now you've got to go with a team.
#
And that's a very different ball game.
#
And when you get inside the country,
#
first and foremost, the barrier is,
#
how will you get inside?
#
How will you enable it?
#
There's some countries where the permission
#
is not going to come to you.
#
You just have to do it as a stealth mission.
#
Risk your life and just do it as a stealth mission.
#
Some countries, the permission will come to you,
#
but may not come to you deep inside.
#
Some countries, visas will be a big problem.
#
I faced a lot of problems with a lot of visas in many places.
#
India might sound to be the easiest,
#
but what one does not realize is that India,
#
I have a Government of India's approval
#
from Ministry of Culture.
#
But when you're traveling,
#
every temple has its own management.
#
They don't recognize the Government of India's letter, right?
#
Everyone's a king out here.
#
Every state is different.
#
You might have the Government of India's approval
#
letter from Ministry of Culture,
#
but BJP may not be in a power in a certain state.
#
They don't care about that letter.
#
So, there's this huge mix of challenges
#
and you're going to manage that even in a country
#
where life is not a threat in India, right?
#
You can imagine how tough it becomes.
#
So, that's the first part to the question.
#
So, your second question was that
#
the Nanak Panthis, were they there, right?
#
Look, when Nanak was traveling,
#
the Nanak's Panth was not being formed.
#
Guru Nanak in his first part of his life
#
was not creating any followership.
#
Second part, he was on a quest.
#
Third part, when he came and settled down at Kartarpur,
#
people started flocking around him
#
because he now had immense value to offer.
#
I think the Panth starts emerging from there.
#
The community starts emerging from there.
#
Till then, he's just moving around.
#
It's the beten that he passes on to the second Guru
#
and that lasts on for 250 years in the name of Nanak,
#
creates a bigger and bigger community up till Afghanistan,
#
deep inside India, Maharashtra and so on and so forth.
#
That becomes the Nanak Panthi.
#
So, you know, we're kind of running out of time.
#
So, my sort of final question here would be that,
#
you know, in the process of immersing yourself
#
in Sikh traditions or Nanak Panthi traditions,
#
first in Pakistan and now on this entire trip,
#
how has a way that you look at your faith changed,
#
your community changed, and if any,
#
what is a message that you'd like to sort of give
#
to the Sikh community at this point in time
#
about how they look at their own history
#
and their own heritage?
#
Well, I think the learning is only a reaffirmation
#
of the most fundamental message of Nanak of oneness.
#
There's nothing different, right?
#
simple message of oneness that we are one.
#
And I think you just need to have the ability to understand that.
#
All can coexist in a bouquet of oneness.
#
That's the only message that I'll take
#
because I have seen the love and affection
#
and the challenges that have been overcome
#
by the people in Afghanistan, in Iran and Iraq
#
If not for them and not their feeling for oneness,
#
this project could not have been done.
#
That's my takeaway from it.
#
And the message to my communities also is that
#
it's the message of oneness.
#
There's no difference, right?
#
So we need to have the ability to embrace everyone.
#
It's the need of the day.
#
The world is already broken up.
#
And does that also mean being honest and self-critical
#
and recognizing the rigidity that has crept into the faith
#
over the last few decades?
#
Well, every faith goes into all kinds of rigidity,
#
all kinds. There's nothing new.
#
It's not rocket science.
#
Every faith evolves that way, right?
#
Religion is a defining of a boundary around spirituality.
#
So I am a proud adherent of the Khalsa tradition.
#
I wear a turban. I keep uncut beard.
#
I'm proud of it because of my culture, my history,
#
my tradition and I will die like this.
#
But there's not any reason for me to not embrace anyone else.
#
Your culture as a Sikh in Afghanistan
#
may have a different culture.
#
In my journey, I've met Assamese Sikhs.
#
I met Nanak Panthis of Oriya origin in Orissa, right?
#
And they don't speak my Punjabi language,
#
but yet they are believer in the faith, right?
#
And they don't look like me.
#
So who am I to pass judgment on that?
#
It's the only thing that I've learned, right?
#
I think the key message is that the need of the hour,
#
the need of any place in the world,
#
even within our own country at this point of time,
#
is that we need to learn to live with the oneness.
#
There's a lot of damage that's happened
#
to the underlying structure of the coexistence
#
and we need to rise above that.
#
And Nanak's message in this time is very important for that.
#
And I'm often reminded of the prayer we used to read in our school,
#
in Doon school when I was there,
#
Rabindranath, take odds, right?
#
Where the world has not been broken up by...
#
Into fragments by narrow domestic walls.
#
Yeah, into that heaven of freedom.
#
I think that's the only message.
#
I think Nanak was striving for that.
#
And finally, you've finished shooting most of Allegory,
#
which is a 30-part documentary series,
#
but there's a lot of work left on post-production.
#
You're going to Lahore soon to record again with Salima Khwaja.
#
You still need to raise funds for some of that.
#
If any of the listeners of the show
#
would want to contribute to your project,
#
how can they do so? Where should they go?
#
Yeah, so there is a charitable organization
#
that's supporting this project within India.
#
We're managing it out of Singapore,
#
but we are in need for fund.
#
These projects for five years are only running
#
because of the people who support us, right?
#
And if anyone wants to support,
#
there are ways of doing it.
#
We have a tax-exempt organization
#
that's helping us as a third-party organization.
#
At this point, I will simply request
#
that my email could be given,
#
and they can contact me on that.
#
Or my WhatsApp is the Singapore number,
#
which is plus 65-9832-6508.
#
They can drop me a line on that.
#
and you can give my email at the bottom of the podcast.
#
Both the email and the number will be in the show notes?
#
Yeah, and anyone can contact me,
#
and we can take it from there.
#
But we are looking for support.
#
I mean, you know, there's a lot.
#
There are no organizations behind this project.
#
This is a quest of a madman.
#
And we have proven ourselves as a team long enough
#
for five years that we are able to generate stuff.
#
And if people who feel that there's
#
a space for this narrative,
#
my books on Sikh legacy in Pakistan,
#
and equally should impress and motivate
#
any non-Sikh to delve into them.
#
Similarly, Gunanak's message has to be
#
appreciated by everyone,
#
and anyone who comes forward can reach out.
#
And even if we can't exactly live in borderless geographies,
#
we can live in borderless minds.
#
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Amardeep.
#
Thank you so much for giving an opportunity.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene in the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support
#
and contribute any amount you like
#
to keep this podcast alive and kicking.
