Guru Nanak Dev Ji Didn’t Come to Create “Just Another Religion” | Bhai Satpal Singh
BoS TV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hWWWtjBvSI

Transkript (automatisch erstellt)

0:00 I think we do a disservice to Sikhi by just saying it's just another religion. It's the fifth largest religion.
0:07 We demote Sikhi when we just say, oh, there's all these other religions, we're also a good religion.
0:11 I don't think Guru Nanak Dev Ji was doing that. He never was trying to convert people into Sikhi.
0:16 And I don't think we've understood Sikhi in that way, that we are not trying to sell you another religion.
0:23 What we're trying to do is we're trying to say, whatever religion you belong to, we have a wisdom that can elevate that.
0:28 keep your religion but genuinely make it about connecting with the divine don't make it just
0:34 tribalism which is what most religions have become we don't play those games we're
0:39 there is light in all but you just don't know how to bring that light out of you oneness resonates infinitely eternal truth is its name
0:52 you know there's so many people who grow listening to job just who don't know what it
0:58 means and these are now people in their 40s 50s 60s i get parents coming to me all the
1:02 time saying i know japji sabot by heart but my are asking me what it means and i don't know what
1:07 to tell them but i just want my kids to learn to repeat it as well and they're saying they don't
1:11 want to learn that unless they know what it means but it really is for the whole world and i
1:16 think as a Sikh community i feel we haven't done to actually bring it out to the wider world this
1:21 is why this wisdom is written in such a way you feel like carrying on.
1:26 Because there's a beauty to how it's being said. It's not just technically accurate,
1:31 it's also poetically beautiful. So then you realize how amazing Bani actually is,
1:37 Guru Granth Sahib Ji's poetry really is. It's so clever in how it pulls at your heartstrings,
1:45 but it's also teaching you. It's also giving you wisdom at the same time.
1:49 How do you create a song that has wisdom as well? That's what the gurus managed to create.
1:55 You listen to one parcharak for one angle and then you listen to another
1:58 for a completely different angle. Why should we try to compete with each other?
2:02 I think that's a very unhealthy way to look at each other in the panth.
2:05 And for me, that analogy of seeing the panth as a jigsaw puzzle and everybody has a part to play,
2:11 I think that's a really healthy way to look at it. It's been quite a while.
2:21 I don't know if you remember back in COVID time, we were speaking then as well
2:24 and we were trying to get into podcasts, but I think you were just really busy.
2:27 So finally, we've got you here today. Thank you for having me.
2:30 So I'm sure many of the Sangat already know who Parasat Parasinghe is. Nanak Naam has been around for quite a long time, very similar to Basics of Sikhiya.
2:41 In terms of, I think Basics started in 2011, 2012 and you started in 2013? Yeah, I think Basics started with March 2012 and we started in January 2013.
2:53 So yeah, very simple timeline. There you go and we'll speak quite later on but also
2:57 I found out recently that you went to the same school as Guru Guru Nanak Singh Ji as well.
3:01 Yes. Yeah, I knew him all throughout high school as well
3:04 before he got into Sikhi as well. Oh, wow.
3:06 Is it Langton? Langton School, yeah.
3:08 Yeah. Good buddy.
3:11 So it would be nice because, you know, Guru Guru Nanak Singh Ji, you just launched an amazing project
3:16 which we'll speak about on Siddhi Japji's side. But I thought it would be nice to start just a little bit
3:20 about your journey. Who is Nanak Nanak?
3:22 Who is Siddhapal Singh? You know, your upbringing and, you know,
3:25 your path towards Sikhi. yeah I mean for me depends how far back you
3:30 want to go I spent my early childhood in India moved to the UK when I was eight years old
3:38 and grew up in a Gursikh family so we always had a relationship with Gurdwara with Sangat kept
3:46 Kesh our whole life learned Japji Sahib as as kids and grew up in the UK had
3:52 my education everything here grew up going to Sikhi um being inspired and learning more for ourselves
4:00 i think there was a big sort of point in my own life it's sort of late
4:05 teenage years where i was inspired to want to more than just what you had been taught
4:11 from your parents but actually wanting to inquire discuss different ideas with different people more so
4:18 i think for me my love for saki kind of grew in my late teens even going and being
4:25 a seva daur at sort of kids camps and summer camps and things like that at 19 i was a blessed
4:32 with amrit and from that point onwards it was just lifelong kind of love and passion for sikhi
4:39 i remember choosing my university based on the size of the Sikh society i was literally looking
4:45 at which ones had the best Sikh societies at times um which is like your Sikh association
4:50 group student body groups and at the time [london it was Brunel it was like i just] want
4:56 to go to that that that university um within sort a year of joining i became part of
5:02 that Sikh society eventually became president of that ran that for a number of years as well so
5:07 there's there's been a lifelong sort of love and passion for Sikhi and learning and it was in those
5:14 kind of formative years that I really started to learn more about meditation and self-reflection,
5:22 becoming just aware of spiritual wisdom outside of even kind of the kind of the Sikh focus, kind of the wider Indian kind of philosophies
5:34 and that to me was pivotal that point at which I started to really introspect look within myself
5:42 look at my own mind try to understand who I was what my relationship with my mind was what is
5:50 ego and then constantly dipping back into Guru Granth Sahib Ji Bani and saying is this what I'm
5:55 practicing is this what Bani is saying and then constantly trying to make Sikhi something that
6:01 was actually using to learn about myself further and for me eventually that became such a
6:06 journey such a healing process for myself such an enlightening journey that you realize so many
6:12 things about yourself that i felt like i wanted to share that perspective rather than a
6:20 that i was hearing in the gurdwaras which is a lot of stories about the past for me what was
6:26 more fascinating was what is Bani actually saying about who we are what is the nature
6:31 connecting with God actually looked like what is that kind of personal journey and that to me was
6:38 an it was an element that I was feeling wasn't kind of spoken about much let alone in sort of
6:44 the early sort of 2010s there was very little education online on YouTube so for me with my
6:50 background in IT I just felt that there was a natural kind of progression for me to take
6:56 I had been learning and actually put it on a YouTube channel. And I created a YouTube channel called Nanak Naam in 2013.
7:03 And in 2016, I left my work in IT to then follow this full time. And it's been more than 10 years now that we've been just going as far as we can
7:16 with bringing the teachings of Gurbani, not just to the Sikh audience, but also to communities all around the world.
7:23 and you can definitely see that i'm going to get by in terms of even just the different types of
7:27 platforms you've gone on uh i think it was that was it called bear by six because it's like that
7:32 was fantastic right in terms of you know going on to kind of more mainstream uh podcast channels
7:38 stuff as well and loads of questions came out of the stuff that you're saying g so if we just
7:42 back a little bit um you spoke about being [the president um at Brunel university uh the Sikh]
7:48 so and you spoke about your journey to Sikhi was that kind of happening at the same time did you
7:54 feel empowered to want to become the president because you wanted to start bringing back change
7:59 was you seeing things in the university students that you wanted to kind of now you know be a part
8:05 of making that I think I certainly didn't set out to become president of the Sikh society for me I
8:09 just wanted to be involved I just wanted to help out so in my very first year I was just
8:14 involved with the Sikh society and at that time the president was in his final year so when he was
8:19 going to be moving on and leaving university then he said would you like to do it and it was
8:24 at that time and the role of the president was almost like chief organizer it wasn't like you're
8:30 a pracharak or anything like that it was about can you organize the the student bodies you know
8:36 even if it was like a paintballing event or you know like a bowling event or something like
8:40 can you organize weekly meetups where you try and find different speakers to come in and then you
8:46 bring them on board and it was just kind of being somebody who was dedicated enough to want to run
8:52 the Sikh society and I think for me what was interesting about that is sometimes where
8:58 [speakers didn't turn up then because your Sangat] were already invited and they were coming then
9:04 have to just kind of stand and do whatever you could so the very early stages of learning
9:08 public speaking pretty much started around then as well and you mentioned that at 19 you
9:14 amrit were you the first in your family to take amrit and like what was it that really
9:18 you to take that step yeah i i have to give credit to my mom she um could see from sort of
9:25 my teenage years that i was getting more and more into sikhi and more inspired by and she
9:30 saying you take amrit you should take amrit um in my immediate family yes i'm i'm the first one to
9:37 um but certainly not in my sort of grandparents and and my lineage i come from a lineage
9:44 in our family uh and that's why my mom had seen that in her previous generations and she
9:51 something in me and she said uh take um and i remember you know hearing that at the age of
9:57 and i was like well that's not cool i don't really want to do that you know i i had my own ideas of
10:01 what it meant to take Amrita. I think by the time I was 19
10:05 and starting to get involved more with kind of Sikhi camps, I'll tell you a funny story, actually,
10:11 what broke that about. One of the first Sikhi camps I was invited to as a sevadar,
10:17 I was 18 years old, and it was a children's camp
10:20 run by the Sikh Missionary Society in Southall. And as a sevadar,
10:26 you were a group leader of children, maybe sort of 9, 10, 11 years old.
10:30 I used to go to this, so you might have been one of the kids. You only seek you out.
10:35 And as part of being a Seva Dao, so when we were young teenagers, 10, 11, 12, 13, we were, my sister and I were taught by my parents how to do card and, you know,
10:52 read Chepchi Sahib, how to, you know, memorize Rera Sahib and so on and things like that. and then as you were a little bit older in my
10:59 mid-teens I kind of dropped it so by the time I got to about 18 I had probably forgotten most of
11:06 my sort of bunnies and I remember going to the Sikhi camp and part of the Seva was that every day
11:13 a different group had to sit on stage and do part and it was the turn of my group and
11:18 I remember being totally embarrassed that I didn't know to do any of my part I'd forgotten all of it
11:26 and I remember asking 10 11 12 year olds in the who knows how to do part and sitting them forward
11:32 in front of the mic and me sitting right at back of the stage even though it was our group's
11:37 turn to do do the art and that actually had an impact on me at the end of that Sikhi
11:41 camp going home and thinking look you look like a but you don't actually how can you be a
11:45 thing that doesn't actually even know how to do parties so that inspired me like I was going
11:49 home after that and just every day and do and that's the great thing about going to Sikhi camps
11:54 is that you get into a routine you wake up and you're doing part
11:57 you're doing the Rehras you're doing the Sohila Sahib in the evenings
12:01 so when you come home that has a little bit of a lasting effect on you
12:06 and I just started to learn again from scratch
12:09 doing Varnis and Vart again so much so that by the following year
12:14 by the time I was 19 I just fell in love with the whole thing
12:17 and I had taken Amrit by the time the next year so a camp had turned up
12:21 So that's a little bit about how I got inspired into it. And did you always tie the mala like this?
12:26 No, not at all. No, I just had a regular, the star, that everyone in my family sort of ties.
12:34 All my dad's side, my mom's side, the family are all sort of wearing more sort of traditional Punjabi style, the stars.
12:41 When I went into high school that I started seeing a few of my friends wearing this, what we call the Kenyan pug.
12:46 or around the world they call it the uk book which is this kind of folded one which is very sort of
12:52 [neat lug so um i remember being at Sikh] society events in the early 2000s going to various
13:01 week events around universities and i remember seeing sings with the malay for the first time
13:06 and i was like that's beautiful i want to look like that you know it felt like for the first
13:10 time i was looking at people who look like the paintings of the gursikhs and the
13:15 I don't think a lot of people today appreciate that even if you go back 20 years, it was very
13:21 rare to see a Dhamalla. I grew up most of my life not seeing a Dhamalla. If you watch videos of
13:28 Gurdwara programs in the UK from the 90s, you see recordings, you can find them on YouTube,
13:33 you will not see a Dhamalla, you will not see a Bala. That was the childhood that I grew up with.
13:37 There was not these just massive people, crowds of people all in the Manli and Bani. The only time
13:45 you might have seen it was if you saw
13:46 a Ghatkabu then you might have seen it
13:50 but otherwise on a day to day
13:51 so it wasn't common for people to wear them
13:53 on day so when I finally
13:55 started seeing them in my sort of
13:57 late teens I was really
13:59 inspired by that to me there was
14:01 something there was a pull
14:02 and I thought I want to look like that
14:04 It just shows the power of Sangat
14:06 when you speak about the Sikhi camp experience
14:08 when it comes to reading Bhart
14:09 and that's what Sangat does
14:11 in terms of if there's somewhere
14:13 where you feel that you're lacking
14:15 [then Sangat goes] show that
14:16 and show you a way forward
14:18 in terms of getting you back
14:20 on the path to the breathing part
14:22 and taking Amrit and you spoke about
14:24 I'm guessing in your 20s
14:26 you had different experiences
14:28 you started to delve more
14:29 into Gurbani and you mentioned
14:32 something about being healing
14:33 as well so if you don't
14:34 want me asking was there something
14:35 that happened to you in your 20s
14:38 where you kind of came towards Sikhi
14:40 because generally just generalizing
14:43 people in the world they go towards
14:44 you know world endeavors careers which it sounds like you did progress in that as well
14:48 but what really pushed you in this direction did something happen or was it just a natural thing
14:53 no i don't think for me i'm i count my blessings and i feel very blessed that i i have grown up
15:00 a very stable home a very loving family environment and so i don't have sort of a trauma story about
15:08 something that happened to me that sort of led to to that although you're absolutely right
15:12 A lot of people come into Sikhi because there's something that's sort of shaken them in their life.
15:16 I think for me, healing was about realizing an aspect of yourself that you didn't even know. And for most of my childhood growing up, Sikhi was about things on the outside,
15:29 practices that you have to do, history that you have to learn, knowledge that you have to familiarize yourself. And it was nothing transformative on the inside.
15:42 It was more just about being a Gursikh who could do Keetan on stage, play Tabla, who could read the Bhanis, who was doing the speeches at the age of 9 and 10, standing on a podium at Sikhi camps and doing speeches about Gurudev Bahadur Ji,
15:56 Shaheed. All of those sort of things. I grew up with all of that. But I think for me,
16:02 when I started to introspect and learn about just sitting still within my own self and noticing what was coming up, the healing part of it was realizing that there were layers to your own mind that you didn't know you had.
16:15 and that to me was exciting it was scary it was something that i felt like it was untapped it
16:26 almost like you it's like discovering a door or a room in your house that you never knew you had
16:32 and you've lived in the house your whole life and nobody's ever opened this one door and when you finally look behind that that
16:39 curiosity just grabs you and that to me that curiosity about introspection and looking within
16:46 myself and meditating and then having the comfort of knowing that you had Bani there to
16:52 kind of guide you around what exactly it is you're seeing what are these various stages within your own
16:58 self that you can kind of go down that to me was just fascinating and I it felt like
17:03 I had discovered something that nobody in my upbringing had said was was possible there was a version
17:09 of Sikhi that wasn't being talked about which was this self-discovery you know you mentioned as well
17:16 before that you had to kind of go of like the Sikhi thought process or into
17:20 like Indian spirituality and stuff and there was this gap but then why do you think that gap
17:26 existed I don't know I feel like as a community there are sort of norms there are things that
17:33 we become comfortable with but now over time I've obviously discovered that those those things aren't
17:39 gaps they're just not as prominent so if we take even like the uh the uh the
17:44 nirmala sangat they talk a lot about this and the of the mind it was just that growing up that
17:51 wasn't what i had been hearing you know i must admit as a child you just go to the gurdwara
17:56 you listen to keetan i love to listen to keetan but i didn't know what any of that
18:01 meant and then you're listening to katha and as most children at that time when you hear the Katha
18:06 you get up and leave you think there's nothing you know interesting for you because
18:10 Katha is you know in a language that you're not familiar with I was a big fan of
18:14 music and Keetan so I would listen to Keeftan a big fan of Tabla
18:18 I would always position myself that I could see what the Tabla player was playing that's where
18:22 it grabbed my attention as a child but it was only
18:26 when I started learning meditation that I was thinking why have I not heard
18:30 about this I've been to camps I've been to this why have i not heard about this thing so i feel
18:36 like a lot of the time as a sangat as a we're very good at presenting the traditions
18:43 and the history but we're not necessarily good at actually going a lot deeper so i
18:49 had to find this elsewhere like i agree it's rare to find in today's world the idea of going
18:56 to guru god and the average pujab is said being told that you're hating me god like like
19:00 you said it'll be stuff that they don't understand also that it's a language and they're not
19:05 connecting to it and you know we all see the nan karji's at the sukunisai parts where
19:10 they're just sitting against the wall and they're just having their conversations right it's not that
19:16 level of engagement yeah um so how did learn this then in terms of was this was
19:21 a conversation with somebody is it a book that you read about this element of meditation and
19:26 you know opening that door that you never existed i think for me i was introduced to it um
19:32 by a gorsik who was not very well known but he almost took me under his wing and started teaching
19:41 me an area of sikhi which i just felt had not been something that i was exposed to and
19:47 he was showing me shabads like the whole idea of you know
19:53 He was saying, let's actually look at this. The idea of you are, oh mind, you are, you know, one with the divine.
