The Sikhs Are Coming!

By S.S Walia

In The Sikhs are Coming!, Jack Singh, a struggling screenwriter, fills his notebook with observations and scene sketches as he attempts to write a first draft script on the Komagata Maru incident for Rupa Gosavi, an award-winning Indo-Ugandan-Canadian producer. When Rupa tries to get Jack to write a terrorist story instead of a pioneer story he realizes Rupa is not working alone and that her Anglo-European-Canadian financiers have a hidden agenda of retelling an old lie in a new way with a new medium. This is both one writer’s journey and an eye-opener for anyone working in the film industry. Part diary, part script, Singh unveils how he slowly discovered the story of the Komagata Maru and its significance to Canadians of East Indian ancestry. Follow Singh as he tries to consolidate two very different visions of the story in a desperate attempt to have his first feature film produced without compromising his roots or vilifying his ancestors. Republished in digital format with permission by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312648746

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The Sikhs Are Coming!

Copyright

The Sikhs are Coming! © 2011 S.S Walia.  All rights reserved. Based on the original unproduced ‘Snakes and Ladders’ teleplay series episode ‘The Line’. The Sikhs are Coming! © 2014 Digital Edition by LBL Digital. 

This is a work of fiction. All characters, their distinctive likeness and related elements featured in this book are registered or unregistered trademarks of the author(s). If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by an information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.  This is a work of parody and/or speculative fiction. All of the characters, names, products, incidents, organizations, religions and dialogue in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used satirically, as parody and/or fictitiously. Snakes and Ladders™ is an unregistered trademark of S.S Walia. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-312-64874-6

The Line

Vancouver. September 15, 2011. So Chief, Four years and I finally realize what I will and will not do for what I want.  Turdukin Films Studios was a great place to learn and grow, but I realize that if I’m going to write and make the kind of movies I want to make, I’m going to have to do it on my own. What surprises me the most is that it took an experience in Vancouver to help me see the truth of who I had become in the last few years. What, oh what, you wouldn’t do to be produced or published!? It’s ridiculous! Sell out your voice. Your community. Your ancestors. Yourself. By the time you realize what you’ve done, it’s too late, and there’s nothing in your work you’re really proud of because deep down you know…you know you’ve sacrificed your truth to please the powers that be—those who work hard to maintain an infrastructure that instils within creators an ‘invisible editor’ that silences the muse. An ‘invisible editor’ that has creators warp their creations to maintain ‘their’ status quo.  Sounds like a conspiracy and it probably is. Without going off on a tangent, the more I think about it the more I believe schools exist to develop one kind of intelligence—an intelligence that works well in a corporate environment—at the expense of the manifold skills and intelligences that exist in a human being. It’s the ‘invisible editor’ that gets us thinking in terms of points, reward points—be it marks or money—instead of artistic virtues like truth, creativity and innovation. In this view schools are nothing more than a series of graduated Skinner boxes where we learn how to maximize cheese yield without ever really questioning our need to maximize cheese yield. Many no longer have the creativity or the critical thinking skills to question the Skinner box, never mind think outside the Skinner box as it were. And it’s precisely that need to maximize cheese yield that gives the ‘invisible editor’ all his power to silence the muse. From what I can tell the implantation of this ‘invisible editor’ begins in school where we are taught to follow and emulate not challenge and create. In school where we are taught to fear making mistakes. In school where a mistake is defined as anything that goes against the status quo. In school where we are taught to please the teacher who dispenses marks like money and grades like status. Once we learn to please teachers to maximize marks and status we go out into the bigger Skinner box that is the real world ready to maintain and defend the status quo—ready and willing to please money-and-title-dispensing bosses. Studios. Producers. Publishers. Even a freelance creator does it. He really does whether he knows it or not. You see it all the time. Our ‘invisible editors’ have us emulate the ‘best kids in the class’ or, as Picasso once said, ‘the whitest sheep in the herd’. Screw the white sheep! The white sheep follow the farmer to the slaughter house. The white sheep follow the corporate elite to self-extinction. We need a lot more black sheep to get us out of our current mess. A lot more free thinkers who can think outside the Skinner box that puts profit before people and everything else. Our school system needs a new paradigm. Students need to learn how to creatively challenge authority and the status quo to bring change to the world without fearing the loss of marks or status. Schools need to encourage and foster critical thinking and creativity more. Much more. Our Canadian grant and subsidiary system should do the same. The exact same. Else, our system is just a government cheese-dispensing machine, and you end up with film companies like Turdukin, endlessly trying to warp a creation so as to obtain the most cheese from the government. That’s why you end up with producers constantly trying to emulate instead of innovate. That’s why producers won’t take chances with majority-minority protagonists or minority-minority protagonists. And that’s precisely why Rupa doesn’t want the protagonist of her Komagata Maru movie to be an orthodox Sikh even though the majority of the passengers on the Komagata Maru were orthodox Sikhs. She simply doesn’t want a protagonist with a turban and a beard because this, she believes, will upset mainstream audiences and her financers. She’s just not willing to take such a chance with her film. She wants her film to follow a clean shaven protagonist because that’s what Canadian movies do. Because that will mitigate risk. But, let’s be honest, the blame does not just fall on the Skinner system or producers like Rupa. The Sikh community in a little way needs to share the blame. The mark of a successful community, any successful community is its art and literature. Nothing says you’ve made it more as a community than a ‘Spike Lee’ or a ‘Steven Spielberg’. Yet we don’t really have one in North America. Not one. Not yet. We get one or two movies a year on a shoestring budget. But that doesn’t really cut it. Doesn’t make an impact. Doesn’t stimulate interest or dialogue in the country or community. Our community is overflowing with engineers and doctors…but little or no artists. Especially not mavericks—mavericks thinking outside the Skinner box. The Skinner box that promotes and produces media that seems to hurt us more than help us. What we need as a community is real movies of superior quality to take the next step and reach the next level in this country. Our ancestors courageously got us this far. They fought for and protected our right to enter this country. They fought for our right to vote and our right to be treated as equals even though we were British Subjects. The least we can do is get their stories right. Like it