SIKH DAY PARADE 2013 GETS HUGE MEDIA ATTENTION

Harjap Singh Aujla

Held on a fine spring afternoon on Saturday April 2013, the 26 th Annual Sikh Day Parade in New York started in a highly festive atmosphere on the fashionable Madison Avenue of Manhattan. Held between 38 th Street and 23 rd Street, this parade attracted a huge Punjabi media frenzy. All the Punjabi newspapers published from New York and India covered the event. Several domestic and foreign tourists were seen taking snaps of the colorfully dressed men, women and children. A new emerging culture was tastefully being unfolded in front of America and the world. The tourists enjoyed the Langar (free food) to the hilt. A lot of them were interacting freely with the Sikh community. A major theme of this year’s parade was an appeal on mercy grounds to commute the death sentence awarded to Professor Davinder Pal Singh Bhullar.


Punjabi television media based in North America covered the event extensively. Surprisingly Jus Punjabi, a veteran of several Sikh Day Parades pulled out of live coverage. “GET Punjabi” TV channel had a big presence in the parade. Its coverage team was spearheaded by a historian, scholar and broadcast journalist Gurcharanjit Singh Lamba, Editor of “Sant Sipahi Magazine”. Others anchors on the team included Sherry Dutta formerly of Doordarshan, Harry Malhotra and Nidhi Singh. All anchors did their best possible. They were all polite, polished and receptive. I personally think that Mr. Lamba should have been used more extensively. He gave expert comments on the importance of the occasion. He should have conducted some interviews too.

A much in demand broadcast journalist Sumandeep Kaur of “STAR SPOTLIGHT” and “NRI WORLD” fame, who had suddenly disappeared from small screen in October 2012, popped up all of a sudden after more than six months on PTC Punjabi platform. She was stationed at PTC coverage base station on 27 th Street. After the success of their 2012 experiment, PTC repeated the “fulcrum and arms model” in 2013 also. PTC used Sumandeep Kaur as the fulcrum (pivot) and Fairy Bath and Avtar Singh Sherpuri were surfing the clusters of participants as the wings or arms. Both Fairy and Sherpuri talked to some interesting participants in the crowds and took interviews of a broad cross-section of the matchers. Sumandeep Kaur’s station had started attracting big bunches of participants and prominent guests even before the start of the parade and it continued till the end of their North American, Indian and international live telecast.

“GLOBAL PUNJAB” (an associate of DAY & NIGHT NEWS of Chandigarh) is a new entrant into the rough and tumble of live coverage of the Sikh Day Parade. They laid stress on conducting the telecast by adopting the model of mingling with the crowds and interviewing as many of them and they succeeded to a good extent. Their telecast was started by Jaspal Shetra and Sukhpal Singh Dhanoa on the pattern of “Walk the talk”. Later on they set up their telecast station on the 27 th Street, where they got good response from the participants and the guests. Including Jaspal Shetra himself, they had a total of four hosts. The other three included Dr. Sukhpal Singh Dhanoa, Jagdev Singh Bhandal from California and debutant New Yorker Mandeep Kaur Sidhu. CEO of GLOBAL PUNJAB in America Sunil Hali was present too. All hosts put in their best effort.
The participants spoke all dialects of Punjabi. Lahori (Central)Punjabi was prominent amongst the TV broadcasters of all the channels at the Sikh Day Parade. Gurcharanjit Singh Lamba was speaking an amalgam of Pothohari, Lahori and Jalandhari Punjabi, Sherry Dutta and Nidhi Singh were speaking chaste Lahori (Standard) Punjabi and Sumandeep Kaur was speaking a mixture of Lahori and Chandigarhi Punjabi. The crowds were the largest to date. Fifty two buses came from Sikh Cultural Society Richmond Hill New York alone. The next biggest presence was from New Jersey with more than two dozen buses.

Surat Singh Padda, the New York correspondent of Daily Ajit of Jalandhar, helped in the compilation of this report.