20:03 Go and search within yourself. And I was fortunate enough to have that guidance.
20:10 And at the time, it was just kind of dipping into certain ideas. And he said, go have a look at this, read this.
20:18 You know, I was introduced to what is, I mean, understandably a very controversial figure.
20:24 Rajneesh, I was introduced to his Japji Sahib translation, and I guess I'm just Osho, yeah,
20:30 and his Japji Sahib translation, again, was just a massive eye-opener to hear Japji Sahib translated purely from the perspective of introspection. What does it actually mean?
20:42 What do these different stages actually mean? He definitely gets things wrong, according to traditional Sikh understanding, and he's also a very,
20:51 very controversial figure. I think for me i have always learned you know one
20:56 of the things my my mother always taught me which was just take the good from anywhere that you
21:02 go you know i don't mind going to different and being i'm very comfortable with saying i
21:07 don't agree with this part of what you're so i'm just leaving that to one side but
21:12 there are other things that you're saying and i'm gaining value from that i think today we're very quick
21:18 to just put people in boxes and just say he this person is all good or all bad and i
21:22 was never brought up that way i was brought up you know try and take the gun out of
21:27 everyone you know there's always some good in there for me i just ignored the scandalous side of of
21:33 of rajneesh osho and i was like not interested in that i'm like that that's that's not what i'm
21:39 here for but when i'm reading his books when listening to his lectures there's something there there's
21:44 some value in there you know i think And Sun Singh Muskeenji has quoted him before as well.
21:48 So take the good where you can, but just have that self-awareness to recognize
21:53 where there's some things that you don't necessarily gain value from. How did you get that self-awareness then?
21:59 Where you were able to test and know like, this is something I do want to connect with.
22:03 This is something maybe I don't know. For someone who's new and trying to discover this path for themselves.
22:07 I felt to me that everything that I was reading outside of the Sikh space was just to help me understand Sikhi better,
22:16 help me understand Gurbani better. So if it was helping me understand Gurbani better,
22:20 I was like, great, I'll take it. If it wasn't, if it was something talking about something else,
22:25 then I was like, okay, that's not helping me. So I was sort of cherry picking the bits that were helping me.
22:32 So being grounded in Sikhi and being brought up in a Gursikh household really kind of meant that you never lost that kind of,
22:41 Like your roots were pakeh, your roots were firm within the Sikh tradition. So it was anything that can kind of help you understand that further.
22:49 That's kind of my philosophy. And then how did it come to us nodding on then?
22:54 How did we get this nodding on from introspection? What made you think that actually, you know what, I want to grab a camera
23:01 and I want to start making videos and speaking to our people about what you just found out yourself?
23:06 Yeah, it's all very sort of organic. I was like I said I was involved with the
23:11 Sikh societies every now and then you have to stand and and say something and talk about Sikhi and
23:16 then we were involved with Sikhi camps quite a lot in my early 20s myself and a group of
23:22 Sangat from West London and East London are quite heavily involved in Sikhi camps and again if a speaker
23:28 didn't turn up you might be told all right know that speaker's coming half an hour late
23:32 you but everyone's sitting in their seats so you say something you know so you kind of
23:37 built that idea of standing up and and and some ideas that you had not that you were
23:42 an expert on anything but you know we're all samgat members all six just helping each other
23:47 all students kind of teaching each other whatever we've learned so that idea of public speaking just
23:54 very slowly grew and grew so every now and I'd be invited to Sikhi camps. And in 2013, Shepherds of Gurdwara,
24:02 which I was quite close to and had kind of grown up with as a child, the Gurdwara committee had a changeover and there
24:12 was a new young committee that were very keen to have new speakers, new ideas. And I was invited
24:18 by one of the committee members um to come and do uh some classes and i remember saying yes to
24:28 thinking that i was invited to go sit in a small classroom on the side and maybe there was a
24:33 people and he said you know for the next couple of weeks once a month come and do a talk
24:37 something and it was only on the day that i actually learned that that i was actually invited
24:42 to go settle the good on a stage and so i was like okay i'm i'm gonna be invited to do something
24:48 a good or say it's not an interactive thing and i had done this a few times before i camps
24:52 so the idea was let me just bring a camera along you know whatever cheap video camera i had you
24:59 know i i shudder at the the very early videos fanatic arm channel because i had no idea
25:05 um picture quality sound quality you know it was whatever sound was being picked up by by the
25:11 camera so that's kind of how it started it was just i was going to camps anyway i was speaking
25:17 anyway so the idea was very much that why don't we put something together and put it online
25:21 but it was with the background of everything that i was learning was really having an impact on
25:29 like i was so fascinated by the idea that you can learn so much about your mind and you could
25:35 so much about how to manage your emotions when you were able to meditate and create a distance
25:41 between you and your anger and your frustration and your thoughts you're able to sit back
25:47 just be comfortable even if frustration arises even if anger arises even if lust arises you're
25:52 able to create this distance and i i wanted to share that i was like this is something
25:57 too good to keep to myself and i remember in my pre sort of pre-2013 2010 2011 when i was
26:08 on the train going to work i was doing one of either two things either i would use the hour
26:13 of sitting on the train i was just in meditation just literally in meditation in vaidra simran in
26:19 samadhi of any sort you know however i understood it or i was writing actually video title ideas
26:26 from about 2011 i had this idea that i wanted to put something on online and i would just be
26:31 there writing video ideas about you know this would be an interesting video this would be
26:36 interesting video and I remember looking at the all the other passengers on the train and
26:42 at people from all different communities and thinking I wonder what this person is
26:45 through I wonder what Guru Nanak Sikhi would would say to help this person or that
26:50 so that's kind of how my idea formulated very early on that whatever I was experiencing
26:56 not exclusive to Sikhs that was something true of the human being of the human nature and if
27:02 true and it's working for me firstly i can help bring this out to the Sikh community but also to
27:09 the wider community like everybody should have access to this information about the mind
27:14 the self about the higher nature of the self so i was writing down video ideas from about
27:20 and i remember seeing uh online what was available and i think back then probably sick net were
27:27 only channel that were doing anything in english and they were doing a good job there were some
27:31 videos out there but what was very clear to me was that there's so much more that can be done
27:36 i think 2012 i saw paithi garaj singh then had a similar idea and he started a channel and i
27:42 like okay this is this is a go this we're able to do this like i'm not the only one that's come
27:46 with this idea that you could just train the all that you can kind of take your training and and
27:53 and bring that to the sangha you know you know i like we said i knew paithi garaj singh and
27:59 knew that he wasn't sort of claiming to be some sort of jnani he wasn't claiming to be some sort
28:04 of expert he was saying look this is what i know this is what is helping me can i bring some clarity
28:10 and i think i went with the same attitude i had no sort of illusions that i was some jnani
28:17 somehow i was i was wise or anything like that it was just if you're inviting me to sit on a stage
28:22 and talk about sikhi then i'm just going to share what i understand as another student as another
28:27 student of the guru this is what the guru is showing me maybe i can bring value to you so
28:32 nanak nam was really just brought out brought born out of the idea that there was a need
28:38 content online and um even the idea of writing videos down video titles and stuff is that linked
28:45 to your degree as well or was you studying at university no i i did i studied computer
28:50 at university but there was almost no teaching back then around seo or social media or
28:58 like that there was nothing like that so that was more what i was seeing as i went into my
29:04 professional life so i graduated from university i think something around 2004 and then going into
29:12 a working life and seeing the very early stages of social media start to become a thing so
29:19 job i was in you know we were sitting in the it department that there was this conversation
29:24 marketing digital marketing what is this thing called social media so i very much
29:28 the first time hearing the word twitter and someone says have you heard of twitter i
29:32 no i don't know what it is and then learning about what this thing is you know learning what facebook
29:36 is um seeing the the start of youtube and just looking and saying oh video and i think
29:43 going to be important at some point you know so it it wasn't part of my my education but it
29:48 that'd be the world that i was in in my profession was it digital marketing then they use in yeah
29:52 i i spent a lot of time in digital marketing i actually worked for a number of charities
29:56 before um and trying to think about how to take the charity message back then you know a lot of
30:03 the charity promotion was either done um through letters that they would post to all of their uh
30:09 mailing list or it was a magazine and then we had you know this this very small it department and
30:16 we were being told can you come up with a digital marketing strategy and i didn't even know
30:20 those words meant back in sort of 2007 2008 and it was trying to work out what does
30:25 marketing mean for this charity that i'm working with so it's very much in the early stages of
30:30 social media that i was kind of exposed to those things and had to ask those questions for
30:34 benefit of my employers and so i was now understanding digital marketing
30:41 how charities work and how charities think and then slowly slowly was the idea that actually
30:46 I could put something like this together myself. I guess the barcha that we do at Gurkha
30:51 we always have it grounded in Gurma to the best of our ability and our knowledge.
30:56 But definitely when we look at non-economic the marketing element is fantastic
31:00 because we love doing marketing as well. So whenever we look at the videos you made
31:05 over the years in the progression like you said from the first videos
31:07 where you're just sitting there with a camera and how you've done that.
31:11 If you don't mind just for a few minutes just talk about marketing
31:14 because I think it's such a powerful tool that you know people are starting to realize that
31:18 actually if you use this you can help get message out more especially for social media to me
31:25 right yeah i think for me because in these stages there were no other blueprints there was no
31:31 one that we could copy there was no one we could look at within the Sikh community that
31:36 was doing video online i had to look elsewhere had to look online and i and i had to
31:41 i think that's probably been one of my strengths like don't mind learning from anywhere i kind of touched upon
31:47 that before so i'm looking at you know the i remember the rise of jay shetty in sort of
31:52 2017 2018 and looking at viral videos that he making i thought that's interesting i could use that
31:59 idea and bring my my message in in that format uh i remember in 2018 being one of the
32:05 very first to deliberately make a viral uh and that video still kind of goes quite viral these days
32:12 it's a one a little short three minute video was taken from a lecture uh called guru nanak's
32:16 greatest message a lot of people can still share it especially whatsapp yeah so it you know it
32:23 it starts with guru nanak didn't believe in god guru nanak knew god so that's a powerful kind
32:29 of opening line so looking at things like what's first line that they're using what grabs
32:34 your attention so i remember intentionally making viral thinking if i get it right i know this is
32:40 going to go viral uh and then we you know edited that and then got that out in time just for
32:45 guru nanak's kutpura back in 2018 and sure enough it went viral and every time something like that
32:51 happens you come back and you learn something more and i'm i'm always looking at what various
32:56 kind of communities are doing what are just various different things that are working online you know
33:03 right down to even you know social media influences you know gary bainer chuck looking at
33:08 his video style game okay he doesn't use in his instagram reels and then telling my editor
33:13 we're going to stop doing thumbnails from now on because that's not adding any value so it's
33:18 just constantly looking at it at who's doing interesting online and then like why can't the
33:24 bunty use that why can't we use those that seem to be working all over the world surely
33:29 if it works there it would work for us so always just kind of looking at outside to see
33:34 what can what what can we bring into into community it's so funny because we do a lot of
33:39 the same similar stuff where we look at like these the most famous people out there who are using
33:43 these type of techniques and we try and model for how could we use it for the month and
33:48 just one thing uh you're very good at doing is getting the message out there but bringing quite
33:53 an emotional response to some some people and know sometimes it is brings a lot of controversy
33:58 over the years but where do you draw the between like clickbait and like giving authentic
34:03 videos and titles and packaging i think different if we look at the early years every
34:08 viral had to be constructed every viral you had to i remember for that very first viral that we
34:14 talked about i was sitting at a one hour lecture and editing that myself and going and just picking out
34:20 what i would do is i would look at the line the entire lectures and go that sentence
34:26 really hit hard that sentence on its own some value in in there like you sometimes
34:31 you have to over explain some things but you hear a single sentence and go that sentence just
34:37 says it all so i would then go and pick all of those and then construct a story within
34:42 that so even though the lecture i might have one thing here and one thing there in the lecture
34:47 in the viral i was like that's a good start gonna start with that so it doesn't have to kind
34:52 of map in the exactly same way and then spending ages looking at music you know which bit do
34:58 you say something where you want to increase the slightly the volume of the music in the background
35:05 and so it really kind of makes that that kind of carry more i understood that there was
35:10 that's how things went viral is that you have understand the emotion behind it even though the
35:15 viewer or the listener won't know that that's what's happening it's kind of you have to do
35:20 that you have to create that emotional response within people. But it's always then to inspire them back to Gurmukh,
35:26 back to what the Bani is actually saying. So in those days, every click, everything was intentional.
35:33 But nowadays, we're in a different world where reels are just being created on a daily basis.
35:39 Back then, we weren't creating many virals. We were just looking at the key good purups and saying,
35:44 which good purup can we make something for? But now you can click things up very quickly.
35:50 So there's a lot less of a decision-making pros and i think that part part of
35:56 the the compromise there was today in order to viral it's not about just taking one thing there's
36:02 no one hit wonder it's about consistency so now create clips on a daily basis and 99 of them
36:08 are amazing sometimes you know the tools that you use you can be using ai tools to be
36:13 creating clips these days sometimes it'll put things and you'll think okay that sounds fine and you
36:18 put it online and it has a totally different to what you'd intended and then you go back
36:22 and you have a meeting with your team and what are the comments saying why did they say
36:27 that how how did we miss that and then constantly learning so what we've learned today is that
36:33 as a team we now are very responsible with every clip that goes out we say if if there's
36:39 any clip that can be taken negatively if there's any clip that can be made where people can get
36:45 the wrong impression we just kill that clip no how much as a team we think oh that's really
36:49 good i really like what we've said in that that if it if if it can be misunderstood we just said
36:53 we just kill it we just cancel it we just it'll never go out but we've had to learn that the hard
36:58 way we've had to learn that from so how did you deal with like because a lot of people
37:02 nowadays making content starting on the journey they get a lot of critique right criticism yeah so how
37:07 do you personally deal with that and like as a team deal with it i tell you i i there was
37:12 a very distinct moment this is going back a few years where Ravi Singh from Khalsa Aid,
37:19 who I've met with many times, I've sat down and spent time with him.
37:24 I've heard his incredible stories and the amount of dedication,
37:28 the amount of things that he's done that the songers don't even know.
37:32 I was sitting across the table and learning from him. And then I would see people criticizing him online.
