Film festival highlights the Sikh way
ARTHUR J PAIS
In his first serious film venture, Gulshan Singh, a
University of Michigan freshman studying engi-
neering physics, deals with an issue that has
become a worrisome phenomenon in recent years
in American colleges and schools. His music
video Let It Out is the story of a Sikh boy who
deals with a bully — without resorting to violence,
but by sticking with a friend and acting with con-
fidence.
The story of a New Zealander, the son of a sheep
farmer from Feilding who has spent a lifetime
researching Sikhs, is another interesting film that
will be screened at the Sikh International Film
Festival in New York, being held at the Asia
Society October 14-15. Hew McLeod: A Kiwi Sikh
Historian, directed by Jasmine Pujji, is about
McLeod’s research into Sikh immigration to New
Zealand. The emeritus professor, who has
sparked controversy and blazed a trail for other
scholars to follow over four decades, speaks here
for the first time, says Pujji.
Besides films from India, the Sikh International
Film Festival will also include shorts and feature
films made in the United States, Canada, New
Zealand and in a Spanish enclave in Morocco. Many entries
are from new American and Canadian filmmakers.
The festival examines Sikh lives not only in India but
elsewhere, be it in Spain or Canada, says Jeet S Bindra,
A scene from Jagjeet, which tells the story of two friends against the backdrop of Delhi’s 1984
anti-Sikh riots
president of the Sikh Art and Film Foundation, which
sponsors the annual event.
The festival begins a day after a Sikh Leadership Summit
is held October 13 at the Asia Society. Speakers were to
include Mohanbir S Sawhney, the Robert R
McCormick Tribune Foundation Clinical
Professor of Technology, and director of the
Center for Research in Technology &
Innovation at Kellogg School of Management
in Evanston; London-based filmmaker
Gurinder Chadha; and Gurvendra Suri, the
founder of Optimal Solutions Integration,
Inc, an enterprise technology consulting firm
based in Irving, Texas.
;Page A40
Gurmeet Sodhi documents
an extraordinary movement
ARTHUR J PAIS
“We all have heard of Mother Teresa but
very few of us have heard of Bhagat Puran
Singh,” talk show host Gurmeet K Sodhi
said. “Why, is what I ask myself… The
answer that I could come up with was that
we just don’t talk about him or his
work. We need to do our part as a commu-
nity member and recognize our people
first before we ask others to recognize
them.”
Over 95 years Ramji Das, better known as
Bhagat Puran Singh, founded Pingalwara
near Amritsar, Punjab, after having carried
around on his shoulders for 14 years a spas-
tic child. When he was not carrying the
child, Piara Singh, he would cart him
around in a wooden trolley. Bhagat Singh
also had an adopted handicapped daughter
called Inderjeet Kaur, who became a physi-
cian and made serving humanity her mis-
sion. A recipient of the Padma Bhushan,
one of India’s highest civilian orders, she
made Pingalwara a dynamic social institu-
tion. It offered remedial programs for the
handicapped and also ran a school and
started farming to create a large, self-serv-
ing community — which also led to organic
vegetable farming.
The word Pingalwara, Sodhi said, “means
a house or asylum but it just not an institu-
tion, it is a dynamic movement.” It is also a
call for people at large to get involved in
helping the most vulnerable people around
them.
Gurmeet Sodhi, center, with orphans at Pingalwara
in India that focused on how the farmers
overcame adversities using creative solu-
tions.
When she started to learn about
Pingalwara, Sodhi felt a calling deep with-
in. “I felt I needed to go there and see what
the place is and how can I help them,” she
added. “I felt compelled to show people
who Bhagat Puran Singhji was, how he is
the epitome for the word seva with the way
he took care of the sick and needy.”
His work was probably the same, if not
far more difficult than Mother Teresa’s, she
said.
“If we can recognize a saint like her then
I surely believe we can learn and recognize
Bhagatji’s work as well.”
