Hi friends this is a longish post so I will publish it in parts. It describes a journey, an attempt at discovering my own religious roots which left a mark on me. Hope you enjoy reading it.
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Part ONE

What you meet in life is destiny, how you meet it is free will. I have come to this conclusion after pouring over all the decisions that have shaped my life over the years.
 
Born into a Sikh family, I had always found it difficult to understand the need to follow certain ‘customs’ and ‘rituals’ that had obviously outlived their original utility. Ask any young Sikh boy living anywhere below Delhi on the map, who has to stay indoors on Sunday after washing his long tresses, the strapping young ‘munda’ who cannot do away with his facial growth especially when it comes in the way of scoring with the fairer sex. I found my own remedies to these seemingly unusual issues. I washed my hair in the night, stylized my facial hair (prohibited by the religion) to avoid the unkempt look - free will at work you see. I found a middle path to come to terms with the dichotomy of following the religion I was born into and what I felt was my right as an individual. I was too meek to rebel and too arrogant to placidly accept things I could not fully comprehend. My choices of course caused a lot of distress to my parents, especially my deeply religious mother who had undertaken a long and arduous journey all the way to the sanctum sanctorum of the Sikh faith – the Harminder Sahib in Amritsar (also known as the Golden Temple) for my naming ceremony. She had promised the lord that she would visit the temple if she was ‘blessed’ with a male child. I was preceded by two sisters and was born after a lot of prayer and age gap between me and my siblings. My parents had lost their first born son at age two. So when I finally arrived on the scene I was treated like the ‘chosen one’ and raised with the knowledge that being a male is not only a privilege it is also your license to freedom; the freedom to choose, the freedom to explore and the freedom to be let off the hook if you strayed – a freedom that was not always necessarily available to my sisters.

But something went wrong with the script my parents were trying to write for my life. I was supposed to turn out to be this hot blooded and aggressive Punjabi ‘gabru jawan’ who would love his sarson da saag and aaloo parathas, be on a back slapping, bear hugging terms with his brethren, have a long beard, wear a regal magenta turban, kill a long glass of lassi in three gulps and wipe the malai from his moustache, break into a bhangra at every excuse, take up a government job (like my father did), go to the Gurudwara every Sunday morning and ultimately settle down with a ‘sohni kuddi’ from Chandigarh who would bear his children and give company to his parents.
There was nothing wrong in these expectations; most of the heroes in Hindi movies did this, all my cousins did it, our neighbor’s son did the same…after all it was the norm. Only in my case I guess the template went horribly wrong; I was born and raised in the heart of the most cosmopolitan city in the country - Mumbai. For some time I did try doing all of the above, but something always went awry. I preferred the gujarati dal bhaath and theplas to daal makhani and parathas, I went to a convent surrounded by Christians at school and Gujaratis and Sindhis at home. I was too influenced by the heady and liberal ways of working in an advertising agency to accept a plum government job that came my way, and finally I performed the ultimate sacrilege by rejecting a ‘sohni kudi’ to marry a ‘south Indian madrasi’ girl of my choice – and that was the final straw, the last nail in the coffin.

“Where did we go wrong in your upbringing?” is the lament that I have heard ever so often since then. In short I screwed up on my ‘Punjabiat’ (the Punjabi way of life)

As is evident, the first twenty odd years of my life were truly chaotic and confusing where I faltered often while walking the thin line dividing the life led by norms of my religion and the life I wanted to live. What’s worse I did not understand the fuss when I would choose to walk with a foot on either side.
‘Am I different?’ I used to wonder often. All my cousins had long flowing beards and wore their six meter turbans apparently without being troubled by existential questions. But then most of them lived up north where they defined the culture. Me, I felt like an expatriate trying to blend in like a chameleon.
My lack of affinity to my own loud, often aggressive and at times pompous brethren often raised questions in my mind that bordered on the ridiculous; “Was I adopted?” or “Was I found wandering and crying in a mela?”.
This was when the Daler Mehndis, Juggi Ds and Karan Johars of the world had not arrived on the scene to define the new wave of Punjabi cool.

Now that I am apparently all grown up, a father of two daughters, supposedly out of the woods, the restlessness has been replaced by an adequate quietitude. But is that because I have found my identity or have I reluctantly compromised with the state of my existence?
Frankly, I don’t have an answer to that.
Like all pseudo intellectuals I too like to think that I am a seeker who wants to get in touch with his spiritual self, without knowing where to look and what to seek. Like a novice swimmer thrashing my limbs believing that I am swimming while actually I may be in the same spot or worse even going under. I have read books, attended discourses, including dabbling into ‘new age’ alternatives.

Not surprisingly with every effort I come back more confused than enlightened and I end up hanging the blame on my lack of exposure to the roots and history of my own culture, something that would have acted as an anchor to which I could moor the boat of my faith. My convent education only afforded me a fleeting glimpse of the state’s version of the Sikh religion through text books, the Amar Chitra Katha comics packaged five hundred years of tradition into twenty pages of pictures and blurbs.

The only other possible source - my parents; were perhaps too immersed in bringing up the family and I didn’t actually nudge them enough to translate the rich heritage into a language that I could understand. To make matters worse there was no Internet.
As a result my participation was restricted to going to the Gurudwara on the birth and death anniversaries of the gurus and lining up to bow before the holy Granth and then head straight for the yummy langar (community lunch) which I suspect was a motivator for a majority of those present.

As I grew my visits became directly proportional to my urge to eat a simple and tasty Punjabi meal. I had ultimately simplified my relationship with religion to a very basic level and had given up any pretension of understanding it. That was till one day my mom asked me “Will you take me to the Golden Temple?”
It came out of the blue catching me off guard. It was like my life had come a full circle, giving me a chance to do for my mother what she had done for me when I was ten months old. Not to deny her an opportunity to indulge in her spiritual desires, I saw this as a chance to make an acquaintance with my ‘roots’, the origins of a religion whose rituals I had been following, whose symbols I have worn all my life.