37:38 And many times I remember seeing this kind of just groups getting together
37:42 and starting to criticize him online. and in the initial years I remember thinking oh
37:47 you know that that'll go away but as he more successful and more famous the criticism
37:54 increased I remember one specific moment where I saw okay this criticism's coming back and and it
37:59 was just a little bit of a light bulb moment for me and I had a team meeting with with
38:04 with my editors and my marketing team and I said i've realized something criticism isn't going to go
38:11 away the more popular you become the more criticism we should expect because at that time we
38:17 were of the mindset oh no like some we done something wrong again the criticism has come and
38:23 we saw that as a negative thing and now realize that that's inevitable i'm not saying that
38:27 it's a positive thing i'm not saying it's that we get that criticism we always learn from it
38:32 we always learn uh what could we have done better what should we have said what shouldn't we have said
38:37 but how should we have edited it so that that that intention that we wanted to to bring
38:43 that video out with um actually gave that rather than than the wrong message but eventually
38:49 i realized that the the more popular you the more your videos get spread and looking at how
38:54 Ravi Singh from Khalsa Aid has dealt with it as well i realized that criticism is has
38:59 to be something that you become comfortable it is always going to be there you can
39:04 just you know humble yourself every time it goes and try to not to make those mistakes again
39:11 but not to somehow be defeated every time every it happens and i think i realized once i
39:17 became comfortable that this is this is something that's going to be there you know gurbani talks about
39:22 ninda as well people are always going to criticize you you know i love this line that if
39:30 you are being criticized you should not reduce your and that's one of the principles that i've
39:39 taken on board like i'm when there's negative i'm never going to go in there just constantly
39:45 try and like like start entering into online in online discussions about these things it's just it's not
39:51 it's not my it's not my way of working and you know one of the things that I
39:56 thought about in those days whenever you know it's you're getting a lot of kind of pushback a
40:02 lot of feedback sometimes you're tempted to go in and start leaving comments and I said to myself
40:08 you know what every day you put a video you get hundreds of positive comments and you've never
40:14 once felt to go and say thank you to people so why when 99% of the Sangat are
40:19 giving you positive responses do you not say anything there but when somebody is saying something bad
40:25 you feel like you have to defend yourself and i had the mentality that if i ever
40:29 want to defend myself against the critics first you to go and say thank you to all the
40:34 people that have actually given you blessings and we so many amazing messages that come on a
40:39 daily basis saying you've changed my life thank for the work that you do and we just kind
40:43 of like brush it off okay thank you you're fine then we move on and i think that's a good thing
40:47 in a way that you don't you don't build an ego about all the positive praise that you're getting
40:52 but then don't build an ego about all the negative praise
40:54 that you're getting as well. Just kind of try and stay
40:57 almost detached from both of them. There's a funny video online
41:00 about how even the golden temple has like one star reviews
41:04 and people complaining despite the golden temple
41:07 feeding so many people. So you can never win.
41:10 It's true. You don't leave reviews
41:14 very often about things that you like but if there's something that you don't like
41:18 then you think I've got to warn everyone I've got to tell everyone
41:20 Right But that's not necessarily
41:21 The right attitude Because
41:23 Why wouldn't you go And praise all the things
41:25 That are good You know
41:27 It's like they say You know
41:28 Bad news Spreads fast
41:30 That's just That's just human nature
41:32 That was amazing And the whole marketing stuff
41:47 Thank you for sharing that because it's cool to see
41:50 just the way it's like you're creating a story
41:52 with the different kind of clips coming together
41:54 and you've done so many things Guru Kipa
41:57 when it comes to Nadakna in terms of different styles of videos
42:00 you know looking at different topics
42:03 maybe like you're saying you've watched other channels
42:05 and thought you know what
42:06 we can do this but put Guru Nanak's message
42:09 on there right and put that spin on it
42:12 so you know let's walk now towards
42:14 the project that we're speaking about so when it comes to Sibi Jakti Sai
42:18 Eight years It's taken you eight years
42:21 To complete this project So
42:23 Just Why Japji Sahib?
42:25 Why did you If you just tell us the background behind
42:28 Why you decided to do this project When it comes to the English
42:31 English translation of Japji Sahib So
42:34 You're right that For me
42:36 I was never Comfortable with just one video format
42:40 I was always looking at What is missing
42:43 That Needs to happen within the Sikh space
42:46 and I remember very early on trying to google Japji Sahib in English on YouTube and
42:55 there have been many translations many web pages that you can read or maybe pdfs that you can
43:00 download on a book format there was almost nothing online even going back five or six
43:06 and you could type in the Quran in English and the whole Quran in English is made as an audio
43:14 for audiobook on on youtube you can type the pavakita in english and it's there you can type
43:20 in the quran in punjabi and it's there and i thought we're missing something in the
43:27 world where if somebody's trying to type in Guru Granth Sahib in English because they're genuinely
43:32 curious about what does sikhi teach why as a community have we not done that so i'm always
43:38 looking at what seva can we do for the community to help spread Sikhi, not just within the Sikh
43:45 world, but even outside. What a tragedy it would be if somebody is genuinely curious about what Gurbani says, but they're not able to find it in a format that they're looking for.
43:55 So in the early days, I decided, having done a full lecture series on Japji Sahib anyway,
44:01 that I wanted to find a way to translate Japji Sahib and put that available online.
44:09 Was you having the same thoughts when you were doing the lectures or was it after this?
44:13 I think that was certainly afterwards. At the time when I was doing the lectures on Japji Sahib,
44:17 the idea was very much that I just wanted to put this in a book format and just kind of have all of the commentary available.
44:25 That's still something I want to do. I was very pleased to have the opportunity to do that,
44:31 say about to bring the commentary of Japji Sahib but I wanted to create a translation of Japji
44:39 Sahib that was available in an audio format and when I would read the existing translations
44:46 English of Japji Sahib they would not go into the kind of depth that the tikas were going
44:52 so I felt that there is so much more to every line of Japji Sahib than the current
44:59 translations were making available. You know, when I was going through the commentary, I was
45:04 looking at tikas like Garb Ganjami Tikka, Kabhi Sattok Singh Ji, looking at Bhai Veer Singh,
45:10 looking at Fareed Kaur Tikka, looking at Gyani Kaur Bachan Singh Prindra Wale. And they go into
45:14 so much depth that there was something missing in the existing English translations of Japji Sahib.
45:20 So I thought, look, I've already done this entire commentary, gone through all these tikas.
45:24 even in doing that i've had to translate every line anyway so i had a full translation by
45:29 time i finished that series anyway that i thought let me try and make this into a format that was
45:34 available online but when i in the early stages what i realized was that the translations
45:40 i had done that was for my benefit that was for me to have a translation of every word and
45:44 it into a sentence but it didn't read very well as almost like a like a barney it didn't read like a
45:50 in a poetic in a poetic form or in a in a even a form that was um made for reading rather
45:58 made for a learner or an interpreter you know i had written down the whole translation
46:02 for myself more as a as a academic or somebody studying it but it didn't read particularly well
46:09 so i thought okay let me go and try and do this and then that's been that sort of eight
46:13 project to try and come up with a version that actually reads well that actually works
46:18 um you know one of the things i always say that if if guru rana pasha was here alive in in a
46:25 form today would he consider creating something in english and i feel like you know if he was
46:32 born and brought up in the uk maybe he would write something in english what could that look like how
46:36 do you keep that message there of course you know one thing i'm always very clear on like who are
46:41 to translate Bani like what what gun do we have that we're gonna we're gonna try and do that but
46:46 it's if you if you go down that line of thinking then you will never do any qurta if you go down
46:52 that level of so much humility that says i don't know anything then basics of sikhi wouldn't exist
46:58 none of that wouldn't exist because you just constantly kind of breaking yourself down to say
47:02 i'm not good enough to even say all this stuff so i think you've had to i've had to kind of overcome
47:06 that a little bit to say even if i know my my own limitations there's still some value that it's
47:12 going to bring the sangha you know there's so many people who grow up listening to japji sahab
47:17 who don't know what it means and these are now people in their 40s 50s 60s i get parents coming
47:22 to me all the time saying i know japji sahab off by heart but my kids are asking me what it means
47:26 and i don't know what to tell them but i just want my kids to learn how to repeat it as well
47:30 and they're saying they don't want to learn that unless they know what it means so
47:35 something there that's kind of missing and i felt let me let me try and put something out there and
47:40 for no other reason even if just anybody from outside various communities around the world are
47:45 able to get translations of all the other grants from the different traditions why shouldn't they
47:50 be able to access Barney as well you know Barney really is for the whole world and I think as
47:54 Sikh community I feel we haven't done enough to actually bring it out to the wider
47:58 well definitely in terms of English resources available within Sikh scriptures is not much
48:05 available right compared to like the Hare Krishnas and so on they've got so much available
48:09 and like you said the main aim
48:11 is to spread the message of Sikhi
48:13 and to bring Gaudi back
48:14 to Sikhi and Guru Bani
48:16 and so far when you look
48:18 at the video it's doing that
48:20 in terms of the comments
48:22 or you know even people
48:23 some of them say stuff like
48:24 I've never read anything like this
48:26 before in English and you know
48:27 when I listen to myself definitely
48:29 the translations are fantastic
48:31 the poetry is amazing as well
48:33 it's you know
48:36 even just researching something
48:38 in an academic way to do this course on it is quite hard but then to take that and turn it to
48:44 poetry that's it makes me feel tired thinking about it so how are you because i think you
48:50 you you four times like you know what made you stick with it you know and not give up because
48:56 you know generally i have a personal rule which i try to take the history of like if i can't
49:01 something three times then maybe it's a sign i'm not going to do again you went to four
49:06 i bet you it's my own personal thing so what made you want to continue after eight years
49:11 well in those eight years to do this project and not think you know what maybe i should do this
49:16 these other things are working for me anyway the youtube channel is working you know good
49:21 to get by you've traveled the world yeah you've done lectures everywhere and they'd be very
49:25 successful why did you stick with this and not just think i'm not going to do it now i think
49:31 there are certain things there are many projects that i've started that i haven't completed and
49:35 i've never seen the light of day but there are certain things where i realized it's still not
49:40 done it's it's still not out there and i feel like i the work that i do is almost work
49:52 needs to exist so i'm very happy if somebody had created a poetic rhyming Japji Sahib out there
50:00 say please everyone read that one like i don't feel like i'm not trying to stamp my own
50:05 or anything like that what I'm looking at
50:08 and saying this still doesn't exist
50:10 and the
50:13 kind of feeling that I have is
50:16 if Guruji has given you some understanding
50:18 don't just sit on it like it's our duty
50:22 as a Sikh you know
50:24 Gurbani is talking about Guru Nanak Dev Ji is giving us
50:32 an instruction there that as a Gursikh
50:34 you have to be somebody who's practicing it
50:36 but also willing to to share that with other people and so if you have an understanding and
50:41 you're just sitting on it i that that i'm not doing justice to it i i can't show my face to my
50:47 guru if i'm not sharing what the guru has given me and that's kind of what's just kept me going
50:53 again and again it's i just look at it and say it's still not there it's still not
50:57 so i was very much of of the the mindset and upai jigara singh was also of that mindset which
51:03 you know just do it now and ask questions later it just needs to be done you know one very
51:09 comment that that got left on on this chapter style video it said is it is this approved
51:14 the sgpc and i thought you know what if somebody had to try and go down that route of trying
51:20 get approval the amount of red tape that you had to go through you'll never get done it will never
51:24 get done eight year right it would be an eight year project trying to get approval i don't
51:29 links with with with the sgpc like i i'm not interested in in trying to do that and you could
51:36 say that about any sikhi project is this approved by them is this approved by them and again
51:42 of these channels would exist no resources would exist if you had to try and go down that
51:46 so i understand what they're trying to say is is is this validated is this authentic can you how do we know that we can trust this and
51:55 for me i say that if if you look at my body of work that i've done before that i feel like
52:02 i've spent enough time with the Bani that i feel i can do this and i at no point do i say it's
52:08 the best at no point do i say that this is the only one that you should be listening to but there
52:13 is you've got to give some credit where somebody's that has done work for for a long time eight
52:19 years was just on this Japji Sahib project but previous to we've you know gone through the entire lecture
52:25 series so there is that you know there's something there and even in the lecture series in
52:30 those i talk about which tikas i'm i'm borrowing from so there's a lot of kind of research that
52:36 goes into it's not just me kind of just sitting one day in my living room going oh let
52:40 me just translate the whole adeptus out and just down any old words that come to screen
52:44 like anybody who's done translation knows there's a huge responsibility that comes with that and every single
52:50 word you got to go about looking at mahan kosh looking at all of these different sources saying
52:54 have i got it right have i translated it right and to do that on a word by word basis
52:59 and then to try and make it rhyme you know that's probably why it took me such a long time but
53:03 i'm very pleased with what we produced at the end and you know you had multiple versions before so
53:08 what went wrong with those that you felt you needed to try again it was more about so
53:13 the the rhyming poetry was probably only came in last version prior to that i was never trying to
53:18 make it rhyme i was just trying to make it make sense like i would read it and say
53:21 does that does that actually make sense does that sound like the bani and what i would do is
53:26 i would give like a completed version to some friends mine and said look if you just had to read this
53:32 one morning you had to get up and you wanted to read jeb jisab in english could you read this and
53:36 the feedback i was getting time and time again was that this is confusing like i'm not able to
53:40 follow it even though it's all in english there's about it didn't flow very well and i felt like oh
53:47 this is why bani is in poetry this is why this wisdom he's written in such a way that you
53:53 feel like carrying on because there's a beauty to it's being said it's not just technically accurate
54:00 it's also poetically beautiful so then you realize how amazing Bani actually is Guru Granth Sahib Ji's
54:08 poetry really is is that it's so clever in how it pulls at your heartstrings but it's also
54:15 teaching you it's also giving you wisdom at the same time how do you create a song that has
54:20 wisdom as well that's what the gurus managed to create you know i think about this this this uh
54:28 people think that these are just songs but the managed to put the highest wisdom in the format
54:36 of a song so what i realized there was that i did in my english translations was going
54:42 to help people if you didn't actually solve that final puzzle which is how do you actually
54:48 make it interesting enough that they feel like want to carry on reading and i think that
54:53 poetic element that beauty element was missing and i before you tried to even approach a poet to help
54:59 you and then what how did that go like yeah it's just a very good friend of mine who
55:03 writes poetry another Gursikh and i remember years ago sitting with him over dinner one day saying i've
55:09 got this project idea i want to do this and he having tried to do some even like
55:14 simple Mool Mantar poetry he said what i've realized there's too many compromises they can't be done
55:21 and i'm just one of those people that take no for an answer like you know i respect
55:26 him for saying look i don't think that you can justice to the bani by having the added
55:34 um difficulty of trying to make it rhyme too many compromises that you have to make and
55:40 and only by going down this process you realize every translation is a compromise translation does mean
55:46 you are going to have to compromise in way or another and then adding poetry there is that
55:51 element there as well so but i think for me the reason i took so long was i didn't i
55:55 didn't want to compromise as much as possible i wasn't trying to do a sloppy job and just quickly get it
56:00 out the idea was once you put it out and i you know this when you make videos once you put
56:05 it out you can't edit it you can't you can it but you can't change what you've said so sort
56:10 some skill like do it take your time and do thoughtfully and you know in the eight years
56:16 you'll be working on this is it eight consistently or was it taking breaks you know how
56:20 did you balance that with the rest of the that you're doing as well yeah so in the
56:25 eight years it's even while i've been doing my work this was just something that a project that i
56:30 would pick up every now and then i would go to it and try and do it you know i remember
56:35 in one of the early years um i remember i think probably about 2017 2018 uh i was invited to a
56:43 camp in canada and i remember the the cap organizer had booked my flight and i remember sitting on
56:51 the plane and it was really weird the plane a very small plane like you know the kind of
56:56 small planes that you take if you're going one hour hours from here this was a small plane and it
57:01 was going to canada and i genuinely thought i was sitting on the wrong flight and then they make
57:05 the announcement oh this is a flight to toronto thought well i'm on the right flight and i sit on
57:09 my seat and there's no tv screen in front of me and i thought this is definitely something i've never
57:13 sat on a plane for an eight hour flight where there's no screen in front of me there's
57:17 no wi-fi or anything like that luckily i had laptop i remember even then sitting on the
57:21 plane thinking right but guruji's giving you an opportunity carry on with your translation so i'd
57:26 be sitting there on the plane just try translate Japji Sahib further and further so any opportunity
57:32 that I had I would go back to it you know there was I'm not trying to suggest
57:36 in any way that I've been working on this for eight years because all the other Nalik
57:40 Nal projects have been happening in the background well well you know with the Alok Alam podcast
57:45 they spoke about you know the theology and they on the kind of methodology of putting together Japji Sahib which again if you touch
57:55 put some of those points for free to um are we able to focus on your devotion to Japji Sahib
58:00 because even then when you're speaking about uh the the poetry and you used to give the other
58:05 translations to your friends and they said it's still not flowing um and then it made you realize
58:11 even how you know another realization of how beautiful goodbani is right uh so talk to
58:17 about that you know over the years when you're working on japji side what has that done for
58:21 because I know this project technically is for everyone else, but what's it done for you yourself as an individual?
