On a recent episode of Man Up, Aymann Ismail spoke with Simran Jeet Singh, a visiting scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and senior religion fellow for the Sikh Coalition. Ismail and Singh talked about learning to embrace being "different" and shared stories of how they've responded to racial and religious harassment. A portion of their conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is below.
Simran Jeet Singh: One of the things that I draw from my tradition as a Sikh is this idea of chardi kala—always finding optimism in everything. It is somewhat forced. There's bad stuff happening all the time and painful stuff that you have to deal with. But being able to find hope doesn't just mean that you're deluding yourself into some false reality. It also means that you are then giving yourself a direction to go and shaping yourself as a person, right? What kind of person do you want to be, and how do you grow into it despite all the nastiness that's out there? That to me has been the power of that idea.
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