Canadian Youth Wins Right To Wear Kirpan to School
South Asian Focus
India-West Newspaper, Posted: Jun 04, 2002
Canadian Youth Wins Right To Wear Kirpan to School
A Quebec court has ruled that a 12-year-old Sikh boy should be allowed to wear his ceremonial dagger -- a kirpan -- while he is at school.
The decision overturns a previous ruling made by Gurbaj Singh's school that banned him from carrying the small blunt metal dagger, because the school regarded it as a dangerous weapon.
The issue has created divisions between parents at St. Catherine Laboure School in LaSalle near Montreal. The Sikh community feels that the majority community in Quebec has failed to grasp the importance of the kirpan to their religious beliefs.
The controversy started last November when Singh fell in the playground and the kirpan fell out of its wrappings under his clothes. The school then banned him from carrying the kirpan.
The boy refused to go to school and his father, a devout Sikh, ruled out any compromise, such as wearing a plastic kirpan or a miniature one in a necklace or bracelet.
In April, a temporary court injunction allowed Singh to return to school wearing his original kirpan, but he attended with a police escort, with some youths shouting abusive comments. Dozens of parents kept their students from school in protest. There are precedents for the court's decision. In Ontario in 1991, a school board was not allowed to ban a student from wearing a "reasonably sized" kirpan to school.
Class-Action Lawsuit Against Boeing by Asians
A discrimination lawsuit filed by Asian American employees at Boeing Corp. has been accorded class-action status by a federal judge. The case is estimated to include an estimated 2,000 engineers at the Seattle-based company.
U.S. District Court Judge Robert Lasnik ruled as a class Boeing engineers whose ethnic background or nation of origin is India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Cambodia, Vietnam or the Philippines. The workers must have worked at Boeing from Oct. 12, 1996, to the present, and been below the rank of first-level manager. Hourly workers are not included in the class.
Asian Americans claimed they were shortchanged on pay and raises. Seattle attorney Harish Bharti contends that Boeing supervisors took advantage of some Asian American employees' cultural reluctance to complain.
The ruling comes three years after Boeing agreed to pay $19.5 million to settle two bias cases involving African American and women and minority employees.
Boeing spokesman Chuck Cadena declined to comment, saying the company had not seen the ruling.
Children from Gujarat Slums Carry on Mahatma's Message
By Varun Arora
A dance troupe of 14 youths from the slums of Ahmedabad, where Mahatma Gandhi lived and where there have been outbreaks of Hindu-Muslim violence recently, concluded their 10-week, 11-city U.S. tour promoting world peace and unity May 25 at the Mexican Heritage Theater in San Jose.
The troupe, made up of kids ages 12 to 17, is called ekta, a Hindu word that translates as "unity." The performance featured native and modern dance and dramatic sequences. As a backdrop, film footage of Gandhi was shown and integrated with reenactments of speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
At Manav Sadhna's school in Ahmedabad's Gandhi Ashram, the children study science, math, English, Hindi, Sanskrit and the social sciences. "Gandhi's philosophy of self-sufficiency is at the core of our program," said Jayesh Patel, founder of Manav Sadhna "The children clean their own premises, wash their own clothes and perform chores in alternating groups."
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