58:29 For me, it just makes me fall in love with Bani even more. And I think we're lucky enough
58:38 if we have an understanding of Gurbani that you can listen to Shabbats
58:42 and you can understand what Bani is saying. But I'm one of these people who I still think in English.
58:50 That's my first language. and even today if you see me in the gudar listening
58:54 to keep them i've got my phone out and i'm trying to follow the translation and the way i'm doing
58:59 that it's not because when i'm listening to keith and i'm not generally understanding it but there might
59:04 be one word that i don't get and i want to miss that one word i want to go
59:08 into that and so i'm looking at not necessarily the translations but i'll have sort of professor saip
59:14 singh's breakdown of every word and so i'm oh the shabad is saying this for me i'm i
59:19 always feel like i'm a little bit of a shabad like i'm so excited when i come across a shabad or a
59:27 line or a word that is new to me a new concept and i'm always intrigued how do i learn more
59:35 about this so for jabji sahib there's one of banis that you've been listening your whole life
59:41 from the child you know from childhood that's of the things that most children get taught and to
59:46 hear it now come out in this poetic english way it feels like it just makes you fall in love
59:53 with the bani more you know i feel like we've a version for people who don't have that
59:59 benefit of being able to just understand gurmukhi gurbani from from from the direct language so that
1:00:07 bani that we fall in love with if we're enough to being brought up in a family or
1:00:12 in a background where we can actually listen to Gurmukhi and understand it how do we transfer
1:00:17 that love to other people like we're constantly falling in love with Bani but there are so many
1:00:22 people who are not and and I've I've heard from these people and I feel their pain I can really
1:00:27 feel the pain of a parent coming up to me saying I don't know what what is Bani means but
1:00:32 my whole life I've been I've been taught it so that's kind of what it's done for me like
1:00:36 I it's given me a wonderful sense of satisfaction that i have been able to create something that
1:00:43 i'm able to share the love that i'm feeling the body i'm able to share that with people
1:00:48 who don't necessarily know that so it just kind makes you fall in love with it more and
1:00:53 it's given me so much confidence seeing the feedback that we've gotten that now that the next question a
1:00:59 lot of people are saying is what's the next one what's the next body and i have no idea
1:01:04 like i don't i genuinely haven't thought about the more effort that we would take to translate
1:01:09 [more banis although i probably listed at the] background i probably have about seven or eight more
1:01:13 [banis that i feel like you know this could] be done if if you can do it on what
1:01:17 is arguably a more complicated bhani like Japji Sahib because it's not common punjabi language it's not common easy
1:01:25 words if if we could do it for that [how many more other banis could people benefit]
1:01:31 from that they could that they could learn [to like one of the banis that i absolutely before]
1:01:36 you say can we guess who have a bond please know you go first because i was gonna say i was thinking that's all i was thinking
1:01:45 i'm really surprised that both of you said that because that is the next one that i would love to
1:01:49 salok || is so hard hitting and every time i'm listening to
1:01:56 this i'm just thinking what if other people just listen to this every day it is like the
1:02:01 little two sentence nuggets of wisdom that are just so hard-hitting about your life what is
1:02:08 life about why are you wasting your life they're so hard-hitting and it's almost the most
1:02:14 by me i think because it's in that salok format of just two liners i would love to do that
1:02:20 again because i feel like you could very quickly give people gurmukh wisdom in a way that they're
1:02:28 just learning wisdom in a very easy
1:02:31 to digest format. So I would love to do
1:02:32 Suluk Melanova. Anand Sahib
1:02:35 is another beautiful one. Sohila Sahib, of course.
1:02:37 I think definitely, especially when people pass away
1:02:40 and they have the Suluk being sang near the end
1:02:44 on the board. And when you see
1:02:47 the English translations, they're still hard-hitting.
1:02:49 Like I said, they're already quite digestible.
1:02:51 But if it was something a bit more to the,
1:02:53 just there, because we always know
1:02:56 that the English translations can always be better.
1:02:58 So if there's a bit more thought That went into that
1:03:00 I think definitely I can imagine that
1:03:02 You know That would really hit people
1:03:04 So it's good to know You've both got it correct man
1:03:06 Smashed it You know with the
1:03:07 Japji Sahib project Was there any specific
1:03:09 Body or point Where you just thought
1:03:11 That this is Like the most
1:03:13 Inspiring Inspired you've been
1:03:15 Like where you just Put the pen down
1:03:16 You're like I just need to reflect
1:03:17 On this now Yeah
1:03:18 There's a There's a
1:03:20 There's a line that Hits me every time
1:03:23 Which in the Gurmukhi is
1:03:25 and the way i've translated it is just praise and praise without answers to delve like rivers in the ocean that lose
1:03:40 themselves there's something about that poetry that time i hear it i'm like oh i fall in love
1:03:46 with him the idea that you're not going to get all the answers by this methodology praise of that divine
1:03:56 is not going to give you all the download of wisdom about how god is you're never going to be
1:04:02 able to figure out god but the way you need to praise god is the way the river flows into the
1:04:07 ocean to the point at which it once the river goes into the ocean it you can't find the river
1:04:13 anymore that is what praise does for you so i for me there's something about that which again i
1:04:18 think when i was reading Japji Sahib that might not have been the line that stood out to me
1:04:23 but in the translation that's the line that i just back to and just sometimes you just want to pause
1:04:28 and think okay let me just the way the river to the ocean and loses themselves at all
1:04:33 that's there's something it just teaches you something in that have you got your translation memorized as well
1:04:40 no oh no close then you close no no not because then you'd have to sit there and just
1:04:45 do yeah do that when you when it flowed it's your favorite one i was like what are you
1:04:49 going to try if it's called memoirs no i don't think i did that and what about the most difficult
1:04:54 body was there one that you know you had to cut down and come back to there on did
1:04:58 you do in a chronological order did you start it won't go and go to okay now did you kind
1:05:03 of break it up into no definitely did it in in chronological order um and i think it's important
1:05:09 because when you're translating you want to make sure that if a certain word has been translated
1:05:16 a certain way in an earlier barney then later you don't want to just you're not making
1:05:21 up the translation every single line by line so there's in translation there's this idea
1:05:25 of creating a translation dictionary where every word that you've translated you store it somewhere to
1:05:31 see when that word comes up again can i that same translation so while i didn't create a
1:05:36 full kind of glossary like that i would constantly look at any word that's come up and how
1:05:42 have i translated that before so that there's consistency throughout it so definitely did it um from from start
1:05:48 to finish but i think that the area that i struggled with the most is where you're referencing
1:05:56 indig philosophy and then how do you bring out how do you bring out these ideas without
1:06:03 feeling the need to explain it or over explain and then I had to take my cues from
1:06:08 Gurbani like Gurbani doesn't explain things when it references certain things I think for me the one that stands out is this idea of
1:06:15 like how do you explain without then overly explaining what the concept is and I'm when
1:06:22 I'm reading the Bani I'm like well Guruji hasn't explained what is he's just referenced it for the
1:06:28 people who know it they know it so i think there's there's constantly kind of debates that you're
1:06:32 having with yourself which is what do i do with with this idea and then you're going and
1:06:37 and what is this thought though you know what are mahesh gurbani is talking about i was gonna
1:06:43 when i was listening to it the first time it was majority in english and then it got to like
1:06:47 shiva and i was like you you could have translated those to god of destruction or whatever you
1:06:52 didn't and there was must there must have been a thought process that's a thought process
1:06:56 is do you translate everything and then can you translate in a in a succinct way so where
1:07:06 is mention of um the i i use the the idea of Dharam Raj that i just call the king of justice
1:07:14 now you wouldn't necessarily somebody said what is Dharam Raj you wouldn't necessarily say the king
1:07:20 of justice but if you actually take the words Dharam and raj then you have to kind of create it
1:07:25 in a succinct way so in in certain ones i'd leave it as as as the words that are traditional
1:07:32 [Chitr and Gupt i left them in there but Dharam] [Raj i felt like i could give something but Chitr]
1:07:38 [Gupt like how do you how do you translate that] into a single word you know so there are so
1:07:45 times when you're having to question these things i think specifically where gurbani references
1:07:49 indic philosophy and ancient indian ideas and and devi dft and things like that even the word devi
1:07:54 and devta like i couldn't necessarily work out what you know demigod you lose something you
1:08:03 something sometimes just the the translation is just too long and too wordy so i think i early
1:08:09 on i made a decision that certain words i was just going to leave in there you know i think i admire
1:08:13 you different as well yeah um and um you spoke about earlier how you had like a dictionary
1:08:20 the word so before you decide the chapter set project did you do some research into
1:08:26 translations then and kind of learned okay this is a process in what in which you follow in
1:08:32 to do translation work so one of one of my earliest jobs i actually used to work for one of the largest
1:08:37 translation companies in the world in back in my it days so i worked on um their website and so
1:08:44 understood a little bit about the translation process from this is probably 2010 something
1:08:51 like that i was working in in a larger translation company so i had a little bit of understanding of
1:08:57 that but i think with the internet today you can learn anything in any skill and and most of the
1:09:02 time you can download uh translation tools so you start learning well how do other translators do it
1:09:10 then you can very quickly do that. And I think maybe with my sort of tech
1:09:13 or my IT background, I've been very comfortable with the idea
1:09:17 that you can learn anything, right? If you just put your mind to it,
1:09:21 if you do your research, you can find the information out there.
1:09:25 You know, one interesting thing as well is even the fact that you've added music, right?
1:09:28 Because obviously Japji Sahib isn't in any RAG particularly.
1:09:32 So how did you even get to that process of I'm going to choose this music for this?
1:09:36 And I think you've done into four sections, right? yeah so in the early days i said that when
1:09:42 i was trying to find these kind of audio versions english translations online they weren't there i would
1:09:49 again be inspired by what else is out there's a particular version of the bible as
1:09:55 an audiobook online where they make really good of background music and background sound effects and when
1:10:03 i heard it i mean the audio quality was so well the production value of that was so high
1:10:09 i just knew i wanted to do something of that of quality at one point i even played with
1:10:15 the idea of having sound effects so when malaj oceans or mentions this or that could we actually
1:10:21 hear those sounds in the background i played with that idea as well um and so for me the the
1:10:26 idea that the whole Japji Sahib as a piece of audio had to be an experience that you were kind of
1:10:34 gaining i suppose it goes back to what we were doing with the virals it was learning that
1:10:39 you could say something impactful but if you added music behind it it would just lift it so
1:10:44 much more i think it was some of that same of thinking that you can create versions that are
1:10:50 with no music in the background and you would miss something but if you could play with music
1:10:55 in the background then it would just elevate that and again the listener wouldn't necessarily know why
1:11:00 is it having this transformative effect and i think there's a reason why even if we don't have
1:11:06 a rag to Japji Sahib even if you're doing it home you do put a bit of a melody
1:11:10 to even when you're reading it quietly to yourself it's got a cadence it's got a rhythm to it
1:11:15 you might actually sing it and you know there are so many versions of Japji Sahib that are
1:11:20 sung online and they're beautiful you know listen that sung online you know what things i love when
1:11:25 you when you go to sikhi camps and it's time there last time they actually sing it together
1:11:30 with a vajra it's so beautiful because then whole song that really kind of get gets in gets
1:11:35 behind it so there is so much power in adding music to that that i just listening to
1:11:40 various examples of different kind of scriptures online i would hear and i thought yeah that's a format that i wanted that i wanted to use
1:11:48 And even the Q&A aspect as well, in terms of asking the question and giving the answer through the Bodhi as well. Where did that come from? Because some people may think that you made that up,
1:11:59 but that's not the case, right? Yeah. So if you look at all of the Tikkas of Japji Sahib,
1:12:05 when we say Tikka, what we mean is these commentaries by very well-respected [scholars of Sikh philosophy of Gurbani.] they have written commentaries explanations of Japji
1:12:19 Sahib and almost all of them agree Japji Sahib is actually Guru Nanak Dev
1:12:25 Ji's answers to various questions and when explaining Japji Sahib in those tikas in
1:12:30 those commentaries they actually write questions down and say almost as though and then Guru Ji
1:12:36 was asked this question and then he gave this as the answer so the idea that japji sahib is
1:12:44 a q a is a very well uh accepted idea within the kind of scholarly uh world and for
1:12:52 me when i was giving my earlier versions of sahib translated to my friends they were saying they
1:12:58 weren't able to to follow the the format and i thought maybe it's because one verse going to
1:13:04 a one topic and then going to another topic going to another topic is something that they're
1:13:09 just not they're not comfortable with that they're not they're not able to follow it and i
1:13:13 think there are other bhanis like anand saav for that does seem to have a bit of a flow
1:13:18 whereas Japji Sahib is written in such a way that it's tackling such complicated issues and it's doing
1:13:24 it in a very succinct way that the does when you read the translation feel like it's
1:13:28 going from one subject to another to another like what does sunia the listening verses have to do
1:13:33 the mania and then it goes on to the verses like there are so many different
1:13:38 although poetically it's beautiful when people are the translations they were saying to me and i don't
1:13:42 get it i can't i can't even finish it because i'm not able to follow it so i thought well
1:13:46 if all the commentaries have got these questions in there could i add a question in there and the way that
1:13:52 we try to make it clear that the question is not in the bani is that we use the different
1:13:57 voice so there's a female voice asking the question and then and then we've actually put the question
1:14:02 on screen but when the bani is coming out English we've actually put the lines of Japji Sahib
1:14:07 so it's very clear that the question is just like an aid to help you understand what Japji Sahib
1:14:12 is which is a Q&A Guru Nanak Dev Ji's answers in all of his Udasis in all of his travels
1:14:18 around the world his answers to some of the most technically complicated questions and some of the
1:14:23 most deeper spiritual questions Guru Ji has that all in Japji Sahib. Well definitely it comes of course as very engaging I remember when I was
1:14:30 speech in lots of about as well but i can imagine somebody sitting down when they're reading this
1:14:35 but they're fully able to engage with sivijapti song and it almost it becomes like a
1:14:41 yeah when you're listening to meditation kind of thing and i feel like Bani is a meditation yeah
1:14:47 Bani is meditation, Bani is introspection it's not i've just never been a fan of this idea that
1:14:54 Bani is something that you do because it's something you have to do it's not just a tick
1:15:00 in the box exercise it really should be every time you read bani every time you listen to
1:15:05 it should be an experience i think that's why bani was written in people's common languages
1:15:11 i don't think people necessarily appreciate that because if you've been born and brought up with
1:15:15 sikhi you're just hearing it and you just think it is what it is but i think the gurus made a lot
1:15:20 of effort to write bani's in various languages for no other reason that people actually understood
1:15:26 what was being said so i feel like bani should be understood it should be something that you
1:15:32 really savor and take in so if bani is an experience if it is a meditation if that it is
1:15:39 your communication with the divine what would it feel like if the bani is the guru and the guru is
1:15:45 the bani that's your connection that's your conversation right there it's not
1:15:51 that the guru told you to do it's not an exercise that you have to do it's something where the
1:15:55 guru saying sit down let's talk that's that's that's I that's how I communicate with Gurbani
1:16:02 myself so I wanted to share that feeling and I just feel like you we've unfortunately got into
1:16:09 the position where there are people who just want to finish one I remember once I was at an event
1:16:15 and somebody had said to me I can do Japji Sahib in nine minutes and I was taken aback by that and
1:16:23 And my honest response was I would never want to do Japji Sahib in nine minutes. I don't want to finish it that quickly.
1:16:29 If I sit and do Japji Sahib, I am happy for it to take me 45 minutes because there's something in there and I'm enjoying it
1:16:36 and I'm learning from it, you know. So, you know, Gurbani has said time and time again,
1:16:42 just reading isn't alone. You know,
1:16:44 What is the point of reading all these scriptures? if you're just going to let it wash over you,
1:16:55 if it isn't going to bring you a stillness, Gurbani is openly challenging the idea that you're
1:17:00 just going to read it because it's something you've been convinced that it needs to be done.
