Preety Bains

Hello, Good afternoon one of the concepts that we're going to be exploring today is the concept of sewa. Sewa is also known as selfless service, is one of the three key pillars of Sikhism espoused by our founder guru Nanak theatre. traditionally sewa used to take the form of supporting members of the broader community in delivering basic requirements such as food, community and support, and lodging. In recent times organizations such as Khalsa aid have extended this concept of sewa to be on borders to provide humanitarian support in applying this notion of modern-day sewa is crucial in today's day and age, particularly when we talked about the growth of Sikhs in Australia being 400 percent growth in the last 10 years. It is now our responsibility to organize sewa because the impact that we can make is magnified, given the rate that we're growing and our scale, as a community we need to start considering what does sewa mean in today's modern-day and age What is the best way to provide this sewa?

How do we even identify what this sewa means, and what does our community need and how do we coordinate and deliver sewa in the most meaningful and impactful way. So to help me explore those topics we've got two very distinct speakers, first Dr. Malvindar Bains who's a neuroscientist most well known for her work in promoting brain health and awareness of neurogenetics narrative diseases, sorry I’m not a scientist so would you like to join us on the panel today Dr. Malvindar Bains and our second-panel speaker is Gurmesh Singh an Australian politician and member of the new south wales legislative assembly since 2019 representing Coffs Harbor for the nationals. So, we might start with yourself, permission, I know your family has been in Australia for about 120 years now and was one of the first settlers of Sikhs in Australia have you seen over those generations the concept of sewa development and what does sewa mean to you today.

Gurmesh Singh

So our family arrived here in the 1890s my great-grandfather was here cutting cane in the north and part of new south Wales and Queensland and we settled in the Wakaga area in the 1950s and during those early probably 20 years or so of settlement in that area the community was obviously very small only a handful of families and you know probably the way that they manifested their sewa was by helping each other out and settling into what could have been quite a hostile environment in the 1950s 60s and early 70s by helping each other out these families often would live in  agricultural sheds, would save up enough money to then move into town and you know when you speak to a lot of those old families they will tell stories of well we used to have dinner at each other's houses because no one spoke the language no one spoke English very well and cointegrated into society than someone who'd come straight away, so I guess it manifested itself in helping each other in the early years and then as the families became more and more established that have longer, Nowadays nearly every day of the week and during that Christmas period they run longer you know, 15 hours a day to hundreds of people every day in a community of probably only a few hundred people, so it's changed and it continues to change but one thing I have seen is that the sewa that a lot of people do in in our community is still quite inward focused. It's focused on our community but I guess we can explore that a little bit later on.

Preety Bains

Yeah that's it that's a great length, into I know that yourself talked about this, you got a lot into the community and how do you kind of shift that difference of traditional sewa of that length of sewa to what you do, speak a little bit about that, that'd be interesting. 

Dr. Malvindar Bains

Fantastic question, thank you so much to the YSPN team for actually welcoming me here, I’m actually from Auckland New Zealand so it's nice to be on the other side of the ditch real pleasure to be here. Yeah, the concept of sewa for me and how we can best apply sewa is quite different. I come from the field of stem science technology engineering and medicine and traditionally we're known to you now just get on with our task whether that's dealing with your patients as a medical doctor or in my case dealing with my specimens in the laboratory and you know you focus on what you're doing in your everyday life and you can get fixated on what you're doing and close yourself off to the rest of the world because you're in your professional field, I guess I had the luxury of meeting a lot of families and patients impacted by the diseases that I work on in the laboratory and I think we've heard this resonate throughout the conference so far we need to listen to what these people in the community are telling us about what they need and we need to hear the call for sewa sometimes we don't know what kind of sewa to do because we haven't heard our call yet.

For me, my call came in the form of a family impacted by Huntington’s disease and that's one of the diseases I work on in a laboratory and they said to me it's all farewell and good that you're working on these brains of these families that have donated their brains to science but what about the next generation that is going to be impacted by this devastating disorder what are you doing for them and I was taken back, I was shocked to have this kind of question because I’m getting on with my daily life in the laboratory.

This is my life, this is what I do and suddenly I realize I’m blessed, [06:31inaudible] has blessed me with this knowledge base and I can actually share this with the community, I can speak about the disease in the community and raise awareness in that way or I could take things to the next level and so I started having conversations with people impacted by these brain disorders and hearing what they actually need and whether or not I have the skill set to provide that is beyond what this conversation is all about you can always draw in those experts to help you but I quickly realized that these young people want to know more about genetic testing, these young people want to know more about how they can deal with insurance companies when it comes to having a risk of a degenerative disorder in their family and so for me I was like wow, actually I can do some kind of sewa, I can actually help support the next generation of people that are going to be at risk of this disease and that's how I got started on this journey.

