UNITY COMES IN ALL COLOURS

Ken (Air India) Herar, back row right, and yours truly, back row left, spoke at Dasmesh Punjabi School on Tuesday about issues the students and staff seem well versed on. It was a great morning of memories and meeting awesome people.


“We may have come over on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.”
– Whitney Young, Jr.


It is a lively Tuesday morning in Matsqui Village as parents manoeuvre minivans through a bustling parking lot at Dasmesh Punjabi School.
Principal Sulochana Chand stands outside the Riverside Street school offering big smiles and greetings to everyone who makes eye contact with her.
Adrenalized students, in matching sweaters and slacks, buzz by their principal as another day of learning begins for the 580 enrolled in the kindergarten-to-Grade 10 private school.
The scheduled morning lesson is all about tolerance and diversity, and the guest speakers are Times’ columnist Ken Herar and yours truly. But the first challenge is figuring how to make a quasi-turban out of a blue kerchief, and the second to hide the small “air conditioning” holes in your socks when asked to remove footwear.
The 40-year-old Herar, a local diversity award winner and the best-ever tennis player to call Mission home, is passionate about eliminating racism, promoting diversity and making people understand that “brown and white” can thrive together.
I, on the other hand, am trying to not look like a stagecoach robber as the kerchief keeps slipping over my eyes.
School administrator Sandeep Lidder, easily mistaken for one of those Bollywood goddesses, says “everyone” has that problem at first. Methinks this is how Captain America, The Green Hornet, Robin, X-Men and Flash Gordon got started, but I digress.
There is a large sign inside the school’s Worship Room. It says “Recognize the whole human race as one.” Nobody in this gathering has a problem with me being white. And I wonder, who really needs the lesson of tolerance?
In my Caucasian, born-in-Canada world, I have watched as we “white guys” screamed about allowing turbans in the RCMP, sending gangsters “back to where they came from,” ceremonial daggers, bicycle helmets, affirmative action hiring, negative stereotypes, you name it. We have had prouder moments in this country.
Herar, embraced by many in the South Asian community for his media involvement, and nicknamed “Air India” by his basketball buddies, shares an e-mail from a family that claims to be moving away from Abbotsford because “there are too many East Indians.”
The usually cool columnist admits this makes his blood boil, especially when nobody says they’re leaving the area because of the white Bacon brothers or the white gangsters or the white drug dealers or the white pimps or the white thieves.
Dr. Dalip Singh Gill, a brilliant and kind man who founded this school in 1985 citing a need to recognize all human beings as equal, says he has seen some progress here, but notes there are many challenges ahead.
The school, which has been in Matsqui Village since expanding in 2005, now has a staff of 40 that includes a teacher from Hong Kong, several Caucasians and one Métis educator. It promotes a lifestyle free from smoking, drinking, drugs and gangs.
Their objective is to integrate Sikh studies with the B.C. education curriculum. And their successful sports teams, nicknamed the Falcons, have been praised for sportsmanship and class.
Gill proudly points to a wall of pictures filled with former students who have gone on to become lawyers, accountants or medical professionals. He says the idea behind Dasmesh is to make students better people, better adults and parents, who spread the message of equality and doing good deeds.
As you discover quickly in this facility, accomplishments have no colour. There is a lesson there, if we chose to embrace it.
Perhaps it’s time we all tried just a little bit harder.