1:17:05 No, the Bani itself is your conversation with the Guru. That is the transformation. The time that you're going to give to actually transform
1:17:12 your life is there when you're reading it. So it's really important. I feel that people
1:17:15 understand what they're doing and it really becomes a transformative experience every
1:17:21 you do it and outside of youtube comments and social media are there any examples that
1:17:26 seen or sung that i know closely that i've used this translation i mean it's only been out for a
1:17:32 week now we literally launched it last week on on thursday last week so it's been um a
1:17:39 response online but most of the response has either been what i've read on on comments
1:17:44 actually just people reaching out to me that i haven't heard in a long time on whatsapp and
1:17:48 saying you know this is amazing well done or it's a really beautiful thing and you know i'm
1:17:52 it with all my friends so i'm starting to hear from various kind of sources that people are
1:17:57 uh gaining value from it and i feel blessed i feel humbled that you know i've i've had
1:18:04 opportunity to to to bring this and present this to the sun that you know it gives you a lot
1:18:10 confidence that when you do put all of your heart and soul and your love into something that it is
1:18:14 something that is something that are gaining value for and however if you don't mind speaking
1:18:20 your family as well in terms of balancing this work the the devotional aspect of you know going
1:18:27 there many hours traveling as well doing other projects um how do you find that time to balance
1:18:33 doing all this stuff and still being you know a family man your father being a husband and so on
1:18:40 as well um that's a really good question actually for me i'm really really fortunate that nanak nam
1:18:46 has for a number of years been my full-time job so it's what i do monday to friday and because it's my full-time work i treat it like my
1:18:56 job like it's a nine to five thing that i do you know i have a team we all log on
1:19:02 we're all working from home you know you have your you have your work but because i'm able to
1:19:07 dedicate my monday to friday to it i'm also to switch off at 5 p.m and say okay my work
1:19:12 is done and then i can go and spend time with family so it's not something that i do on the
1:19:18 side it's not something that i do on the evenings weekends and i think that is very important that you
1:19:25 are having a i mean i don't want to call a work-life balance but that's probably the best phrase
1:19:31 that that i can think of because this is not this is not work what do you do yeah this
1:19:35 is it's a labor of love it's a passion it's a um but it's very it's very i'm very fortunate that i
1:19:42 get get to do this as a job as my knight defied and the other way that i balance it
1:19:48 is whenever i travel abroad um i people have so many times why did you come and spend three
1:19:53 months here or come and spend a few months here like you could we'll give you we'll give you what
1:19:57 you need to go and just do prachar in this for a number of months and my response is always i
1:20:03 have a family i have young kids so i usually will never travel more than two weeks two weeks is
1:20:09 my limit i'll go and then i'll come back you know i'm still doing the school drop-offs
1:20:14 every now and then especially when my kids younger you know i'd be dropping them to school
1:20:18 picking them up from school making sure that when they come home from school they've got a dinner
1:20:23 on their plate because if i work from home some of that responsibility work is on me um so
1:20:29 i'm very much aware that i'm a key member of family diamond dynamic so i don't want to
1:20:36 put unnecessary pressure on my wife who's also and she doesn't work from home and then she's
1:20:41 having to do the cooking and the cleaning and all those things if i ever travel it's for two
1:20:46 weeks max and i and i understand that's a limitation while my kids are young and when they grow
1:20:52 up i'm sure that you know it'll open up opportunities when when they don't want to spend any
1:20:57 more time with mom and dad you know they need us anymore so it kind of opens that up
1:21:02 so i'm very comfortable with knowing that this is a limitation for this phase in my life and
1:21:08 you know it's really interesting you mentioned a about the whole nine to five because um if
1:21:13 you don't mind touching upon the topic of i religious guilt um in terms of because um i
1:21:17 know there's something that i've struggled with for a very long time and people that i've worked with
1:21:23 closely the idea of you know because we do as a as a job some gets support some gets
1:21:28 you know donations you know we do feel that pressure that we feel like we have to over work work more
1:21:36 hours and stuff but it can and it has become very unhealthy why and then it can start to you
1:21:42 know affect your health and stuff so what would say to even advice to me or to other people
1:21:48 in the future because i think now prachar is to people investing in prachar guru karas guru kirpa
1:21:53 investing in prachar just quick shout out to kamili goddara for giving us this space as well for
1:21:59 free to do this podcast um but how do you manage that way you don't almost put your own
1:22:04 health on the line because we are going to about longevity as well um and keep that
1:22:09 work-life balance you know look after family because last thing we want and advice that goddesses are
1:22:13 giving to me is that the last thing you is to have any sort of resentment
1:22:17 because you've literally killed your burnout.
1:22:21 Burnout happens a lot as well. So how do you manage that
1:22:24 and what advice would you give to other people
1:22:26 when it comes to that? Maybe it was just me
1:22:28 and my sort of lazy approach that I said,
1:22:29 I think I'm just going to do as a nine to five.
1:22:31 I come from a corporate background. I know what it's like
1:22:34 to work in a job nine to five and then thank you very much.
1:22:37 You know, last meeting on a Friday and then you enjoy your weekend.
1:22:40 And even as someone who is a public speaker on Protarik,
1:22:44 it does bleed into your weekends at times there are many saturdays that that you've gone and done
1:22:49 programs abroad and travel abroad you know if you're if you're engaging with the sun that
1:22:53 pretty much doing it on on the weekends or you're doing it on the evening so there is that kind
1:22:58 compromise but for me i feel like i'm not one of those like go-getters that i just constantly
1:23:05 work work that's that's not me and i don't work in that way but i i genuinely mean no disrespect
1:23:10 to anyone who who does work in that way i'm just not motivated that way i'm i'm a bit more of a
1:23:15 layback say jay say jay take your time kind of person um and i think that's kind of just been
1:23:21 my approach all along and you think it helps you keep a routine as well because you're kind
1:23:26 fixed in what you're doing because i love a lot of good success token to the travel a lot it
1:23:31 that they can't keep a routine again if you're going to different countries um you're awake
1:23:36 then things like amritvilla it's all it's just it's in the proofs in the pudding you can't do
1:23:43 a lot of things consistently because unfortunately you have no consistent routine yeah it's
1:23:48 completely true and i and i found as i as i've gotten older that jet lag now affects me way
1:23:54 than it did 10 years ago so i know that as amazing as it is that we get to travel and do the work
1:24:00 we do that it does have an impact it does have an impact on your routine it has an impact
1:24:05 on your health so you want to keep it at a slow and steady pace rather than a fast pace so you
1:24:12 want to kind of do it at a certain pace where you're comfortable doing it and I think I would
1:24:17 not at this stage of my life when I have smaller kids I think that stability that I had growing
1:24:25 as kind of in my family like my family we grew up very fortunately that we always had dinner on
1:24:31 table every day and we always sat around the dinner table as a family we weren't one of
1:24:35 that everybody just eats dinner whenever they come home we were one of the families that we sat
1:24:40 and that was a time when myself my sister my parents we would talk we would talk about
1:24:45 going on in each other's lives like i grew up with that stability and i want to give that routine
1:24:50 that stability to my family as well i we we try to have dinner on the on the dining table you know
1:24:55 no tv is on let's talk about it like how was your day what are you going through what's happening
1:25:00 or what's happening in the world that we can talk about as as family so that's the stability that i
1:25:05 grew up with and i i think i i've been i've been kind of trying to recreate that for my own family
1:25:12 as well i think there's just something really important about children growing up in a stable
1:25:16 family household so i'm going over my own conversation i'm just a bit on that about
1:25:22 i know you've done quite a bit of work on relationships in sikhi with benji as well of BG doing that I'm not sure she's done
1:25:31 much on parenting have you done much on parenting bringing up kids is that something you're looking to
1:25:36 do more in the future I actually haven't and it's certainly been a topic but again if I'm being
1:25:41 quite raw and quite honest I don't think I'm a great parent I think I make mistakes every day
1:25:49 I still have frustrations with my kid and with kids and i question myself every time you you
1:25:56 know you raise your voice every time you get frustrated then you're like oh well you sit on
1:26:00 stages and you say all these amazing things but you still get frustrated at home and it's a real
1:26:05 one of the best things about family life is that it humbles you very quickly because you you can
1:26:12 pretend to be someone spiritual on stages and when you talk really well but in your own family
1:26:18 life if you're not able to control your emotions things like that you still have work to do and
1:26:24 I try whenever I go on stages whenever I do anything and I'm talking I try to tell people
1:26:30 look guys I'm not perfect let me tell you I've fallen let me tell you where this went wrong
1:26:36 in my life so while we did do things with relationships my wife and I have worked a
1:26:41 lot on our relationship and we're constantly using Gurbani and trying to understand each other and
1:26:47 understand what it means to be Gurmat focused parents uh when it comes to parenting it's just
1:26:54 so much harder and i don't feel like whenever thought about doing something to do with parenting i
1:27:00 didn't feel like i was a good enough role that i could sit and talk to people
1:27:05 about parenting because like like the kids are with a relationship once you get into a good
1:27:11 flow with your partner that pretty much sustains itself with children everything changes every couple of years
1:27:19 the children keep changing and all of a sudden the things that were working with your kids
1:27:24 you know two three years ago are now no working so you're having to reinvent who you are as
1:27:29 a parent every time so I just came across that challenge and thought well I thought I had this fixed
1:27:34 you know I thought that we had we were good as a family but now my kids are teenagers so now
1:27:38 I deal with them in a different way and now my eldest is i don't even see him as a teenager he's
1:27:43 almost like a young man and now i'm having to deal with it in a different way i can't almost put
1:27:49 on my loud daddy voice and tell him to do because he's taller than me so he's he's no longer
1:27:54 i'm no longer speaking to a child that will just kind of listen to me he's more like another man
1:28:01 in the in the house so as a parent you're having to reinvent the kind of parent that you
1:28:06 are and it's been such a fascinating thing to watch just what your journey is like as a father
1:28:11 as a parent that i don't feel like i've got anything worked out yet that i can then go and do
1:28:17 a course on it the other the other element to it is i don't feel like gurbani has a lot
1:28:23 of parenting advice there are some elements in there about you know a mother who raises a a
1:28:29 child who's focused on the divine like there are mentions in there but Guru Granth Sahib is not
1:28:36 a parenting manual so I also don't want to make it up as I go along I don't want
1:28:42 to create content and say that this is Gurmat based if it's not there like it would be the same thing
1:28:49 if somebody said to me make a video series on how to run a successful business based on Gurbani I
1:28:54 don't think Gurbani is focused on that that's not what it's trying to teach you so what is Gurbani
1:28:59 talking about I feel like if I came across these amazing parenting shabbat i would maybe do a talk
1:29:04 about it but i don't think gurbani is a manual it's not a how to run your business
1:29:09 manual so you can't just kind of superimpose like you're being inauthentic to what bani really is and
1:29:15 i think for me one thing i've always tried do is what is gurbani saying let the bani actually
1:29:20 lead let the bani actually decide and for me the way i decide to make content is i'll just
1:29:24 come across a shabbat and thought wow i didn't didn't even know that that was covered let's bring that
1:29:29 to the circuit i'm sorry just to go a bit further with that um pressure is there is there
1:29:35 is like you said earlier when we spoke about of getting feedback and criticism the more popular you
1:29:42 become with the same thing you're best to do how is that pressure on your kids go to school
1:29:48 did it oh he's not an arm's dad rpg as you know they're the wife she's on the videos as
1:29:53 well how do you manage that is that okay or You know, when you go to Sikhi camps,
1:29:57 you know, sometimes they compare us and like, well, you're the son of,
1:30:00 you know, Nanak Naam, so you should be at this level
1:30:03 or this kind of stuff. Right.
1:30:04 If you don't mind. No, that's brilliant.
1:30:07 I'm really interested. You've asked that kind of angle.
1:30:10 One of the things I've tried to do is I've tried to keep my children
1:30:12 away from the Nanak Naam channel. Like, you don't see what their faces are.
1:30:18 I don't think they're rarely probably even mention their names.
1:30:21 So I try to sort of shield them from some of the criticism
1:30:25 that i might experience online uh and similarly like my like my wife her meat she doesn't get
1:30:31 a lot of uh criticism herself because she's not that so active in in creating content
1:30:39 i try to tell her as much as possible you've got some amazing views people would love to hear from
1:30:43 your perspective so she is slowly slowly kind of um getting more opportunities to kind of
1:30:49 content online with with me but with the kids i think they they're pretty much being born and
1:30:57 brought up with seeing their father as somebody who's on social media so much so that i don't
1:31:02 think it really they don't get what what nanagnam is they don't really get what uh kind of
1:31:08 uh we get online for them it's like that's just dad that's not really somebody special
1:31:15 the only time that they recognize that there's there's something to what i do is when i when
1:31:21 you're out about on the street and you get stopped and you get recognized and people
1:31:24 you know i i seen you in channel can i get a selfie with you or whatever that that happens
1:31:29 but again that's been happening for their life most of their lives so they just pretty
1:31:33 know that that's this part of the world i think they know but they don't they don't let it kind
1:31:38 of it's not something that they that they process very much um but certainly when um one or
1:31:44 kind of times have been when when there is a heavy criticism on something that we've said online
1:31:49 i think one time was when they they started hearing it in school they were like why did
1:31:54 your dad say that and this and that the other i think that was that was for me a bit of a
1:31:58 call that says i really have to be responsible what i say for nothing else but i don't i want
1:32:03 to shield my kids from from this i don't want them to to live in my shadow uh in that way nor
1:32:09 do i want them to have to defend what i'm saying even though i stand by everything that i say
1:32:13 Sometimes it's just how you edit something Sometimes how you put it out
1:32:16 Or even sometimes how you say it And you phrase things
1:32:19 And they're amazing Because one of the things
1:32:24 We've been very fortunate to do is Every morning before they go to school
1:32:28 We have this time in Malaj's room That we have at home
1:32:31 We're very blessed So every day before they go to school
1:32:35 We spend half an hour Before they go on their school bus
1:32:38 And we go through the Hukam Nama We go through Sakhis
1:32:41 We go through Qa'i Qudas We go through
1:32:43 We'll go through different things So that they are really well
1:32:48 Equipped with this knowledge So some of the times when they
1:32:52 Themselves have kind of Been questioned on some of my views
1:32:56 They can kind of answer it themselves You know they've been brought up in
1:33:00 This and they say no actually Gurbani says this
1:33:03 Or this is the Sikh viewpoint Or this is the philosophy
1:33:07 So you know bringing your kids up with gurmat wisdom is is like that is a
1:33:13 parent's responsibility that is something that you have to do uh you don't just get to outsource it to
1:33:20 your gyani ji in the gurdwara like i've always told like if there's any core audience of my content i
1:33:27 always say it's parents like i want you to take it so that when your kids are asking you something
1:33:33 you you feel like you you know something you don't just feel like oh let's let's ask energy in
1:33:38 the gurdwara no what feel confident that you can that you can interrogate gurbani yourself start
1:33:44 reading gurbani even if you're just reading translations start having a regular practice with gurbani
1:33:50 for you for your children so that you're you're well versed in what your guru is teaching
1:33:54 otherwise how are you a student of your guru if you're not actually directly engaging with the
1:33:59 bani and even if that's with english translations I always encourage people
1:34:03 Use it They're really good
1:34:05 You know Like I would say
1:34:07 They're about 90 to 95% accurate They're good enough
1:34:10 For you to learn Rather than feel like
1:34:13 You never want to access the Bani And so I try and encourage parents
1:34:16 As much as possible Make sure that you understand
1:34:20 What the Bani is saying Teach your kids
1:34:21 [Show them Shabads] You know
1:34:23 When a Hukam Nama comes Don't just read the Hukam Nama
1:34:25 And just assume That the kids are going to understand it
1:34:28 Most of the time they're not Go through it
1:34:30 If you don't know what it means Just say with your kids
1:34:32 Kids what do we think Dishaabad means
1:34:34 What does this line mean What does Guru mean
1:34:36 When he wants us to do this Or think like this
1:34:39 It goes back to like How you were kind of raised
1:34:42 Going to Sikhi camps And you had that foundation
1:34:44 In like having Sangat Have learning Sikhi
1:34:47 Ithiyas and all that stuff And even like the importance
1:34:50 Of having Sikhi Swaroop And I like
1:34:52 How have you found that Teaching the kids
1:34:54 In that kind of format Of having a Sikhi Swaroop
1:34:57 Wearing the star And Dari and all that
1:34:58 So I remember as a child going to school going to primary school and being the
1:35:04 only child with a with a patka at the time with long hair at the time with a turban of any
1:35:10 sort so i know what it's like to be the only that stands out and with that it sounds
1:35:17 really corny but with that there's a real even as a child you know that you represent something you might not know what it is
1:35:27 and you might just when somebody says what's that thing on your head and you just say oh it's my
1:35:31 religion even that you know that you're carrying your religion as as a representative that everybody
1:35:37 who's looking at you doesn't just look at you they look at your whole religion they look at
1:35:41 entire community when you do something so i have had that experience going to schools where i was
1:35:48 the only kid in a with a patka so i know that experience so i see the value of how that kind
1:35:57 it keeps you in line i remember as as a teenager you know my friends my mates who who didn't
1:36:05 kids or who weren't of the sick background getting up to all sorts of things you know and i just
1:36:12 that i was never going to be tempted to do those things because i'm like that's not that's not who i am you know i remember probably
1:36:18 never even walked into a pub until the age of about 20 and even then you only do it
1:36:24 at work because after work on a friday they're oh we're going for after work drinks and
1:36:29 you're standing there with your cherry coke or it is that you're that you're trying to know um
1:36:34 like up to the age of about 20 i would would step into a pub not that i thought that i
1:36:38 was gonna drink but i was like no that's not where a gursikh stands that's not where a gursikh
1:36:42 belongs so you kind of you're carrying your identity and what an amazing uh self-regulation tool
1:36:48 maharaj has given us gusab has given us that you are self-regulating just by the fact
1:36:53 that you know that you are a representative It's like you're walking Nishansad for your community, for your faith.
