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An Epidemic of Myopia

T. SHER SINGH

“Another victory for Sikhs!” proclaimed news reports earlier this month.

Apparently, after a protracted intervention by The Sikh Coalition (a Sikh advocacy group) -- long, weary, expensive months -- the National Board of Examiners in Optometry has now agreed to allow a Sikh-American optometry student to sit for his national licensing examination, in order to qualify on his way to becoming a full-fledged practitioner.

The hurdle? The student in question wears a turban, which is a Sikh article of faith.

A victory? Sure, it’s a victory. We are always grateful for such mercies.

But I must confess I don’t feel like jumping up and down with glee over this umpteenth ‘victory’.

Here’s my difficulty.

Ever since I can remember -- and my long-term memory is sharp and goes back six decades, easily -- I have always been aware of a new struggle, a new court battle, and then a new victory, somewhere or the other in the world at any given time, over the right of Sikhs to wear a turban at work, at school, at play … anywhere, somewhere, everywhere.

[The only time they’ve been exempted from so-called ‘strict regulations’ which purportedly require uniformity, is during war, when Sikh soldiers, renowned for centuries for their chivalry, courage and valour, have been allowed to die on the battlefield without having to doff the turban. In the two recent World Wars alone,  83,005 Sikh soldiers gave their lives for the Allied cause, helping win on some of the most difficult and hard-fought fronts. Another 109,045 were wounded. All were proudly wearing turbans.]

The battle for the Sikh’s right to wear a turban has been fought over and over and over again, ad nauseum, in the courts and in legislatures and before human rights tribunals and commissions, in virtually every country in the West.

Won every time, of course, but then only to have to go back to another tribunal to fight the same battle in a slightly different context … often in the same town and city, or in the same country.

Here’s what baffles me.

The very first relative, that I know of in my own extended family, to arrive in North America -- A HALF CENTURY AGO! -- was, and still is, a turban-wearing Ophthalmologist.

Soon after his arrival in 1959, Dr Gurcharanjit Singh Attariwala received a fellowship from the American Academy of Ophthalmology to spend a year at the prestigious Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.

He holds the prestigious F.R.C.S. degree (Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons) in Canada. In the US, he is a respected member of the American Board of Ophthalmology. He has been practicing his profession both as a surgeon and a medical practitioner since 1965, and has served as the Head of Ophthalmology at a leading hospital for 20 years.

He continues today -- FIVE DECADES after he started his career in North America -- a drop-dead handsome man in his turban!

And so does his nephew, Dr Harinderjit Singh -- a distant cousin I played with as a kid.  He's the leading Ophthalmologist today -- and has been for a few decades now -- in Augusta, Georgia, USA, where, I'm told, its citizens can spot a golf ball from a mile away.

The two I have named are not the only two Sikhs in North America thus involved in the field of optometry. There are hundreds of them, each long licensed and practicing for dog's years ... and regularly using, inter alia, the spectacle ophthalmoscope.

Have they all been missed by the radar at the National Board of Examiners in Optometry, forcing them to put young Ampreet Singh through the ringer during the past year?

Every such repetition of a court challenge or a tribunal process ultimately eats up millions of dollars of society’s resources, not to mention the toll it takes on its emotional reserves … all because of simple, unadulterated negligence or carelessness or, worse, bias and prejudice.

What I mean is, how often, how many times, do we have to put Galileo to trial before we will finally accept once and for all, as a rational, civilized, decent, God-fearing, fair-minded society, that the sun does not revolve around the earth?

Surely, there has to come a point when we, as a society, have to be ready to give short shrift to every Tom, Dick and Harry who, heady with the power of being the gate-keeper in some institution or the other, insists yet once again that the universe is geocentric.  

It was in the 1950s that Great Britain declared, after a lot of soul-searching, that there was no reason why turban-wearing Sikh-Britons couldn’t drive public buses.

Similar cases, however, had still to be fought, trench to trench, in the different communities across the United Kingdom.

Then followed similar struggles in other parts of Europe. In Canada. In the US.

Believe it or not, the same issue still raises its head again and again every few months, in the same lands, under some guise or the other. Each time … a long and draining struggle is unleashed, mercifully always followed by victory.

Today?

This week, believe it or not, Finland is grappling with the question: Should a Sikh bus-driver be allowed to wear a turban?

In Australia too, they’re considering the re-invention of the wheel … Should Sikhs be allowed to wear turbans at the workplace?

The US Army is grappling -- really? -- with the issue of Sikh turbans in its armed forces.

I don’t know why, but I wake up everyday feeling like Daniel. In the lion’s den. Over and over again.

It’s like Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day.

Mercifully, being Daniel has its benefits too.  

May 23, 2013

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