KGC — Khalsa Gurmat School

Hello everyone — today I will be telling you about Khalsa Gurmat School (KGC). This is a place where my family and I connect with people of my religion and culture and where we can do our prayers. I will be telling you about why I like going to KGC and what we do at KGC.

KGC started in 2006 and since then every Sunday we go to KGC to listen to our holy scriptures and holy music. This is a place where I can connect with my peers of my religion and learn more about my culture. I started going to KGC when I was three weeks old and have been learning from there since I was 4. The youth is great there and they hold great events like blood drives, car washes, Sikh movie nights and even more. Even though we have gone through these rough times during COVID-19, we managed to bring Khalsa Gurmat Center online and we used Microsoft Teams to continue to run the school and connect with our community (sangat). Along with the hard times we still did our yearly symposium and many kids participated — we recently had our regional symposium and now the winners are going to compete in the international symposium.

The symposium starts when a quarter of the year is left. We have to read a book and answer questions in a speech. There is a local, regional, and international symposium in which everybody will get a chance to participate in Locals then people who did well will go on to the regionals and whoever does good in the regionals will go on to the internationals where they will compete with people from US and Canada. I myself have gotten to go to the international level and won a distinguished speaker award for my speech.

The day at KGC starts at 10 am when we get there. Then, we have the Diwan where we listen to our holy scriptures (Paath) and holy music (Kirtan). Next we will have our Gurmukhi and Gurmat classes where we will learn about our Sikh history and how to read and write in Punjabi. After our learning we have langar (food) where everybody brings and makes food. Finally after we have all eaten it is time for math and computing classes. After that, we are done at KGC for the day and we head home.

In addition to learning about our history and our language we try to be good citizens of the broader community as well. We do seva (help) for our community, participate in protests, and stand against injustice. When we first heard about George Floyd’s murder, our Sikh community came together and went to many protests and stood up for his justice. Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has added 3 new farm bills — as you must have heard there have been many protests to take back the farm bills and till this day farmers in India are still sitting in Delhi and protesting for their rights. Through KGC, I have participated in many protests to show my support for the farmers.

I am proud to be part of the KGC family and I feel blessed to have this opportunity to give back to our community.