1:37:02 And why wouldn't we give that to our kids? So even though you're not teaching them necessarily anything,
1:37:07 you are at least giving them that responsibility that you represent something bigger.
1:37:12 Not just your parents, not just your family, your extended family. You represent Guru Nanak.
1:37:18 You represent Gokul Vincenti. You know earlier you touched upon the time you have in the morning
1:37:24 with the kids where you're looking at the Okan on the side. And you mentioned it probably a few times throughout the podcast about the emphasis on Gurbani,
1:37:33 which of course, Bani is Guru, Guru is Bani. And I can appreciate the element of when it comes to history,
1:37:39 when we bought up, that's all we were told. But, you know, kind of the main message of why we're here, what we're here to accomplish,
1:37:46 what Guru Saji tells us again and again to do in Gurbani, which is Namjapo and Bani Paro and Connect. What is your vijaya genuinely at the house
1:37:54 In terms of I'm just assuming
1:37:56 I don't think you're anti at the house at all It seems that your concentration more is on Gurbani
1:38:02 But where do you bring at the house Into your conversations
1:38:05 Do you try to avoid it Or is there a clear space for history
1:38:10 Sikh history Because a lot of our gurus
1:38:12 Sakhya Are at the house right
1:38:15 Yeah Of course Gurbani has background shabads
1:38:17 Why gurus are at the house But where do you kind of sit with that
1:38:21 in terms of Sikh history and then there's Gurbani.
1:38:24 Even though I'm not trying to say they're two separate things,
1:38:26 but we are looking at it through that lens as well.
1:38:28 It's really interesting. For me, when we used to go through
1:38:33 these Shabads with our kids when they were very young,
1:38:37 I remember distinctly one point having this kind of realization
1:38:41 that I was saying names to my kids and they had no idea
1:38:46 who we were talking about. So we would read a Hukam Nama
1:38:49 and today we say, Guru Ram Das Ji today says this
1:38:52 And then tomorrow's Hukam Naam Guru Amar Das Ji says this
1:38:55 And I remember at one point thinking These kids have no idea who that is
1:38:59 Who is Guru Ram Das Ji? Why do we assume that they just know?
1:39:03 So then part of the morning sessions Became going through
1:39:06 Like you get these books With like kids bedtime stories
1:39:10 Series for Where you go through the entire series
1:39:12 Of all the main Sakhis Of each Guru
1:39:16 So I was thinking I remember thinking
1:39:18 I can't just keep teaching them Gurbani because I can't say Guru Nanak says
1:39:22 when they have no image in their head what is
1:39:24 who is this Guru Nanak what did he do
1:39:26 what did he live like where did he live
1:39:27 what was what did he get up to
1:39:29 so it's very important that you give them
1:39:32 that background of who these people were
1:39:35 what did they look like what did they do
1:39:37 when I say look like as in what
1:39:39 what did their their personality look like
1:39:41 what was their characteristics we're not interested
1:39:43 in what they physically sort of look like
1:39:45 it was more about who are they in their day to day
1:39:47 That then when we say Guru Nanak says They're thinking, oh that person
1:39:52 The one who did all these things The one who stood up against his community
1:39:57 When he was given [the Janeu] And said, I don't accept [that Janeu]
1:40:01 Give me something strong Give me something that's never going to break
1:40:04 These are the people that we're talking about And this is the Shabbos that they say
1:40:07 So it was very important for me With my own children to teach them some of that
1:40:12 And again, I had that growing up as a child My mom would be so good at teaching us Japji Sahib
1:40:18 But we had to memorize the names of the Gurus And their wives and their children
1:40:23 We had to learn the Sakhis of all of the Gurus And it wasn't in a structured way with my mom
1:40:30 It was just, okay, today I'm going to tell you this story Today I'm going to tell you this story about Baba Puttaji
1:40:36 Or this story about [Guru Hargobind Ji] And so we just kind of got that overarching kind of understanding
1:40:43 so that it really made you appreciate that these are the role models,
1:40:48 these are whose writings we are bowing down to because they were such role models in their life.
1:40:54 So itihas, especially the guru's lives, is something that I feel like parents
1:40:59 should be teaching to their kids and something we've tried to do.
1:41:02 When it comes to putting that online, what I've tried to do
1:41:06 and what I've always focused on is what is not being done.
1:41:09 yeah and when i i i it's really clear to me very early on when when when i started uh nanak nam
1:41:17 was sitting with one of our charity directors and we had a whiteboard and we were sort of
1:41:22 ideas down about who's our target audience what kind of subjects do we cover what do we do
1:41:26 one of the decisions we made very early on was nanak nam was never going to be in
1:41:32 with anyone we don't see ourselves in competition with any other prachar organization what we see
1:41:38 ourselves as is that the panth is like a jigsaw puzzle and everybody is one piece together we
1:41:45 make the entire picture of the panth so we're not here to step on anybody's toes which is why i
1:41:53 not to even it's some parcharak or somebody says something i never say oh well i disagree with
1:41:58 i'm going to say something else i'm like you do you you do that you that's how you're
1:42:02 your parcha, what are you not saying? I'm going to cover that element of that. So for me, a lot
1:42:09 of katha in the Gurdwara is involving the Guru's stories. And I didn't see a lot of katha that was
1:42:16 more Gurbani Biyakhya, which is really interesting. If you look at the Sikh Rehat Maryada, it talks
1:42:22 about the few things that you're allowed to do on a Gurdwara stage. And it says you're allowed to do
1:42:28 you're allowed to do like a kavi darbar you're you know something that we've kind of lost the
1:42:35 the habit of doing which is people writing poetry we get it somewhat with tarijathas you're allowed to do katha and vyakya
1:42:42 interestingly Sikh Rehat Maryada makes a distinction between katha and vyakya and what I realized was most of
1:42:50 the katha that I grown up with and still I today is very much Katha, which is involving that storytelling,
1:42:57 that element of that. But there's very little Gurbani Biyakhya, which is, I'm not going to do anything else than actually just go
1:43:04 through Guru Granth Sahib. And while the history and the historical context is important, I actually
1:43:10 believe that Guru Granth Sahib is its own dictionary. Like if you don't understand something
1:43:15 in Guru Granth Sahib in one Shabad, you will find another Shabad that explains this. So it's a
1:43:19 self-referencing dictionary so for me you don't have to go to too many other places and
1:43:25 though I may have dipped into reading other Indic sources and reading the Bhagavad Gita and some of
1:43:32 these other things I'm not dipping into that and saying this is how we need to understand the
1:43:36 Shabad because we need to look at what the Bhagavad Gita says like that's how we
1:43:40 this Bani I don't do that I read those things to understand but I feel Guru Granth Sahib is a
1:43:46 perfect self-defining system that all of the concepts in Gurbani are defined on other
1:43:53 and other pages so for me my entire focus is I don't feel like I was seeing enough just Gurbani
1:43:59 which means explanation of the actual Shabbats so that's the that's the gap that I'm going to fill
1:44:05 that's the that's the specialization that I'm going to go down and I openly say when
1:44:10 ask me questions about history I say I'm not the expert on Sikh history please go and speak
1:44:15 other parjareks. You know, people say to me, why haven't you done any Shabbats in Dasambani? And I
1:44:22 say, because I'm not an expert on Dasambani. But there are many other great scholars out there who have done amazing work on, you know, [see Dasam Granth,]
1:44:30 see Saludlugranth Sahib, like go and listen to them. It's not one or the other. You listen to one parjarek for one angle,
1:44:38 and then you listen to another for a completely different angle.
1:44:41 Why should we try to compete with each other i think that's a very unhealthy way to look
1:44:45 at each other in the punt and for me that of seeing the punt as a jigsaw puzzle and everybody
1:44:51 has a part to play i think that's a really way to look at it 100 and it's work with
1:44:55 the japji sahib and non-sahib the asa ki ghar series you've done uh in terms of um the engagement
1:45:03 with this i wanted to bring it back to you mentioned at the start about the way you
1:45:08 used to experience and used to like meditate on trained and stuff and like what was the initial
1:45:13 kind of experience you had would if you don't mind going into that like kind of
1:45:17 spiritual experience yeah no i absolutely don't because i i think whenever you delve into that
1:45:23 question a lot of times people say oh you talk about your experiences or your experiences should
1:45:29 be good and i felt that there was missing now and why is nobody talking about
1:45:33 it either they're not having those experiences or for whatever reason they feel like they shouldn't share
1:45:38 them i can understand that there is a little bit to that because in order to really give
1:45:43 someone an experience what you don't want to do is taint it with yours so you don't want to
1:45:49 say this is what you will experience and whenever i do talk about my own experiences i don't say
1:45:55 like this is the definitive thing that you're going go from this stage and then you're going to go
1:45:59 this stage and this stage i'm not going to say that because then you're then you're looking for that
1:46:03 experience in your mind you know it's like i the example that i give is if i say
1:46:07 that if you go to certain levels within your then you will hear a sound then from the
1:46:12 very beginning you're going to start you'll be going to try to generate that and and unfortunately
1:46:18 if you're not trained your brain can create sorts of hallucinations you can create a sound that
1:46:24 you're like oh i'm at this stage now i hear that sound or if i say you can see
1:46:28 a blue light you'll definitely see a blue light because Because I've suggested the idea, planted the idea in your mind.
1:46:34 So I do understand why people say it's gupt, but I do think that that's created a void
1:46:39 in helping people to understand. So much so that the Sankat almost don't believe
1:46:43 that you're supposed to go and do this introspection. And I get this pushback all the time, especially from the older generation.
1:46:49 They say meditation has nothing to do with Sikhi, and I say, okay, how do you understand
1:46:54 this Shabad? How are you supposed to understand that?
1:47:03 That it's saying that within the sky of your mind there is a flowing river
1:47:07 and you must bathe in that river. And that's where they don't know how to answer that
1:47:12 because they haven't necessarily done that. And I understand that.
1:47:15 But meditation has been so transformative for me. In my early days when I used to just
1:47:20 try and meditate as much as possible, I would sometimes get an experience.
1:47:25 In the very early days you sit And your mind just starts creating visions,
1:47:28 like you're floating in the clouds and all these things.
1:47:30 And I would go back to my mentor and I'd say, look what I experienced in my meditation.
1:47:34 And he'd say, go back, go back, there's more, there's more. Like he wouldn't tell me what to expect, but he would just say, go deeper.
1:47:42 And one of the things that was very interesting for me was I did a meditation for a
1:47:47 of months where I would just observe whatever it is that's coming up and observe to
1:47:56 point at which when something came up i would say okay now i let that go as well so when you sit
1:48:02 within your meditation first things that come up is just noise images sounds duties
1:48:10 that you haven't done like immediate things come up and you say okay i recognize that it's there
1:48:15 and i go deeper what else comes up keep going something else comes up and then eventually if
1:48:20 your daily kind of noise goes then sometimes deep-rooted kind of thoughts that you
1:48:26 thought about for a long time things that you suppressed they come up then i said okay i'll
1:48:32 let that go and i would visualize myself going further deeper and the idea was kurbani
1:48:37 to me oh mind you are the source of the divine light the divine light is within you go and
1:48:46 recognize it recognize what you really are so i'm like this is not me if i could see it as
1:48:51 something that comes up in my mind it's not me so i would sit in meditation and any thought that
1:48:55 [unclear — audio garbled] [unclear — audio garbled]
1:49:01 oh i wonder if my my wife's okay one of my kids okay and you realize oh that's another layer
1:49:08 my attachment i'm attached to my kids i'm attached to my family can i let that go okay i let that go
1:49:14 violet and you almost let it go can you be comfortable and that in that point you're thinking in your meditation can i be comfortable if
1:49:21 i never have to see them again and then notice the fear say okay now fear has come up can
1:49:26 i be okay with letting that go you go deeper and deeper and deeper i remember once practicing this for
1:49:32 a certain amount of time i got to a where i'm like there is nothing more left for me
1:49:38 to let go i sat in the most stillness that ever sat in in the most kind of almost like you're
1:49:44 in a dark cave not in a scary place but just total emptiness and then i realized to myself but i'm
1:49:53 still here what is this with that if i have no thoughts no emotions no nothing but there's something
1:50:00 that i still call me then you go back into gurbani and says that is home i am the
1:50:06 me me did myself that is still there gurbani says [As long as your haumai is there, you can't know what God is.]
1:50:14 And for me, that was a huge realization. Ah, this is the thing that Gurbani is saying to get rid of.
1:50:20 This is the thing. Now you at least know what you're trying to get rid of.
1:50:23 So when Gurbani says, Haumai and the divine name are in conflict with each other.
1:50:34 Both cannot exist in the same space. So when you sit within yourself, ultimately there is an ego there.
1:50:40 There is an I am-ness that is there. As long as that I am-ness is there, you're not experiencing pure Naam.
1:50:48 That was then the point at which I was like, okay, now how do we use Naam? Now you have something that you know.
1:50:54 It's like when you've opened that door in your room, you've seen what the obstacle is.
1:50:58 Now you're like, okay, that's the thing that we're working on. So Naam then now starts to work on.