Preety Bains

That's great question information I think, would you say that you face similar concerns from the community being a member of parliament whereby people come to you with concerns uncomfortable to address it from a policy perspective as opposed to what would you say that we could be doing on the ground level before it reaches to a policy level.

Gurmesh Singh

It's a very broad question so I’ll try and answer it in that broad way the best way to do it might be a bit of audience and participation so can I get everybody in the room to raise their hands let's  do a process of elimination so everyone raise their hands, who here is a member of the SES oh sorry, put your hands down if you're a member of the SES keep your hands up, the state emergency service David cleanups put your hands down if you're a member of the rural fire service or the country fire service okay put your hands down if you are on a committee or a board aside from YSPN that is community focused I’m trying to think of more community-based things, put your hand down if you've a country like Australia we can genuinely serve our community you know I look around this room and I see a hundred well-educated people who could devote their time for instance to their kids sport and actually make a real difference to the lives of two or three hundred children being a part of that group so there are many different ways that we can do that as a community rather than just looking for government to do that because governments don't run a lot of these community and sporting groups.

Then we look at things that have happened in the last six months, being the natural disasters that we've had with the fires that have touched both new South Wales and Victoria and very early on we saw Khalsa be active in places like Kofsava and we saw some very well-publicized seat groups here in Victoria going out into those communities and helping where they can, so you know I think we could do a lot more of that and not just as Sikh groups but just as Sikhs as general we don't have to do them under the umbrella of a Sikh group, it's great if we can but there are also groups like rotary and lions who you know as a community we're very underrepresented in those groups in terms of population we do tend to stick to our groups when we do that work so I’m not sure if that answers the question but that's my thoughts on where we could go from here.

Preety Bains

That's a great answer. Do you think that we're doing, and this could be for both of you do you think that we're doing a lot of the concepts that we talk about is this idea of having an individualistic mindset as opposed to a collective mindset and I don't know if it's that we don't want to do things right, it might just be that we don't know how to bond together as a community to create a coordinated approach to sewa and I’d be interested to hear what you guys think about what's the best way to create that framework for that community to start doing this work.

Dr. Malvindar Bains

Look I think that there's a lot of power in being part of a collective and I don't want to take the cliche that many hands make light work but it's true. I think if there is something like a natural disaster or something, too hard for us to take time out of our very busy professional schedules to do sewa we won't do it right, we won't do it because if it is in the too-hard basket many people have families, many people have other commitments but it's about chipping away at a cause it's about doing part of something bigger there's always going to be someone leading something right; but at the end of the day, that leader is not successful unless they have a big collective behind them working with them. You don't have to be that leader but being part of that kind of collective gives you a lot of power and then that gives you a sense of satisfaction of that woman fuzzy feeling that you get from doing something meaningful.

For someone like me, something as small as just taking 10 minutes out to listen to a family member impacted by disease and hearing what they need was my start of the sewa journey it wasn't setting up a not-for-profit charitable organization five years later which is the end product of all of their dialogue and I think we need to get out of our head that we need to do something drastic to be considered doing sewa. We take a photo of it and we put it on Facebook and we self-promote no it's more about being part of something greater than ourselves and I guarantee all of you at some point you would have heard the call whether that's helping an old lady across the road or you know giving some food to that harmless person whatever kind of stuff that you've done in your life but I think if you think of it as a small task something that's innate and within us as opposed to something that we must do then we will all be doing it.

Gurmesh Singh

I agree with that 100 percent. The concept for sewa you know it's a few hundred years old now and you think of the society a few hundred years ago in India versus a society that we live in now you know back then the problems were economic and problems of poverty but they're not issues really that we have in Australia and to continue on that point you could do sewa by mentoring a young person at work or even out of work, and that's something that you could be doing every day that makes a real difference to someone's life who then might go on to be a CEO of a major company. You know helping, tutoring people at school it's the little things that can add up to quite big effects later on down the track but yeah, they need to be small and meaningful they don't need to be the big event with 500 people and media and all this kind of stuff even small things can have quite a big effect.

Preety Bains

Thank you I think that was a great point that you raised and it was about chipping away and coming to that end goal. How do we motivate our community to come on that journey with us and stress that because we've got 100 people here that you know they've already got the mindset they want to start doing this work they're spending their Saturday here, how do we spread that message because there are 125,000 seats in Australia today and we're the fastest-growing minority group in Australia but we're also if you go out on the street and you go hang on the seat and you've got new standard out in Australia and going oh, are they the guys who wear the turban and is it enough that we're seeing like three seats on the media and we're going well look how great Sikh’s are like oh, we're on the media is that enough or how do we stress that point to the whole community.

