Word: punjab
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...string cot in the courtyard of the Golden Temple of Amritsar lay Master Tara Singh, 76, political leader of India's 6,000,000 Sikhs. Masterji, as he is called by his followers in the Punjab, was entering the second month of a fast he had sworn to keep unto death, or until the Indian government grants his demand for a Punjabi Suba-a separate, Sikh-dominated state. Few fasts since the days of Mahatma Gandhi's Empire-baiting hunger strikes had caused such a stir in India...
Though criticized by many for "debasing" the almost sacred ritual of the soulcleansing fast as practiced by the Mahatma, Tara Singh knows what he wants: he hopes to force Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to partition about two-thirds of the Punjab's 47,456 square miles into an acU ministrative area independent of Hindu domination. The Punjabi-speaking Sikhs, whose monotheistic religion is an offshoot of the Hindu but without its caste system and swarms of gods and demigods, are the only one of India's 14 major linguistic groups without a separate state...
...bearded divines from the East were the Orthodox Archbishop of Thyateira in a brocade cape of gold and scarlet, the Metropolitan of Carthage, and the Most Rev. Nikodim, Archbishop of Yaroslavl and Rostov, representing the Patriarch of Moscow. Anglican bishops came from New York, Gibraltar, Amritsar in the Punjab, Borneo, Jordan, the Sudan and Quincy, Ill. A congregation of 4,000 was waiting for them...
Touring the Punjab hinterland, Shriver's first stop was at Daon Paren, a village of some 300 houses and huts. Peering inside such dwelling places, Shriver saw a sick old woman lying in a rag-covered bed, asked where she could get medical aid. He was told that a health center about four miles away was the only place where medicine could be obtained. Inspecting a relatively comfortable hut, Shriver remarked: "This guy is really well off." He was quietly informed that the hut's owner sustained himself and his family by working as a taxi driver...
Driving from village to village through the Punjab countryside, Shriver was struck by the fact that Indian farmers huddle together in villages rather than living in houses on their own land; again, it was explained that tillable land is too precious in India to clutter up with buildings. As he made his rounds of the villages, Peace Corpsman Shriver seemed suspicious that things might have been fancied up in preparation for his arrival; he tested with his forefinger the whitewash on walls to make certain it was not still damp, turned to escorting Indian officials for assurance that there...