1:51:04 Once you've actually known what your ego actually is, then you can know, okay, this is the obstacle that i have never been able
1:51:13 to no matter then how much part you've done how beautiful you're the mala is what an amazing
1:51:18 banner that you wear how nicely you're able sit on stage and sing keithan if you don't
1:51:23 know this about yourself like what is your ego all those things are not able to actually penetrate
1:51:28 that deep because you can just build another ego oh i'm a great keithani i'm a great this i'm great
1:51:34 pracharak or i do this or even if you don't think that if you don't actually know what your ego
1:51:39 is you're still functioning at a level where you haven't really tapped into the ultimate thing and
1:51:43 gurbani is saying the number one thing that trying to deal with is your ego and i'm encouraging
1:51:49 people what is your ego do you know do you have you spent any time with it how are you
1:51:53 going to get rid of a problem that you don't that you don't know how to do it's like if somebody
1:51:57 says that you've got to you know dig out all the weeds in your garden you say yeah i'm gonna do
1:52:01 it but i'm never gonna go to the garden i'm going to go there and actually even look at the
1:52:05 weeds then how are you going to get rid of well i'll just sit here and read a book about how
1:52:09 to how to take all the weeds out of my garden no you this is the life that you have to do
1:52:14 this is what like the sadam khand in jyotishad is all about it's all about the stage of which
1:52:20 you're molding and grinding your ego down really the the bani work on you at such a level
1:52:27 where you finally say oh i realize this is not even this is what i could do so that's the kind
1:52:35 of the the steps that i felt that i was able kind of recognize within myself now i'm not saying i've
1:52:42 got gotten rid of my ego my ego is here you know shining brightly my ego is here all the
1:52:48 time it comes back but at least i've had a that oh there's that you still haven't dealt with that
1:52:54 right no matter how how good you look on the outside that's still there so every day you're
1:52:59 humbled by bani every day your bani is you something new a new lesson i think
1:53:04 how compassionate the guru is that the guru you the one lesson again and again again in
1:53:10 so many different ways i remember the early days when i was reading gurbani and i was saying
1:53:15 it's the same the same stuff all the time it's the same message all the time why do i
1:53:20 give me something new but no that's why because the the obstacle of trying to break your ego
1:53:28 is the ultimate issue and gurbani is so that every day the Guru is giving you a different analogy
1:53:34 and a different example so that it can work on you. And slowly, with Guru's blessing,
1:53:39 that can actually start having an impact on you. So I'm always encouraging people, sit, try meditation.
1:53:45 And when I say meditation, I don't mean, you know, close one nose and visualize this and visualize doing this
1:53:52 or trying to raise your kundalini and all these sorts of things. For me, these are very superficial layers
1:53:57 of just trying to visualize something, to trying to get experiences.
1:54:05 I'm not interested in experiences. If there is you to experience something,
1:54:09 then you haven't destroyed your ego. The experiencer is the one that we need to deal with.
1:54:15 And that kind of work is why when I started to do workshops, I would make sure that there's an element of just saying,
1:54:21 okay, guys, enough talking. Let's actually do this.
1:54:24 I think we were one of the first ones on our channel to do a guided meditation based on Guru Mahatma's principles.
1:54:30 Again, I felt like it was something that wasn't missing. But is it something new?
1:54:34 No, the Nirmalay have been doing that for a very long time. But they're just keeping it in their own circles.
1:54:41 Even Baba Isha Singh Ji, they wrote like techniques of meditation and how to connect to Naam as well.
1:54:46 So it's been there in the Sampradayas, but it's just maybe the access wasn't there.
1:54:50 It's not there in the Gurdwaras, right? It's not there in the everyday.
1:54:53 And I never claim that I'm an expert. and i never tried to i'm i'm trying to be
1:54:58 as honest as possible guys this is just working for me and i think you need to have it it's
1:55:04 like if you've tasted a really good you know chocolate or something and you say look have you tried
1:55:09 this why haven't you tried this yet sounds like we can't it's it's interesting because uh we just
1:55:14 released a video by jogar singh recently like a lecture series he did at university and in there he's
1:55:20 like why did no one tell me that you could experience this and he's like he just felt like he
1:55:24 had to go to the god and shake someone be you can experience this but obviously with him that
1:55:29 was his kind of way of doing and he you see in a lot of his videos he used
1:55:33 to talk about this is beyond any drug any feeling any temporary feeling you could have and you
1:55:38 could really see that he had experienced that and that authenticity it came through and i
1:55:42 think that's what made it so relatable and connected to and he just wants to share
1:55:46 that yeah and just say look guys there's here that we haven't heard about and nobody's
1:55:50 talking about it but we need somebody needs talk about it i think that's that's so powerful
1:55:55 that we break away from that old idea that you don't share this you don't talk about it you
1:56:00 keep your nonsense and go how is that helping i don't know maybe there's a technique there that
1:56:05 i'm not understanding but i didn't see the in that i was like if you don't share it with
1:56:09 me how am i supposed to know you know there's there's there's only so much that you can read about this
1:56:14 at some point someone needs to sit you down and say okay try this and you know just touching a
1:56:18 bit more on bhai jagraj singh we mentioned at the start you went to the same school together you
1:56:23 knew him before he was even interested so what was that like so he was uh we both went to
1:56:28 lambton school he was two years older than me and we in the year where everybody has a brother or
1:56:35 sister and two years older than you and so kind of knew people in the years above us and yeah
1:56:41 i knew jagraj singh he was in the same year as as my sister i remember them um studying together for a
1:56:48 levels and kind of do kind of we he was he would come around our house he lived you know not
1:56:55 too far away from from our homes or we i walk down to his house sometimes sometimes he
1:56:59 would come around our hours and i remember distinct point where one day he just showed up and
1:57:04 he was you know a gorsik and i'm like where that come from you know what's happened and then he
1:57:10 would you tell us you know what he's been going through and you know how he's you know experienced
1:57:15 Sikhi camps how he's been reading all these books and he's kind of he was a really big
1:57:20 reader so he was a very kind of well-read of our round philosophy and things like that so
1:57:27 we always were in each other's lives you know and I think even then when the the Kili Sangat
1:57:32 started we would be meeting up on a weekly basis when whenever he was there and we kind of our
1:57:38 kids so grew up knowing each other so it was a very interesting thing to see someone go from
1:57:45 almost a clubbing sort of quite a social life to now really just go deep dive into Sikhi
1:57:54 and he very quickly went from adopting Sikhi to becoming a spokesperson for it he was so passionate about
1:58:03 it that he would be at the camps and he remember him being at camps and and other Sikhs who
1:58:08 had been a Sikh or a Kesatari their whole life he'd be like why haven't you taken amrit yet it's
1:58:13 amazing why haven't you taken amrit yet and he was like he was just so kind of passionate about just
1:58:18 telling people look you need to do this so yeah have beautiful fond memories of the book and it's
1:58:25 also very interesting how you both went to the same school and you grew up together and then
1:58:30 you both started your youtube channels as well right yeah just look at that kind of comparison as well
1:58:35 and did you guys speak about that in the kind How do you do it?
1:58:38 He's like, oh, you go YouTube channel. I go YouTube channel and stuff.
1:58:41 Yeah, I remember even when I was trying to set up a non-economical charity and I went up to him and I said, look, I don't know what to do.
1:58:50 Tell me how to set up a charity. And he would advise me.
1:58:53 I remember one time I was working in London and he called me and said, I'm doing a talk at the school dollar.
1:58:59 I don't have any equipment. Can I borrow your camera?
1:59:01 So I remember meeting him in central London, St. Paul's Station. And that's where my office was.
1:59:07 And he came out and I gave him all of my camera equipment. I said, okay, go film this.
1:59:10 So it was kind of, we had a healthy respect for each other. But I think we also, from a very early stage,
1:59:17 knew that he had his message and what he wanted to do with his. And I knew that what I wanted to do with mine.
1:59:23 But on the surface of it might look like two different channels. On the background, we were talking.
1:59:30 I remember, I think only my second lecture on the channel at all was was called um something around uh how to
1:59:38 find happiness and straightaway to barrage came to me and he said that's a really interesting subject
1:59:44 i don't think i've ever thought about titling subject something or other or structuring the whole thing
1:59:48 but he says now that you put put it there of course goodbye is all of us look you
1:59:53 know so we were always in communication with um and had a very healthy kind of respect for what each
1:59:59 other were doing but we knew that we weren't so stepping on each other's toes either and there was
2:00:03 never a sense of competition yeah and like you said before the hajik so now you gave if you don't
2:00:08 mind you always touch upon this but we do you ask these questions for guests that were close to
2:00:14 bhajira singh and spend time around them how their passing for you in terms of how did you
2:00:21 react to that um very much i know you mentioned this idea about how you saw in your kind
2:00:26 of day-to-day working life but you know what impact did that have on you outside of what we
2:00:31 mentioned yeah he's probably one of the closest people in my own life who i've known for a number
2:00:37 of years who then passes away somebody who is my and i think for me the wake-up call for me was
2:00:46 i saw from the day that he told us that he cancer and we heard that he had cancer i
2:00:53 remember when it became public knowledge and i remember other people saying oh have you heard about this i was
2:00:58 like yeah i i know about it but i didn't know it was public knowledge so the day that it
2:01:02 became public knowledge um was around sort of december time and i remember uh i was in canada at the
2:01:09 day that i got the news that he had passed away and i literally just cancelled my plans and i'm
2:01:17 like okay i'm driving a flight back home and want to be back with the sangat with the with
2:01:21 his family with our family and i just literally i on a plane at the time and my one of my
2:01:26 companions who was traveling with me he had data on his and he just said well your glasses passed away
2:01:33 and i quickly just opened my laptop tried to the wi-fi of the plane and just like
2:01:37 okay we're just canceling we're canceling everything and i'm heading back i think the wake-up call for
2:01:43 me was seeing how quickly that happened from the that we had been told about his diagnosis it was
2:01:49 no more than about six or seven months to his passing and the impact that that's had on me is
2:01:56 it's totally shattered the idea that we are we all are going to have a long life that to me was
2:02:04 just right staring me at my face that here is somebody that i knew and now i'm i'm looking at his coffin
2:02:11 like that was like kind of like a rewiring of the brain and from that point onwards i've i've had in
2:02:19 my own life like zero delusion that i i'm gonna have a long life like in my head like i have
2:02:25 a six month life like there's no part of my life that i think of course everybody wants to have
2:02:30 a long life everybody you make plans like if book a holiday sometimes you book a year in
2:02:35 advance there's something at the back of my mind that changed from that point onwards where i'm
2:02:39 like don't ever have this delusion that life is just there for the taking life is a precious
2:02:46 gift and at any moment it can be taken away you and you've seen it now you've seen a family
2:02:54 person who has a wife and children right in front of you go you've seen somebody who you grew
2:03:00 up with went to school with and joked around and hung out with and used to go to the
2:03:04 cinema and go bowling with you've seen that they're no longer here so i think that it became so real
2:03:10 that death is real death is not something that is going to skip you by and i think that to me
2:03:18 is is the biggest impact that it's had thank you for sharing that um before we get to the
2:03:25 final question um of the podcast really nice you kind of mentioned how i go to the cinema
2:03:32 and movies and stuff so outside of Nanak Naam And doing what they say
2:03:36 What do you do For like your
2:03:37 Just chilling out You know
2:03:39 What do you do To just be a
2:03:40 Normal person In the world
2:03:42 If we're going to call it that Do you go to the cinema
2:03:44 Do you like watching movies What are your hobbies
2:03:46 What do you like to do For your time
2:03:48 Yeah I feel like I
2:03:50 Never wanted to present myself [As a Katha Vaachak]
2:03:54 Or somebody You know
2:03:56 One of the earlier videos You see me in
2:03:58 A Baana In the very early stage
2:04:00 Because I love That whole Naanta
2:04:01 That whole Wari Aspect of that
2:04:04 but I realized that that was something that I was putting on as much as I loved it and I
2:04:08 believed in it and all those things I realized that that's not who I am day to day I'm not
2:04:12 somebody that that wore a barna every day it was just something that I was wearing for that
2:04:17 you know you go to Sikhi programs and you put on the barna and all those things I still have a lot
2:04:23 of respect for for all of that but I realized that if I was to share my message with people
2:04:28 I need to present to them my most authentic version and my most authentic version is I am
2:04:33 working guy I'm a family man I'm a dad I'm a man who has the same flaws as any other human being
2:04:41 and I wanted to be as authentic when I presented myself so I do talk to people and when I'm
2:04:49 stage I talk about I have always loved music I grew up listening to all sorts of world
2:04:56 from you know Nusrat Fateh Khan or whether it was the latest kind of you know pop bands or whatever
2:05:01 I've a music that has always been a thing that's that's a really big part of my life and I
2:05:07 now that I've fallen in love with Keith then I tend not to know what's the latest kind of trends
2:05:12 when it comes to music now I probably know more about Keith than that I know about music but I've
2:05:16 never had this conflict because I've not I didn't convert into Sikhi I was just brought up with
2:05:23 so there was never this conflict that you can't live a normal life and also have a spiritual
2:05:29 it was i never had this idea that you have to reject all of them all the fun in the world let's
2:05:34 let's let's put it that way um and only be a serious kind of religious guy and that's
2:05:41 of just the way i was brought up so for me i'm a big food lover you know i don't probably go
2:05:47 the cinema anymore but who who does anymore um but you do watch you know i'm i'm watching
2:05:53 and netflix just yesterday my kids were saying dad we haven't seen the latest avatar i'm
2:05:58 Okay yeah we need to do that You know
2:06:00 It's just simple things like that Like I
2:06:02 For me that Bringing Sikhi
2:06:04 Into your everyday life Is
2:06:07 Something that I think There's a really beautiful way
2:06:11 To pair that And I'm not of the belief
2:06:13 That you have to reject that You know in Sukhmani Sahib
2:06:16 It says Guru Ji is not saying
2:06:20 Don't eat all the different Flavors of food
2:06:22 It's just saying If you are blessed
2:06:23 With all the flavors of food This
2:06:26 Keep that so what is your favorite food yeah what's my favorite food um quite like thai food
2:06:35 kind of feels amazing i i do all the cooking at home as well so i make a quite a good sort
2:06:40 of green curry and a pad thai and things like that and whenever i go to thailand it's
2:06:44 mango rice oh yeah that's really good yeah sticky mango rice that's really good uh i remember seeing
2:06:50 that for the first time and thinking that's a really weird thing he puts rice and and mango
2:06:54 together but the first time i tried it i thought okay these guys are onto something yeah so i love i love good food things like
2:07:01 that yeah i just personally don't have a conflict with with any of those things that's amazing and uh
2:07:07 thank you for sharing that and thank you for just a fantastic guest and just being so open and
2:07:12 speaking of life and you've spoken on um even some of the questions uh try to go very deep
2:07:18 and frankly so open uh to answer them just to the the last that we've spoken about japji
2:07:22 side uh and you know this fantastic project that launched under Guru Kirtipa hopefully so will come
2:07:28 in the future as well uh what other um now we're working with that you just would
2:07:33 like to share with the song then we will links in the description you know to the
2:07:37 Japji Saibang to ISFG channel but anything else want to share in terms of future projects that you
2:07:42 guys are looking to do so one of the projects that we also launched last year was I was always
2:07:48 a fan of how do we bring Keaton to the like I said music is a big part of my
2:07:54 life and again that's another thing that I feel is inaccessible to the wider community so we launched
2:08:00 a project last year called Guru's Voice where unlike translating Gurbani into poetry I translate
2:08:08 Shabad into song lyrics that's quite a style of translation but then I was never a
2:08:15 musician I never had any access to that I'm a good singer and i can't play any instruments so it
2:08:20 was always a desire for me to try and see how do we bring music out of the world so that
2:08:24 people can emotionally connect with the bani so a project that we launched last year [is called Guru's Voice]
2:08:30 where i translate the bani and then we put through software and tools like that to actually create
2:08:35 a sound and a music for that so that's something that i feel like again it's not for
2:08:40 people who listen to kirtan it's for the people who don't listen to kirtan.
2:08:44 I'm always looking at that. One of our sort of mission statement
2:08:49 for our charity is called Taking Gurmat Global.
2:08:52 And I genuinely believe that Gurbani is for the whole world.
2:08:55 This wisdom is for the whole world. But I feel like we may have,
2:09:00 as a community, become quite closed in how we deliver that.
2:09:04 I feel the gurus were more revolutionary in how they delivered wisdom
2:09:08 around the world. And I feel like to some extent
2:09:10 we've become a little bit stagnant and we only do things the way that they're done in the Gurdwara
2:09:14 and we don't empower ourselves the way the Guru has empowered us. You know, the Guru says that you are the Guru Khalsa.
2:09:21 Go out there, go spread this, go do what you can. So I'm always looking at just because something hasn't been done before
2:09:28 doesn't mean it's wrong. It just means nobody's thought about it or nobody wanted to do it.
2:09:32 It's not everyone's cup of tea, but one of the projects that we have is called Guru's Voice
2:09:36 and it's Gurbani in a Western style. and it is specifically for people who may be curious about Sikh wisdom
2:09:45 but have no way to access it and for us the way we access wisdom is through Geethan.
2:09:50 Going forward, this idea of taking Gurmat global is really something that I want to do.
