Baba Ranjit Singh

Baba Ranjit was recently in the UK, I managed to go down to two of their Diwans. On the whole I was amazed at the number of people who had turned up to the Diwans. For the first Diwan I went to which was in Walsall, I was there just over an hour early and half the hall was already full, on the second day we decided to go an hour and half earlier and I was surprised to find the hall (this time in Wolverhampton) was almost completely full.

I found the first Diwan to be pretty incredible, there must have been around 300-500 people squashed into the hall/stairways and Langar hall and everyone was singing alone. It’s the fact that everyone sings along that really stood out for me. Baba Ranjit Singh tends to talk about a topic and explain it using examples from sakhi’s, references from Bani, and then they sing a dharna which everyone sang after them.. Like I mentioned, it was amazing to hear so many people singing alone. It would have in my personal opinion made the experience more moving if what everyone was singing was Bani, this in my opinion would have taken the experience to another level.

The second Diwan that was at Wolverhampton was the same. This time there must have been 500+ people gathered in the main hall with many more sitting in additional halls. Again everyone was singing along and it was very touching, there’s something about everyone singing along which really hits home somewhere deep inside.

I think the Diwans that took place were highly successful events as a large number of people turned up to take laha from them, even though there has been some negativity generated by some people about Baba Ranjit Singh, from what I saw and experienced they seem to be doing good parchar, which is exactly what we need.