Pun­jab-born Har­jin­der Singh Kukreja does scuba div­ing with full tur­ban on to gen­er­ate re­spect for the tur­ban and all re­li­gious head­gear in far-off An­talya, Turkey. 

It’s im­pos­si­ble! Well that’s what you would say. Of course, it is next to im­pos­si­ble! Most peo­ple would say. Not a Sikh and cer­tainly not -Har­jin­der Singh Kukreja -the young Sikh from Pun­jab who trav­elled all the way to Is­tan­bul and other parts of Turkey to en­able the coun­try to boost travel and tourism show­cas­ing the multi-eth­nic en­vi­ron­ment of the coun­try.  For him, the grand fi­nale of his jour­ney was a recre­ational scuba-dive with the full tur­ban on, with wa­ters and fish from the Mediter­ranean, send­ing a clear mes­sage that a life with a tur­ban is a full life with no ifs, not buts and no hin­drances. Un­doubt­edly, he be­came 1 Nu­mara –the first Sikh to do so.

An­talya is the fifth-most pop­u­lous city in Turkey, lo­cated on Ana­to­li­a’s flour­ish­ing south-west coast, bor­dered by the Tau­rus moun­tains on the Mediter­ranean coast.

The love, re­spect and open­ness show­ered on him by the Turk­ish peo­ple dur­ing his 7-day jour­ney ex­plor­ing Turkey in all its colours, is re­flected from the fact that his visit was cov­ered by 12 Turk­ish chan­nels and he fea­tured on CNN Turkey too. So­cial En­tre­pre­neur and phil­an­thropist Har­jin­der Singh Kukreja is al­ways on the look-out for up­hold­ing the ho­n­our of the Sikh peo­ple and reach­ing out where no one has gone be­fore. Rep­re­sent­ing the Sikhs at the World War 1 memo­r­ial in Bel­gium and at the in­stal­la­tion of the bust of the First Sikh ruler -Ma­haraja Ran­jit Singh in St. Tropez, France last year, Har­jin­der Singh Kukreja has taken on the man­tle of ex­pe­ri­enc­ing and fur­ther­ing the pris­tine glory and her­itage of the Sikhs.

“Some time back, I did sky-div­ing with the full tur­ban on, and now scuba div­ing. I love telling the world that this tur­ban is my iden­tity, this tur­ban is no hin­drance to any­thing that I want to do. The Sikhs re­spect their own Das­tar or Pa­gri -Tur­ban and the head-gears of all com­mu­ni­ties -the Hi­jab, the Kip­pah and the Dhukku -the colour­ful head­gear of African men and women”, said Har­jin­der Singh Kukreja de­scrib­ing his ad­ven­ture into the un­known, thou­sands of miles away in a mod­ern Mus­lim so­ci­ety that wel­comed his stay with open arms. “All head­gear is re­spect for God too,” he fur­ther added.

Sur­rounded by 4 pro­fes­sional divers, breath­ing and walk­ing un­der­wa­ter with the tur­ban on, feed­ing the colour­ful va­ri­ety of trop­i­cal fish of the Mediter­ranean and Augean va­ri­ety, this young Sikh car­ried a 32-kg hel­met on his sky-blue tur­ban which was so eas­ily blend­ing with the clear green­ish-blue wa­ters from the Mediter­ranean Sea.

Prior to take­off back home from Is­tan­bul, speak­ing to The World Sikh News on the phone, Har­jin­der Singh Kukreja said, “this was new ex­plo­ration un­der­wa­ter, so I thought that in keep­ing with the Sikh tra­di­tion of Lan­gar -com­mu­nity kitchen, why not take some food for the fish. Our Gu­rus have al­luded to an­i­mal life of all va­ri­eties and it was an en­joy­able and soul-sat­is­fy­ing ex­pe­ri­ence feed­ing the fish.”

For the World Sikh News, Har­jin­der Singh Kukreja is the de facto am­bas­sador of the Sikh peo­ple. For us, his next des­ti­na­tion may be a trip to the moon with his sky-blue tur­ban on and like Neil Arm­strong we would all be hap­pily say­ing, “yet an­other small step for Har­jin­der Singh Kukreja, but one big leap for the Sikhs!”