2:09:56 I've seen amazing kind of impact that we've had within the Sikh community and a question that I'm left with is
2:10:05 how do we bring this to the wider world? does it require you to take Sikhi in its current
2:10:12 format all the way out there or can you unpack from some of the practices and the language and
2:10:18 things that are barriers to people coming in and can you bring it in different ways so one of the
2:10:23 things that we want to do is we want to focus podcasts and really take the Sikh message out to
2:10:29 quite large podcasts around the world I don't see many people trying to do that um and i don't
2:10:36 see why not um probably going back about five or years ago like everybody was doing ted talks and
2:10:43 that kind of trend has died now with with but even till today we never had a gursikh on
2:10:48 a ted talk talking about sikhi we had gursikhs on ted talks talking about business or other things
2:10:54 but we had buddhists on ted talks talking buddhism we had hindus on ted talks talking about hinduism
2:11:00 but never sikhi so i had a vision a few years ago i was like let's do that but now kind
2:11:05 of ted talks are dead and now it's all about podcasts so why can't we get gulmat on some of
2:11:11 these major platforms where and it's not against like against the other religions it's not about that if
2:11:19 you look at my jigsaw puzzle analogy it works even on a global scale even it works with
2:11:24 all the other spiritual traditions and religions that are out there sikhi does bring a truth in a different
2:11:30 angle in a different flavor we do we have a different way of of looking at the world
2:11:36 and understanding our connection to god and oneness and all of those things in a way that some
2:11:43 people who may not find it in the other traditions might find it here I don't think Guru Nanak Pasha
2:11:50 ever was trying to be us versus them I don't him doing that Guru Nanak Dev Ji we proudly say
2:11:56 is the Jalatku he would go everywhere and he would sit with people of various traditions and and have
2:12:02 dialogue with them and I feel like we've lost to some extent and I would like to somehow
2:12:08 see Gursikhi Gurmat on some of these major global platforms why isn't there a series based on Sikhi
2:12:16 on Netflix or Amazon Prime and not Sikhi from who are the Sikhs and what's their background
2:12:22 but what is this wisdom what are these what is this you know there was a a
2:12:27 Netflix series a good few years ago ago about why can't we have that you know so for me
2:12:34 it's just exploring those ideas and I feel like that's where my strength lies it just goes back right back
2:12:40 to how I've always done things I look at the and i say i look at the outside world and
2:12:45 say what else could we benefit from what else are we not doing and that makes me
2:12:50 quite a um controversial figure sometimes because look at me and saying what's he doing why does
2:12:58 he do what he does and i genuinely am never anything to bring any kind of disrepute to the
2:13:05 [Panth in any way] like it's genuinely guys we're all working together
2:13:09 just because I'm not doing the same thing
2:13:11 as you doesn't mean
2:13:12 I'm doing something against you
2:13:13 I'm just working on a different audience
2:13:16 on a different focus and you may see me
2:13:19 go and do more weird and wonderful
2:13:21 kind of projects like that
2:13:22 but it's always with the idea
2:13:23 of taking Gurmat Global
2:13:25 taking Guru Nanak Tehiji's message around the world
2:13:27 why if we are
2:13:29 if we are the custodians of this wisdom
2:13:31 if we are the people who are now
2:13:33 carrying Guru Granth Sahib on our heads
2:13:36 why shouldn't we take it all over the world
2:13:37 why shouldn't we take these teachings everywhere so that's kind of how we're looking at it
2:13:42 one of the things i started to do as of last year is how do we get into some of
2:13:47 wellness you know these wellness conferences huge major global conferences never a
2:13:53 representative how do we get a Sikh representative on that and it doesn't have to be me i'm
2:13:58 comfortable with somebody else saying i can do it and i've got it there i'm like go like i would
2:14:03 love in a weird way i would love to retire from this work i actually it's it's not great being
2:14:09 the public eye all the time it's not it's not great that every time you go out you're
2:14:13 looking over your shoulder is somebody gonna stop me although most people stop you and say
2:14:17 wonderful things some left people stop you and they don't like you you know you're always
2:14:21 of looking over your shoulder so i don't i the the element of being recognized wherever you go
2:14:28 is is not something that i i didn't set out to do that that wasn't what i was trying to do and
2:14:33 more than happy when other people are doing projects i would love for people to the
2:14:38 that i have in my head to see somebody else do it i'm like great now that's done we don't i don't
2:14:43 have to do that you know i could do something else so i'm not trying to be the only guy
2:14:49 doing this i'm not trying to be somehow some superstar or some some celebrity like i i don't
2:14:54 like the celebrity kind of element of it if you could call it that you know but i recognize that
2:14:59 our role is that it's strategically viable for us to go this you know um if you look at this
2:15:09 sakhi of of um it comes in in in on prakash about how nabob kapoor singh got his uh navapi
2:15:20 mughal forces at that time realized that they were fighting with the good six with it with the
2:15:25 with the uh khalsa so much and they realized that this is not a good strategy we we
2:15:30 fighting with them we think we've defeated them then the Khalsa keep coming back and they
2:15:34 up with a new strategy and they said why don't we work with them why don't we give them a
2:15:39 kingship in one area and the Khalsa get together and they're sitting around a circle and
2:15:43 saying that we've been offered this Nabapi we've been offered to be you know a a lord let's
2:15:49 it and of a certain area of land uh and they're all going around in a circle and they're saying
2:15:54 [unclear — audio garbled] [unclear — audio garbled]
2:15:57 I can't do that, that seva But they recognised that it was important
2:16:01 First they were discussing Should we do this or should we not?
2:16:04 We've been fighting with these guys Should we do this?
2:16:06 And they recognised it was strategically important For us to actually have a seat on that table
2:16:10 And in the end they came to Kapoor Singh And they said
2:16:14 [You're going to become the Nawab] And he said
2:16:19 No, I'm nobody His seva was to do
2:16:21 Bakha di seva For the Sangat
2:16:24 He was just doing that And they said
2:16:26 No, no, no, we've chosen you. You're the one to do it.
2:16:29 And he said, I will do it under one condition that I still continue to do my seva.
2:16:35 So even back then, they recognized the strategic importance
2:16:39 of being in spaces that they're not normally in. But they recognized that I'm not doing it to become a king,
2:16:46 but even though I might dress like a king and look like a king on the outside,
2:16:50 I'm still a seva that of the pantham, the inside. That's the intention which we do it.
2:16:55 so sometimes you have to take on that kind of burden of being a public figure being recognizable
2:17:02 but always your your your duty is back to the to the guru your duty is back to the saver of the
2:17:10 path so it's always saver whatever we do you know and we don't do it we try not to do it to let to
2:17:16 let it get to our head or get to our ego you know one of the kind of questions i was just
2:17:22 When you were speaking Firstly it's really good
2:17:24 To see And have that
2:17:25 Panthic mindset I think that's amazing
2:17:26 We should be going out To all these different
2:17:28 Levels of the world Right
2:17:29 And representing Sikhi And spreading
2:17:31 Guru Nanak Dev Ji Maharaj's Message
2:17:33 But when it comes To yourself
2:17:35 You probably have seen A lot of feedback
2:17:37 Or maybe criticism About how
2:17:39 If people might feel You are diluting the message
2:17:42 Or that A lot of people
2:17:43 Might take the way That just because
2:17:45 They are shared truths In other backgrounds
2:17:47 And faiths That Sikhi
2:17:49 Is just an amalgamation Of other faiths
2:17:51 And stuff so how do you find that balance between giving
2:17:55 the uniqueness and beauty of Sikhi as well as like all this other stuff all this
2:17:59 shared truth and wisdom from these other so I try almost never to share wisdom from
2:18:03 other backgrounds what would what would be the point that ultimately everything that we do is is
2:18:09 trying to to elevate the message within Gurdwara Gurdwara itself so I don't see myself as
2:18:15 teaching other stuff like people say oh that's And I'm like, no, it isn't.
2:18:19 It's just this angle of Sikhi that you may not have looked at. If you look at even in ancient Indian tradition,
2:18:26 they're generally seen as there are four spiritual paths. Different kind of yogs they call out, different marats.
2:18:32 There's Gyan Marat, there's Bhakti Marat, there's Karan Marat. There's different kind of paths.
2:18:37 Gulbran Sahib Ji isn't just one. People make a mistake if they think Gurbani is just Gyan Marat
2:18:43 or it's just Bhakti Marat. It's somehow this amalgamation of two.
2:18:48 Of two different things and some of the Shabads that we've talked about, you know, Khoja Deda Hara Roj.
2:18:54 That is not about Bhakti. That is nothing to do with saying Naam Jaam.
2:18:59 That is actually about self-awareness. Now when I sit and I talk about self-awareness, there's more than enough Shabads that talk about it.
2:19:06 There are plenty of Shabads that don't have the word Naam in there. That don't have that devotional element but
2:19:10 actually have that self-reflective element in there. So Gyan Marik is there within Bani.
2:19:15 So if I explain it and people don't hear what they're used to hearing, they say, oh, he's teaching something else.
2:19:21 No, I'm teaching an element of Gurbani as I understand it. And there are multiple paths within Sikhi.
2:19:27 And I think this is a very interesting thing about what Guruji has tried to do. I don't think Guru Nanak Dev Ji came to just make another religion.
2:19:35 I genuinely see Guru Nanak Dev Ji as creating an umbrella religion. And I don't think, I think we do a disservice to Sikhi
2:19:42 by just saying it's just another religion. It's the fifth largest religion
2:19:46 We demote Sikhi When we just say
2:19:49 Oh there's all these other religions We're also a good religion
2:19:51 I don't think Guru Nanak Dev Ji was doing that He never was trying to convert people into Sikhi
2:19:56 He was genuinely teaching There are Shabads in Gurbani
2:20:00 That's teaching you how to be a proper Muslim What a real namaz is
2:20:04 What real fasting is It's there in Gurbani
2:20:06 Is he saying You should leave Islam
2:20:09 Is he saying You shouldn't do your namaz
2:20:10 Is he saying Don't go to Mecca
2:20:12 Or is he saying the reason that you do all these things is so that you can connect in this way
2:20:17 and i don't think we've understood sikhi in that way that we are not trying to sell you
2:20:24 religion what we're trying to do is we're trying to say whatever religion you belong to
2:20:28 we have a wisdom that can elevate that keep your religion but genuinely make it about
2:20:35 with the divine don't make it just tribalism which is what most religions have
2:20:38 they just become tribalism me and my prophet and me and my holy book and my holy book
2:20:44 That we're right That means that you guys are wrong
2:20:45 We don't play those games We're saying
2:20:49 There is light in all But you just don't know
2:20:54 How to bring that light out of you So I'm not trying to push
2:20:57 Any other religion In fact I'm trying to elevate Sikhi
2:21:00 To what I genuinely believe Is Guru Nanak's position
2:21:03 Which is Guru Nanak sits above Gurmat sits above
2:21:07 All the other religions Not from an egotistical perspective
2:21:10 Otherwise somebody else Would be listening and saying
2:21:12 Of course the Sikhs are dead Say that
2:21:14 But no, what I'm saying is we're not trying to just slot in another philosophy. What we're saying is we have a philosophy that you can apply.
2:21:23 Naam Simran works no matter what tradition you're in. Bhakti works no matter what tradition it is.
2:21:29 Whatever tradition you're in, this is how you find God. I think we need to position Sikhi as an umbrella tradition.
2:21:37 And so in doing that, you're not diluting Sikhi. You're simply presenting the ultimate truth
2:21:43 To the whole world Without requiring them to change their religion
2:21:48 And I think that's a That requires a little bit of thought to figure that out
2:21:51 Otherwise what you end up doing is saying In order to be a true Sikh
2:21:55 You have to do this, this, this and this And what we're saying is
2:21:59 Maybe there's a different way of doing things So thank you for sharing that
2:22:02 That's a really I don't think we really hear it that way that often
2:22:06 In terms of the idea of And that's why I think a lot of times
2:22:09 When you see the Speakers' corners
2:22:11 Of debates where They say
2:22:13 Why is Gurmat They just say
2:22:14 Become a better Muslim It's like you said
2:22:17 We're above All these things
2:22:18 Not in an egotistical way But just the way
2:22:20 Gurmat sits It's a different approach
2:22:22 Gurmat is a different approach Anji
2:22:24 Definitely And I think
2:22:26 Karim's got one more question What would be
2:22:29 Your advice to someone Who's starting out
2:22:31 On this journey As an individual
2:22:32 You mentioned On a Pantek level
2:22:35 What you're trying to achieve Which is amazing
2:22:37 But as an individual level What would you say?
2:22:39 I'm still surprised how many people within the Sikh community don't actually just read
2:22:47 And I don't mean memorize Gurbani. I mean actually just read Gurbani, actually do koj of what the Shabads are saying.
2:22:54 And I always recommend people, if you do nothing else, every day, read the hukam nama of the day and actually just read the means.
2:23:02 Spend time with Gurbani and do whatever else you want to learn. you want to learn santia you want to learn you
2:23:10 want to grow your case you want to do all things fine do all those things but have a
2:23:15 direct relationship with gurbani and i say this time time again i genuinely don't believe i think
2:23:20 there are a lot of people within the that are just afraid of gurdwara saib ji there's
2:23:24 just this no i'm not good enough i'm not to do it and i don't think guru nanak dev ji
2:23:28 would want you to have that approach and i always say people if you knew guru nanak dev ji was coming
2:23:34 to your town would you say i'm not worthy to visit him or would you go running to know that Guru
2:23:39 Nanak Dev Ji is in your town so I always say to people you have Guru Nanak Dev Ji in every
2:23:43 Gurdwara Guru Nanak Sahib Ji is that I'm not saying that you need to sit on the tabia and know how
2:23:48 to read it but we're so lucky today that we can download things on our phone we can get apps
2:23:53 we can get hukam numbers on our phone actually Gurbani because you will hear lots of people say
2:24:00 lots of things and you won't know which way turn unless you actually read Gurbani. When you read Gurbani,
2:24:07 you can say, okay, I understand where that person's coming from. I'm not really sure that he's saying something in line with what I've
2:24:13 read in Gurbani. But at least you have your base. Our base as a community, our base as a Dharam is
2:24:18 Bani. Bani is where it starts. Bani is where it stops. Guru Granth Sahib Ji is where it's at. And I
2:24:23 feel sorry for so many people within the community that just don't have that one-to-one direct
2:24:28 relationship with it. And if it means that you do it in English, do it in English. But actually
2:24:33 have a one-to-one daily dialogue with good grand sahib ji that to me is the way your sikhi can is
2:24:38 it's going to start and that's where your sikhi is going to end fantastic and what a great way to
2:24:43 finish off a final message to the sun so thank you so much for coming on the podcast uh we
2:24:49 about uh doing three four hours but finn you're pretty much here they're nearly the three
2:24:54 mark how long did we record our stay two hours by we'll leave it there then um from just your
2:25:01 So Jenny, Jaseki, talking about your marketing experience as well, the projects that Narmaz will be doing,
2:25:07 the Siddhi Japji side, translation in poetry with music, and it's a Q&A, a fantastic project.
2:25:15 And thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast as well, Ji.
2:25:20 And also just the gems that you've been sharing, the different questions you've been asking,
2:25:24 whether that's talking about your personal life and the family dynamic as well,
2:25:28 and just being a very nice person, very nice person.
2:25:32 I think on the point it was a modest, kind person.
2:25:36 Just thank you so much. It's been great to have you on tonight.
2:25:38 Thank you for having me as well. So I think it's really kind of you
2:25:41 to having me on the channel as well. So thank you so much.
2:25:44 Jello, hopefully when you do this we can have you on again.
2:25:48 I don't know about that. But for the song you're watching at home,
2:25:52 just make sure you check out the video, you share the video
2:25:55 with your friends and family. Leave a comment.
2:25:57 If you have any questions, For Paisalbjizan, leave them in the comment section or go over to the NotOnNotOn page as well
2:26:02 Hit subscribe and all that cool stuff as well And we see you guys in the next video
2:26:07 If you have any guests you think we should be interviewing Then let us know, I'm going to do that as well
2:26:11 Okay, finish up there? Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh