Kindle Notes & Highlights
the workaholism, the large overbearing families, the value placed on education, the tendency for migration, the emphasis on integration, the pressure to get married within the community, the massive inter-community variance in religious interpretation, the guilt, the emotional blackmail, the belief in property as an investment, the emotional hysteria, the inability to be laid-back, the noisiness, the studiousness, the self-sufficiency, the obsession with the healing properties of chicken soup/lentil dal, the propensity for beards, the incompetence in the field of sport, the talkativeness, the
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Sikhism was a modern, liberal, open, democratic, monotheistic religion, established in the late fifteenth century by Guru Nanak, that one of the founding principles was opposition to Hinduism’s oppressive caste system, that Sikhs didn’t worship human beings, that the Gurus declared men and women to be equal, that Sikhs didn’t drink, that it was the only major world religion to acknowledge that other religions were a valid way of reaching God.
The theory of the religion tells you little about the etiquette of Punjabi life or the actuality of Punjabi culture, which is rarely written about, because one of the defining things about it is that it is defiantly un-self-examining. In practice, Sikh society often runs counter to the principles of the religion, being, for one thing, highly patriarchal.
We Sikhs are meant to be good in these kinds of situations. We are by tradition warriors and soldiers, renowned for our daredevil courage. But the closest thing I had come to a fight was on a PlayStation.
Families are the last people who should be entrusted with the task of finding you a spouse, given that they are incapable of appreciating that you may have changed since the age of twelve. As for the high ‘success’ rate of arranged marriages relative to their Western counterparts – it is in large part attributable to the fact that the Indian youths in question are so limited in their encounters with the opposite sex that, when they are married off at random, they have nothing to measure the relationship against and endure behaviour others wouldn’t consider reasonable over a single evening, let
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Life, it seemed to her, was just one long painful lesson in learning to let go.
‘In my experience, the thing that most people regret at the end of their lives is that they listened to other people too much.’ She placed the dog down, fastened him to a leash. ‘It is important to live the life you want to lead, not the one you think your mother wants you to.’
As the saying goes, the best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
