From simran: 'What Sikh philosophy teaches us, and what I’ve experienced throughout my life, is that you personally will benefit from serving the people around you. That’s the basic premise.'
was born in San Antonio in 1984, when few Sikhs lived in the city. The lessons he learned growing up on the North Side, at O’Connor High School in Helotes and studying at Trinity University as a self-described “brown-skinned, turban-wearing, beard-loving, sports-playing dude trying to survive in modern America” figure prominently in his new bookThe Light We Give
When you said your father was the first person to wear a turban in San Antonio was that figuratively speaking, or literally? It’s 100% true that for people who didn’t know us, fear was very much part of their operating assumption whenever they met us. Strangers would see us and they would identify us with all the negative stuff that comes with a turban and a beard, like it’s terrorism or misogyny or hatred.
It’s so easy to look around at the world and point our fingers at all the problems, and we’re socialized to do that. We do it constantly. But that’s not actually what leads to culture change. Culture change happens when you can look internally and recognize, “Oh, I am part of this system too, and there are some elements of this that I can work on personally.
And now there are very open conversations about poverty and race in San Antonio, for example, or health inequity, along lines of race and immigration status. Some of those conversations can get really difficult and ugly, but I’m at least hopeful about the future because we’re finally having these conversations, and we’re starting to acknowledge that these problems do exist in our community in ways that we were unwilling to see just two decades ago.