Dr. Malvindar Bains

She's coming in hard and fast with these difficulties questions I’m sweating [15:34 inaudible] I think that we are in a privileged position to be most of us I’m assuming in here is a professional of some kind that has some sort of job or some sort of qualification and we have the luxury of being able to step into a career and make a big change in the world, but how do this spread and I think the proof is in the pudding; if we see more of our people out there doing this now I don't mean by taking that selfie when you're feeding a homeless person or whatever but if somebody else notices you doing this right then we're all going to move forward together and push other people along with us. I have no idea how I was discovered by YSPN, I still don't know how I ended up here and I do think it's probably come from somebody noticing me doing something a little bit outside of the square, on behalf of a whole lot of other people that's been noticed and I think we are our deeds, so if we just get our heads out of the sand and just get on with it without expecting anything in return we're going to have a whole lot of other people following us like if you're out with your mates on that Saturday night and you know you have a few drinks or whatever you're doing and you start talking about hey I’m part of this group we're going to go and pick out rubbish on Saturday you want to come with us, become part of the collective.

For me, I talk to my Ph.D. students. I'm like, oh what are you doing on Saturday, why don't you come with me to meet this family. Take people along the journey with you and this is how I think we will all progress forward and we won't be tokens anymore Sikhs are not tokens anymore you know. Senegal is actually in the top five most common names in New Zealand of children being born. Can you believe that children are being born in New Zealand so we're talking about Australia? that New Zealand's not that far behind. We're not tokens anymore; we're just going to take people along for the ride both Sikhs and non-Sikh we should be leading it though.

Gurmesh Singh

I think also modern sewa look very different as we've spoken about and it's about having the ideas and you know sharing those ideas of ways that you can help novel ideas so 20 years ago an organization like this probably wouldn't have existed because the framework wasn't there, probably the mentality of the people wasn't there, whereas nowadays you know we can have a room like this and we can get together and share ideas and get an outcome from it.

Preety Bains

That was amazing. I'm shocked, I don't even know what to ask next, I guess my question for you Gurmesh is from as a member of parliament. I would want to pick your brain because I want answers for the next part of the session today. What do you think some of these policies would look like if we're creating a globe like a community change and a shift in our mindset towards government policies or government or community?

Gurmesh Singh

From a government point of view things must be easy, so our keynote speaker today spoke about some of the challenges of setting up businesses in Australia and those challenges are there but those challenges also exist for volunteer organizations as well there's red tape and all these other ridiculous things you have to go through just to sometimes do volunteer work so as a government clears those obstacles but people sometimes have a skewed idea of what government is or should be and they expect the government to be a nearly god-like figure that can come along and fix every plot every problem but it's not what government is in the Australian system.

Ultimately, we're here to serve the people and often people do a better job solving their problems, with government nudges rather than a government trying to come in and over the top and telling you exactly what to do so how we would relate that to sewa is that we need to facilitate better outcomes of sewa so if we can magnify for instance and someone sewa a good example of that is for instance you know things like the rural fire service they are a volunteer organization originally started by farmers to protect them and their neighboring properties over the years given you know more and more funding from the government to help amplify that you know that volunteer ethos which now as we saw over this summer without those volunteer firefighters would have been in a lot more strife. So, from a government point of view, that's what can be done but from a community point of view you mentioned it earlier it's about bringing your friends along for that journey. So, if you are going to do something, set something up to help someone if you take some people with you then next time, they might take three more people with them next time as well so it's amplifying that effect.

Preety Bains

Great just before we get to questions to the audience I just had one last question if we strip it back to grassroots what do you think that we need to start doing in the gurdwaras because that's really where sewa was developed, what do you think our gurdwaras should be telling our community as well because they're a really important part in this as well.

Dr. Malvindar Bains

That's an excellent question look our gurdwaras are our safe space they're our space to learn there are space to nurture and the face of the good water has also changed over the years and we're part of that change I came up with this crazy idea at the time that it would be cool to take human brain specimens into a gurdwara and because I wanted to do some sewa, I wanted to teach kids in these Sunday school you know how they have those kids school’s program and they go and learn good rookie and stuff, I wanted to show them what the brain looks like because want to get more kids excited about science. I didn't realize I’m going to have to have a conversation with the [22:23inaudible] about bringing human remains into the Gurdwara and what that means the challenges associated with that.

