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Guest Editorial
“Grow along with me; The best is yet to be. Surf the Internet and you will find a plethora of sites and newsletters devoted to Sikhi. Why another site and newsletter? And why now? The Internet portal, Khoj Gurbani, the brainchild of Harvinder Singh and a few associates, came into existence a little over a year ago. The idea was to gather Sikhs from across the world who would seriously and sincerely, yet reverently, parse and dissect Gurbani methodically, even as they differ rigorously on the fundamentals. The purpose was and remains to systematically seek define and refine collective wisdom, much as a sangat is mandated to do in Sikh practice. In the modern hyper connected world, however, our weekly cyber sangat has been worldwide – joining on the Internet from across the North American continental reality with a health sprinkling from India, Australia, Singapore, indeed from across the world. For Khoj Gurbani the sangat of cyberspace encircles the globe Some participants are Sikhs by birth while others have come to it from other faith traditions. We started at page one of the Guru Granth a year ago. The progress has been steady and slow, as it needs to be. It has taken a year to complete a discussion of the Japji Sahib. A full year on less than 8 full pages in about 50 one-hour sessions! Depending on how you look at life, we are either painfully slower than a snail, or the material is too complex. Simple arithmetic would tell us that the completion of the 1430 pages of the Guru Granth would need around 150 years – this measures out to 5 generations! Clearly, our single reading and exposition of the Guru Granth will outlast the life of all the readers now taking part by a magnitude, since no one is expected to last 150 years. And that’s inevitable but it is also good. There is a lesson in it The lesson is not that this is an impossible task but that the engagement with the Guru never ends. We climb mountains not because they are climbable but because they are there. The lesson is that Sikhi is a journey that never ends. Life ends to be recycled but time and generations continue. The journey is the destination. There is no better proof of that than the fact that we will inevitably pass the half-done work to a new generation, and they will do the same to another generation, and then to another that we will never have seen or even imagined this process. And then it would be time to go at it again from page one. Says the Guru Granth (p.1185): “Hoi ikatr milo meray bhai, dubidha door karo live laai; This is what Khoj Gurbani is all about. |
