Podcrushed - Extra Credit: Your Stories (Simran Jeet Singh)

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Join us this week for the launch of our first ever extra credit YOUR STORY episode, where we devote an entire episode to a conversation with a listener. Today we talk to Simran Jeet Singh, a professor, activist, and author, about his first memorable encounter with religious discrimination on a soccer field, and in a boys' locker room, in Texas. Follow Podcrushed on Socials: InstagramTikTokXSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I just remember thinking, like, you know, when I gave in, I was upset with myself when I fought back. I was still upset. Like, neither of those two approaches felt right. And so I was wondering to myself as a 11, 12-year-old, what does it look like for us to take on life's challenges, those difficult moments in ways that make us feel proud? Welcome to Podcrushed. Welcome to the world of Podcrushed. Hopefully we can add some echo, some reverb. No, I'm getting the word.

No, no, we cannot. I'm hearing that we've run out of money. We're doing something a little different today. Every Monday for the next six weeks, we're releasing bonus listener episodes, meaning they're coming from listeners, meaning they're coming from you, maybe not you specifically, but people like you, just like you, but also quite different.

In the specific comes the universal, right? Today's listener is a professor at Columbia. His name is Simranjit Singh. He is a sick American. His story is one of religious persecution in the U.S. So it's pretty light and it's good fodder. It's a really fun way to pick off these listener episodes. Yeah, it really is.

Well, you know, here at Prokish, we love to take something. light and reveal its tragedy. No, but it's really meaningful. Simran tells his story in a very beautiful, succinct way, and he clearly has had a lot of time to reflect on it. So you'll hear that in his story. I also think what's beautiful about this story is I think his approach towards overcoming adversity and the kind of mindset that he needed to adapt to deal with something that

he would face his whole life is relevant to all of us, and there's something useful that we can glean from it. So stick around. Does anyone else ever get that nagging feeling that their dog might be bored? And do you also feel like super guilty about it? Well, one way that I combat that feeling is I'm making meal time, everything it can be for my little boy, Louis. Nom Nom does this with food that actually engages your pup senses

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Listen to Legacy Talk wherever you get your podcast, or watch us on YouTube. All right. Thank you for coming. Simran Jit Singh. Not only are your listener, you are a writer and a, I'm just going to say a content creator in your own right. That's not really how you should refer it to a writer. A scholar. Yeah, a scholar. Content creator. I'll take it. A content creator for the academy. The first time anyone has ever referred to a Columbia professor as a content creator. I was trying to draw comparisons. Maybe I shouldn't be doing that. Do not compare yourself to others. Tell us a little bit about yourself and you have a story for us. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I'm a teacher, a writer. I'm a dad. I like sports.

And the other story I wanted to share with you is one from when I was growing up in Texas. Okay. Actually, it's a couple of stories coming together. But it's about, you know, I wear a turban. I have a beard. As you can see, your listeners can't. But growing up in Texas where there weren't many people who looked like me, people often thought of me as their enemy

and when I was 11 it was the first time someone called me a terrorist it was a it was a soccer referee it was the referee he came over for equipment checks to check our shingards and our clades and our plates and he came over to me and said I need to check your turban and he was a little nastier than that

he said he thought I'd have bombs and knives in my turban You were 11. I was 11, and I didn't know what to do because I'd never let anyone touch my turban before, but he was an authority figure. Can you explain why you wear a turban? Yeah, so it's part of my faith as a sick. I have long, uncut hair. I've worn turban, not since I was born, but ever since my hair was long enough.

And it's part of our, in our tradition, we consider it a part of our uniform, that people in our community are held accountable to their standards. by the turban that they were. And so I wore one. I was in middle school at the time and the referee wanted to touch mine. And I wanted to say no, but I also wanted to play soccer.

And so I leaned my head forward. And he patted it down and saw that there were no weapons in there. And then we played. But the rest of that day, I just felt horrible. Like I was so mad at myself for giving. giving in to somebody else's racism. And, I mean, I thought about it a lot after that for the next few days,

and I promised myself that the next time there was a situation like this, I'd stand up for myself. I mean, that's why I was upset at myself. And the next situation wasn't much longer after that. It was a friend of mine, actually, after basketball practice. We were in the locker room play fighting, and he reached up as we were play fighting, right? It was nothing personal, but then he reached up and pulled the turban off my head. And I remember flashing back to that experience with the ref

and that promise I made to myself and I was like, okay, I'm going to stand up. And so I just jumped on my friend and started punching him. And I remember, you know, our teammates pulled us apart and we washed up and no one said anything. And I knew that I'd crossed the line. I just remember thinking, like, you know, when I gave in, I was upset with myself when I fought back. I was still upset. Like, neither of those two approaches felt right. And so I was wondering to myself as a 11, 12-year-old, for the rest of my life, I'm going to be dealing with nasty, ugly issues like this, like a lot of us are.

