Who is a Sikh?
Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) has now defined who a “Sikh” is [1]:
“a believer can not be a true Sikh, though born in a Sikh family, if one trims hair and beard.”
So men and women who trim their hair, moustaches and beard are neither Sikh nor Sehajdari Sikh (non-baptised), though born in a Sikh family. says Avtar Singh Makkar.
This shows how religions degenerate and make a mockery of the original spiritual teachings. Guru Nanak Dev, the First Sikh Guru, was known to speak against the ritualistic tendencies of his times and now all that is left of his teachings and great thinking is Hair!
In fact, this time I went to Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, a place that gives me a lot of emotional peace and I had heard about the story of how when people were offering the Ganges water to the Sun in the morning, he started offering water to his fields several hundred kilometers away. When asked he simply said “If your offering of water could reach the Sun several thousand miles away, my fields are just a few kilometers away”. Then looking at the Sarovar of the Gurudwara, my thoughts wandered to that same story. How could a wash in Sarovar wash away any sin or make one “purer”? It is a good water harvesting practice and a good social project to have a pond but to link it to anything religious is again doing what the Pundits of Benaras were doing when Nanak challenged them!?
Was listening to Osho’s lectures on Japji Sahib and he was saying very well that spiritually a Sikh is one who has totally learnt all and submitted himself to Guru Nanak’s “Hukum” or ‘Cosmic law’. A person born in a Sikh family, howsoever following the rituals is only carrying on a tradition of his family. No more.
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