I’m so glad I did it because now this is part of my almost internal curriculum I put myself forward and not just me I bring other youngsters along for the ride and I do little sessions about how to look after your brain in the gurdwara and it's done in both Punjabi and English and for me, this came out of conversations from our community saying hey okay you do your stuff in the lab but we need more people like you to join you and it's very hard to get. Okay, we've already talked about a lack of women in color in the professional world right, think about getting more sick women into science like what is exciting about that how are we going to get more of them there so my thing was started from kids and I ended up going into the gurdwaras because I know these people are never going to come and visit me at the University of Auckland they're not going to come into my space you're not going to see aunties and suits with their shoes coming in and visiting me right they're not you know close to issues of labs you know all these things that you need to worry about.

They’re not going to come and visit me so I have to go to them and for me, this became one of the most rewarding parts of my career and then it expanded to teaching older people about dementia. Dementia is a huge problem in our community on both my maternal and paternal sides of the family, I’ve got a history of dementia and I’m sure most of you have been touched by it in some way so I started going in and talking about the lungo that you're eating is high in cholesterol and sugar should you are having it every day? How can we change lungo, how can we change lungo to reflect our diet that we should be having, and you know this has been doing with my molecules in the lab right so I think when you discover that there are certain skill sets that you have that you can apply to the gurdwara setting it's a teaching resource. We were talking about this yesterday if you've got a finance background how many people would benefit from hearing about how to take out a mortgage? Going into the gurdwaras and teaching people how to open a savings account, how to save, what is the best interest rate for you? I don't know any of this stuff, if I could get this info from the gurdwara, I’d be rich.

Preety Bains

That was incredible and I’m sure we have lots of questions from the audience.

Speaker 1

This is one for Gurmesh, I guess when you look at some of the other countries you know Sikh people are doing an amazing job in progressing in advocacy into politics, I feel like the Sikh community in Australia seems to be on the brink of making it to that top-level there's a lot of influences that are in that space they're keen to get your thoughts on, what inspired you to get involved and what can people against the young Sikh professionals rising how can they get involved in the political space?

Gurmesh Singh

Thanks for the question, so what inspired me I as a background of what I did first about union work, I studied industrial design and I worked in advertising and communications for 10 or so years and after that I had a career change and went farming and I was a chairman of a blueberry cooperative in Morgue and I mean quite a substantial size, this year they'll be turning over about 180 million dollars in a town of five or six thousand people so it's the biggest business in town and from an advocacy point of view I had a constituency being the farmers and I represented them to the management and I got basically involved in politics by sitting on an advisory panel for a minister and I got on that panel by attending an event that he was hosting on a Saturday night three years before I actually got appointed because I had this kind of philosophy where I said no to a few things and missed out on some opportunities earlier in my career and I thought well I’m not going to say no I’ll go, it's a pain in the ass you know, it's a night kind of thing but I’ll go and I went and then I think of that as the thing that got the ball rolling you know five or six years ago to where I am now so I have this philosophy, if you can say yes, turn up the things and go to things.

One of the things that when I spoke at my first YSPN event in Brisbane was why I asked the audience again what other professional groups are you a part of, so if you're in the finance industry it's very important to get to know other people in finance not just Sikhs in finance and one of the best ways of doing that is by attending industry events and I was perhaps fortunate that I started my career in advertising which is a very social industry anyway, but you know it's important for people to get out there sell themselves, know what's out there and become known as a person not just as what your identity is. So you know sell yourself as your unique skill set, I think Australia you know we heard in the keynote, we heard from in the last panel as well we do face challenges here, I can't remember whom it was that said, I don't invest with people like you, well those people exist in Australia who aren't going to look at people based on who they are but you need to bust through that barrier and the best way of doing that is by getting out there and getting known. I’m sorry, what was the second part of your question?

Speaker 1

I think that was the main part, the second part was how can people get involved which I think you've sort of part.

Gurmesh Singh

So in terms of getting involved at a political level, it's important to join a branch I suppose of a party whatever persuasion you might be because you'd be surprised that the level of access that that gives you to you know sitting members and ministers and that sort of stuff. Politics like Australia is not like what it is in India where you see even the lowliest of low politicians has a police escort and all this kind of stuff, it's completely different here you can wander the streets and do whatever you like and then no one knows or cares who you are so I guess here it's also different we're a mid-level public servant is probably the equivalent to what a backbench MP is so you know it's also important to maintain that perspective.

Speaker 2

My question is for Dr. Bains you mentioned that we're not tokens anymore, Sikhs are not tokens. I did like the point that group, I think raised earlier about getting out of it, getting out into different aspects of the community that are not you know traditionally or our space. How do you balance showcasing what your background is, your ethnicity is what your cultural values are, you know being altruistic and all those things about doing sewa, but also maintaining your personality as like in our contemporary society, like how do you balance the two and how do you just not make it look like you're volunteering but take it to that level of sewa like what's the difference between the two.

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