And I needed some sort of approach that, I mean, it didn't mean that I wanted to avoid. or think that there was some perfect solution, but I just didn't want to feel so upset every time there was a tough situation, you know, in a moment of racism. And so that's when I really started to think about what does it look like for us to take on life's challenges, those difficult moments in ways that make us feel proud.

And this first one, the first moment you're talking about, you were 11, the second one you said was it a few years later? The next year. The next year? About a year later, so I was 12. 12. Yeah. It's still in seventh grade, middle school.

And at that time, did you have a thought about what it would mean to respond in a way that you could feel good about or okay with yourself about? Like, did you start to think like, okay, it's not giving in, but it's not being angry? What was the middle ground? Or is that something you're still figuring out? Now I can look back and understand that those two approaches really represented the basic human responses to any challenge. Right? the first one was giving in flight and the second one was fight and um you know there there's a reason why those were the most intuitive natural feelings for me in these moments um and part of

what i've learned is that you actually have to develop a muscle for something in between that goes beyond those two options i mean in in spiritual traditions we refer to them as the middle path right. There's a way of taking on the difficulty of our lives without escaping them, without running away from them, and at the same time to find happiness within that difficulty. And that's, I mean, that's that liminal space. It's so hard to find, but I think that's the journey that I've been on since, you know, the 11, 12 years old. Did you have any adults in your life at the time of either of these two incidents that you felt you could talk to? I think the honest answer is no

I'm thinking about so in the moment on the soccer field my soccer coach knew but I didn't tell my parents I didn't want them to know there were other moments where the rubber hit the road a little more

and my parents had to help out but in this occasion I didn't tell them and definitely after the fight at school like the last people I wanted I wanted to know where my parents my coach knew my basketball coach he called us in but we didn't talk about why we just talked about what happened and he was he was fine with that meaning he didn't

want to address the racism aspect and you didn't either maybe in that is that what you mean i didn't either yeah i mean it was like a locker room like the guys knew yeah we didn't yeah nobody else needed to know my brother knew and he thought it was cool and that's the only the other part of the story that i can remember um but no there weren't really any adults that i would go to to talk about that kind of stuff like especially i think at that time but also at that age um the expectation was you sort of figured it out on your own like with your friends with your teammates with your classmates whatever so yeah i can't remember any adult figures that i would have gone to then how did you and that kid interact after that was there any reparation was there avoiding each other it was

it was and we were on the same basketball team like this was seventh grade basketball so that year in the eighth grade two we were on the same basketball team um and we got along fine but we had been friends. Like we'd played together for years before that. And it wasn't like, I don't think he was trying to be malicious. He was joking. We were play fighting. It wasn't anything. I mean, I wouldn't even go so far as to say he was being hateful. Like, we were just playing. But I think I felt bad about how I responded, but I think he felt bad about what he did too. So we just never talked about it. For a 12-year-old boy, what you imagine standing up for yourself,

and I'll speak for myself, when I was 12-year-old, the way I imagined standing up for myself, it looks like that. It's like, I have to, I have to fight back, you know? There's not a lot of, there's not really a lot of other options than I can think of, you know?

Yeah, I think that's part of it. Like, culturally, but also for me, as sort of a microcosm, our imaginations are so limited. Right, like in my head, it was, it literally was either, you don't say anything or you hit right like there's there's no in between and um i think that's where we are as a society right now too and and i think for me like part of the upside of that

experience and one thing i learned was well at least after one experience i i noticed that in a moment of response i had the opportunity to decide what my response was going to be right when i was standing up for myself in whatever way I thought was appropriate. It really felt like I remembered what had happened. I wanted to do something different. And that's a lesson I've taken with me since. Because so many people will be like, oh, you're just reacting. You can't expect yourself to do better. And I think part of what I've learned is you actually can practice these things so that when the tough situations arise, you have some orientation to have. You have some orientation to how you want to be yeah we need to actually this is a huge thing we talk about

on this show you know because i feel like at this age is when you need to start that discipline and we're not encouraged to do that we're not really often empowered to do that you have kids right two kids yeah yeah and they're young pretty young yeah they're they're they said five and seven five and seven right yeah how do boys girls girls okay okay so that's interesting it's not quite it's not the same not at all i had three brothers going out right yeah Okay, all right. How are you thinking about how you can like prepare your kids a little bit better than maybe you were prepared, you know? Yeah.

