How to tie a turban
Jus Reign takes you through the steps of tying a turban, from “begning” to end:
Categories: Humor, Sikhism • Tags: how to tie a turban, Jus Reign
The stories that photos tell
Julianne Hing, at The Atlantic, reflects on her own feelings about being an Asian American after seeing a black-and-white photo of Sikhs from 1945: Knowing that I have a history that is much bigger than my own small life makes me feel like I have the right to be in this country, and an obligation to defend my community and other people society would be more comfortable labeling perpetual unwelcome outsiders. View a higher resolution of this photo here. Similarly […]
Categories: Picture of the Day, Reflections • Tags: Asian American, Julianne Hing, Sikh Pioneers, The Atlantic
The Sikh Coalition revises their Sikh Air Travellers Guide
The Sikh Coalition has announced an update to their Sikh Air Travellers Guide: Significantly, Sikhs should now expect to be secondarily screened 100 percent of the time at American airports, even after passing through so-called Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) machines. Although TSA publicly asserts on its website that such machines can see through “layers of clothing,” the TSA has made clear in both word and practice that such machines are not powerful enough to see through Sikh turbans. This means that, […]
Categories: Civil Rights, Politics • Tags: Air travel, Airport security, AIT machines, Bobby Scott, Judy Chu, Melvin Watt, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Sikh Coalition, Transportation Security Administration, TSA
Well-dressed with a headdress
In their upcoming issue, GQ Britain is publishing their ranking of the world’s top 10 best dressed men on Thursday. An American makes the list at number two, and he happens to be a turban-wearing Sikh [emphasis added]: Penelope Cruz’s husband was feted by editors of the British version of the publication in its 2011 poll, with Indian-born jewellery designer and actor Waris Ahluwalia and Swedish True Blood hunk Alexander Skarsgard placing second and third, respectively. Waris Ahluwalia hails from […]
Categories: News Bits, Style • Tags: Gentleman's Quarterly, GQ, Top 10 Best Dressed Men, Vanity Fair, Waris Ahluwalia
Top 5 Sikh American Stories of 2010
Happy New Year! The end of 2010 has spawned all kinds of retrospectives on that year, mostly in the form of “Top 10” lists of various categories. An interesting exercise is to consider what were the top five stories related to Sikh Americans during 2010. Why the top five and not the top ten? The number five has a special significance to Sikhs: Sikhism originated in Punjab (now in India and Pakistan), which is the land of “five rivers” (“Punj” means “five”, “ab” means “river” or “water”). […]
Categories: Reflections • Tags: Airport security, AIT machines, Barack Obama, Bay Area Civil Rights Report 2010, Darbar Sahib, Golden Temple, Guru Singh, Harmandir Sahib, Kamaldeep Singh Kalsi, Outsourced, Sikh Coalition, Simran Lamba, Tejdeep Singh Rattan, Top 5 Sikh American Stories, TSA, US Army
A “nikki” footnote, cont’d
A recently published letter to the editor of a Philadelphia-area newspaper laments the Republican Party’s growing focus to be more inclusive of non-white minorities (at the expense of the white majority), using South Carolina’s Governor-elect Nikki Haley as an example: But the GOP leadership is just as obsessed with diversity and skin color as white liberals are; in fact, they seem almost embarrassed to be the de facto party of whites, and they work hard to change this image. They have made inroads […]
Categories: News Bits, Politics • Tags: Nikki Haley, Republican Party, South Carolina
WRFA II
US Senator John Kerry has introduced the Workplace Religious Freedom Act of 2010 to the US Senate. For Sikhs, this law has important implications: Under current law, employers are required to make ‘reasonable accommodations’ for the religious practices of their employees. Employers can bypass this requirement by showing that such accommodations would impose a minimal difficulty or expense on the employer’s business. WRFA would still allow employers to deny religious accommodations, but only by proving that such accommodations would constitute […]
Categories: Civil Rights, Politics • Tags: 111th Congress, John Kerry, Richard Santorum, Workplace Religious Freedom Act, WRFA
No. 9 on Time Magazine’s Top 10 Religion Stories of 2010
As we near the end of 2010, Time Magazine published their “Top 10 Everything of 2010“. Among the topics was the Top 10 Religion Stories of 2010, which predominantly featured stories related to Christianity or Islam (or sometimes Christianity vs. Islam). The one exception came in at number nine on the list: Obama’s skipping Darbar Sahib (aka the Golden Temple) in Amritsar: The Golden Temple in Amritsar is the center of the Sikh religion and, at one point in the […]
Categories: Politics • Tags: Amritsar, Barack Obama, Darbar Sahib, Golden Temple, Harmandir Sahib, Islamophobia, Time Magazine
TSA, USA cont’d
The TSA is finding itself under increasing scrutiny. When not even a Sikh diplomat was spared from the demand to remove his turban at a US airport, the SGPC (the Sikhs’ representative body that manages Sikh shrines in India) held a demonstration outside the US Embassy in New Delhi to protest to the alleged targeting of Sikh turbans by the TSA. However, the TSA is receiving heat not just from abroad, but also from home.
Categories: Civil Rights, News Bits • Tags: Air travel, Airport security, AIT machines, California, Federal Flight Deck Officer, FFDO, Sacramento, SGPC, Transportation Security Administration, TSA, whistleblower
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