Healing touch

Jasmine Singh

Doesn't Ravinder Singh look like a the Santa,’ someone in the crowd, gathered to hear him talk at the TEDx Chandigarh event on Sunday, seems to have found poignant comparisons between the kids’ most favourite man from the North Pole, and this good Samaritan from UK! 

Flowing grey  beard, a genuinely warm smile, and a huge heart, flowing with love for humanity, Ravinder Singh is a real Santa for many, just that, this one is available around the year, stopping by at disturbed places, distributing food and basic necessities, helping kids with the gifts much needed to them.

Though one somehow expects Ravinder to talk nineteen-to-dozen about Sikh religion (given that the name of his organisation is Khalsa Aid), the only aspect he is interested is in ‘seva’. “Our religion teaches seva, this is what as a true Sikhs we should all be doing. Why spend so much money on the beautification of Gurdwara’s when there close by kids could be starving,” says Ravinder who founded Khalsa Aid in 1999 when attending a Nagar Kirtan abroad, he was saddened to see the wastage of food. “`I called up a friend and told him that I wanted to do something, and this is how Khalsa Aid came into being.”

Conversing in chaste Punjabi, remembering his childhood days spent in his village Mundiyan Jatan, Hoshiarpur, running across the khoo (well), dipping his hands in the achaar made by him mom, Ravinder Singh brings the conversation to the most disturbing things that he has been seeing world over. Even though the members of Khalsa Aid are found at all disaster hit places, helping the locals, providing relief, it is Ravinder Singh’s humanitarian work with the Yezidi refugee families in Northern Iraq which has been greatly appreciated across the world. Stationed at the Iraq Syria border for two- and- a- half years now, Ravinder is helping women, children were abducted by the ISIS. “These women wish for death every day, you have to see their faces, frozen, blank, pain and misery written all over. We lambast ISIS, but aren’t we also suppose to do something about the people who have borne the brunt of their evil deeds,” says the man who fights many challenges, almost every day, one posed by ISIS especially! 

“Sikhs mean a lot to them there, if we get scared, imagine what they would think. There is no room for fear, there is ample for love though,” he places his hand on his heart, closes his eyes, for a moment....“Spend on people who need us, isn’t this a religion too.”  —  jasmine@tribunemail.com