For these kinds of moments. Yeah, that's a good question. Because I think part of what I've learned is you, like I work with students a lot too, and I think about my students. As a content creator. As a Columbia University content creator. And one of the things that I've seen is, so many people are looking for quick answers. They want the formula.

They want the one-stop shop for every situation. And I think through parenting, I've learned that what it really looks like to equip our kids for tough moments is to provide them with a compass. What are the values that they can lean into in moments like this? So like, let's just think about these situations that I had as 11, 12-year-old. In that moment, I was thinking about what I wanted for myself. But what if I had been thinking about my values as a person? If I was thinking about what is the kind way to respond, what is a fair way to respond, what is a just way? I mean, these are the things that I think about now.

and these moments come up for me all the time recently walking down the streets of New York City and someone's yelling stuff at me and I have to think to myself and it's hard it's not always the same even though I've been doing it for almost 40 years now but how do I want to treat this person in a way that respects their humanity

even if they don't see my humanity how do I serve this person even though they have no interest in serving me so I think that's part of what I try and teach my kids, the values as the basis. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. All right. So let's just real talk, as they say for a second. That's a little bit of an aged thing to say now. That dates me, doesn't it? But no, real talk. How important is your

health to you? You know, on like a one to ten? And I don't mean the in the sense of vanity. I mean in the sense of like you want your day to go well, right? You want to be less stressed. You don't want to get sick when you have responsibilities um i know myself i'm a householder i have uh i have two children and two more on the way um a spouse a pet you know a job that sometimes has its demands so i really want to feel like when i'm not getting to sleep and i'm not getting nutrition when my eating's down i want to know that i'm that i'm being held down some other way physically you know my family holds me down emotionally spiritually but i need something to hold me down physically, right? And so honestly, I turned to symbiotica, these, these, these vitamins and

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of these things taste incredible um honestly you you don't even need to mix it with water and yeah i just couldn't recommend them highly enough if you want to try them out go to symbiotica.com slash podcrush for 20% off plus free shipping. That's symbiotica.com slash podcrushed for 20% off plus free shipping. The first few weeks of school are in the books, and now's the time to keep that momentum going. I-XL helps kids stay confident and ahead of the curve. I-XL is an award-winning online learning platform that helps kids truly understand what they're learning. Whether they're brushing up on math or diving into social studies, it covers math, language arts, and social studies from pre-K through 12th grade with content that's engaging, personalized,

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Was it a personal connection or did it feel at the time more like an inherited connection or a family connection? And then moving forward, how has you talked about wanting to give your kids a compass? And I wonder how has Sikhism played a part in developing that compass for you. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I grew up in a sick family. We were the only people with turbines in all of South Texas where we grew up. But to me, and we learned about Sikhism at home, but it wasn't really something I thought about as something that had any relevance to my daily life. Like it was my identity. It's what I did on weekends. But it was very much something that I inherited and what my family was about. about. That appreciation for the wisdom of the tradition and the daily application came much, much later for me. Yeah, I think in middle school it was more like, I have three brothers, we're close in age, we played sports, we played in the backyard, we played

on basketball teams, we played on soccer teams. And so if you ask me, like, what was I thinking about as a middle schooler? Like, it was just that. I wanted to hang out with my friends. I wanted to play basketball, I want to play soccer, I wanted to watch basketball, I wanted to watch soccer. Like, that was it. Like, Faith was part of the picture, but it definitely wasn't something that influenced my daily thinking. How has it come to shape your compass today? I'd say it was around that age, you know, this time when I was asking myself the question of what does it look like to feel proud. That's when we started to think about values. In fact, one of the most annoying things my parents did they did a lot of annoying things as parents but they they they would bring us

around a conference table and they would bring in leadership development people from that they knew from their work world and we developed a family mission and value statement wow and part of this exercise helped us articulate what our values were as a family how old were you by the way I was 15 or 16 yeah and they did it on a long weekend it's horrible really fun. This is horrible. But that's like part of the practice of identifying what these values are and then creating this compass for us.

