Vaisakhi

Not too long ago there was a Sikh festival down in Kent, in the south part of Seattle. I didn’t go, I read about it. I will be the first to admit I know next to nothing about the Sikh religion but I was intrigued enough by the pictures taken at the Vaisakhi festival to do a little reading. I see Sikh people around the city here but I only know to identify them because the men wear a turban, known as a Dastaar or Pagg. (And I only know that because I looked it up.) One time while we were driving from eastern Washington to the Oregon coast, we stopped for gas in the middle of nowhere. There was an attached food place called Chester Chicken. Inside, the food was prepared and served by a Sikh man and again, I recognized him as that because of his head covering. He and I had an interesting discussion about his place of origin, which happened to be Assam, in the northern part of India, someplace I would love to visit. He was friendly and polite and kind and I was dying to ask him what the heck he was doing, working at a gas station surrounded by nothing but fields of dry-land wheat but I felt it’d be overstepping more than I usually do. I thought of him again when I saw the article in the paper about the Sikh holiday Valsakhi, established in 1699 as a harvest festival and also known as Sikh day. Apparently the religion is about eliminating all caste and religious discrimination. So all Sikhs carry the same last name, which is Singh. I adore the Sikh philosophy: “Earn an honest living, always remember god, share with the needy.”

Photo courtesy RichardMc at Pixabay.com