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IF an average Pakistani was asked what his perception of Sikhs was, he would reply: turbans swathed around unshorn hair, legendary prowess as soldiers, and green-fingered success as farmers. And beneath, sub-surface, a yearning for the Punjabi homeland from which they were evicted in 1947.
The Sikhs left their major shrines behind in Pakistan Nankana Sahib, Panja Sahib, Kartarpur, the memorial to Guru Arjan Dev, and Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s samadhi. They felt as Roman Catholics would if expelled from their Vatican.
Few Pakistanis associate the Sikhs with fibre optics, yet it was a Sikh engineer Dr Narinder Singh Kapany who discovered that, despite the insistence otherwise of his physics professors, light rays could be bent. He patented his discovery and then benefited from the Big Bang of information technology. With an inordinate sum of money now at his disposal, Dr Kapany embarked upon a personal mission to preserve Sikh art heritage and to dissem