And so it's through this experience which had nothing to do with our religious practice, right? This was a conference room with somebody who's not sick talking about secular leadership ideas and models. But as we started to reflect on these values, I started to understand what faith was about, at least in my tradition, and that is how do you live a good life? How do you find happiness? How do you take on the difficulties of life? And, you know, as a 17, 18 year old, I started to think a little bit about that. And the real inflection point happened as an 18 year old when 9-11 happened. And for me, that's when the racism got really intense. Like, that's when people really started to see me as their enemy.

and this question of being able to receive how others felt about me and still find my own internal inherent dignity. Like that became really urgent for me as an 18-year-old. And so that's probably the time that Faith started to become more of something that I embraced rather than just inherited. I mean, these are big questions, but I know that a lot of our listeners are grappling with them because we get messages. We get more messages than you would expect about Spirit.

spirituality, sort of finding a like a compass. And so I want to ask you, because I know you teach religion, you're a scholar, you write about it, well, how do you live a good life? What have you learned from your tradition? Only short answers, please. No, no, no, that'd be thoughtful in me long. You know, it's funny because you can talk about it as much, and I talk about it and study it and write it, and it's still hard.

Like, it's always hard. this last week, my wife and I were talking about how dissatisfied we felt with our jobs and our lives. And we have everything we could have ever imagined. And literally, all it took was like we were both feeling a little frustrated. It was building up during the week. And I think it was Thursday evening. And we sat down and we just started talking. And it quickly went from what we're disappointed by or frustrated by into but aren't we lucky to have all these things and I would say I mean the secret for me and I don't think it's that much of a secret is gratitude like having the perspective to recognize the blessings that you have you know the way we talk

about it with our kids is when they're when the kids are getting annoying and asking for things they don't they don't have our mantra with them is Be grateful for what you have. Don't worry about what you don't have. And I think that's probably true for all of us. That's literally what I was thinking about with my wife last week. And the five-year-old is like, oh, yeah. God, you're right.

Yeah, just like, you put that rink up. You know, sorry, I forgot. But thanks for reminding me. It's so funny, but they get it. Like, these are these kids at that age. And it's, I mean, it's such a simple lesson, but like, I don't know, especially for people coming from places. of privilege and I you know we have a lot of it it's it's so easy to lose track of the things to be

thankful for and to focus on which you don't have so in fact I rain Wilson was talking about this at his book talk last week that the lowest point in his one of the lowest points in his life was at the end of the office and it's because instead of appreciating all the things he had that he loved he was trying to think of the next thing that would make him happy so yeah it's I think it's a very human experience yeah yeah absolutely more than we usually have you have like a clear sort of moral question

that you were asking yourself at that very very age and sort of like seeing the the threshold that you didn't want to pass crossing it you know yourself and realizing hmm okay you know like and it seems like maybe I don't know if you knew it at the time but it seems like it's been a little bit of a guiding

yeah definitely yeah so so what would you maybe you've sort of already shared this but like if you could go back to your 12 year old self right there and what would you say? I was hoping you would not ask that question. Well and here's how I'll feather it. Here's how I'll feather it. Keeping in mind that so beyond the fantasy hypothetical which is like you know I tell him fill in the blank

there's also this thing of like what would you do so that he would listen? The reality of my so a lot of people when they see me or hear me talk about my childhood they're like man your life must have sucked. And I'm like, no, actually, it was pretty awesome. And it's still pretty great. And, you know, the racism was

there, but it was a very small part of my overall experience. And I think one of my one of the questions that felt really urgent to me and that I put a lot of pressure on

was to figure this thing out right away. Like, I, you know, the fight thing doesn't work the flight thing doesn't work and it's like okay what's what's the answer um and so i i did at that age put a lot of pressure on myself to get to get it right every time um that these you know incidents of racism come up and if i don't have the perfect response then it's somehow my fault and i now what 25 30 years later um i've realized a it's not my be it's a lose lose situation and what's that's what that's enabled for me is is grace for myself

to say you know do your best figure it out take your time and you know it's it's a way of saying that this is a marathon that there's a long tail to these things and you can develop and grow through your through your experiences but the other part of it is is really to say the the expectation of perfection in these moments of yourself is not a fairer it's not a reasonable bar to set for yourself and you'll just constantly end up with disappointment and I wish as a 12 year old I understood that so that I didn't have the pressure of perfection in these moments

thank you so much thank you Sam thank you Stitcher