A Rude Wake-up Call

A Renewed Dedication

Sagarika.Ghose@timesgroup.com’s oped in todays Times of India (2nd January 2020) rudely reminded me, at 77 years, that I was born a Sikh in British India, gifted the mantle of a democratic Indian citizen too after 1947, and am now sought to be diminished to being a Sikh only if I were to fail prove my Indianness to the ideological satisfaction of essentially temporary lawmakers, and entrenched administrators, who conflate belief with knowledge, democracy with majoritarianism, and are likely to spend the gift of life polishing the pebbles cloaked in the lustre of power, and tarnishing the diamonds obscurely strewn amidst the dust storms of poverty.

As I strive to complete my life’s labour I also seek to share, perhaps mainly with those less privileged, this thought with gratitude from one who has been privileged a life-time dancing on the shoulders of—sometimes indulgent, more often long-suffering—Giants.