Submitted by Ishraaj Singh Jolly

My family moved from India to the United States of America when I was six months old. Therefore, essentially every conscious memory I have is of being American.

In spite of this, I spent my elementary and middle school years being picked on and discriminated against. I was the only boy in the entire school with unshaven hair and a turban. I remember the feelings of hurt, guilt, shame and embarrassment I was hounded by, in spite of having done no wrong.

However, I learnt some extremely positive things from this negative experience. I learnt that people fear the unknown, the unfamiliar. Hate arises out of this fear. Therefore, the first step is to dispel the darkness of this ignorance with the light of knowledge. The more information that people have of different cultures, their food, their dress, their beliefs, the less they need to fear and to more to appreciate.

This process must begin early, with young children who are much more amenable to the new experiences. Schools help by teaching about different countries, their history, literature, and their contributions to the world. Communities encourage this knowledge when they celebrate the festivals of different regions, hold exhibitions of arts and crafts, music and dance, world literature days and so on.

As one gets to sample the richness and variety of different ethnicities, one realizes how impoverished our world would be without them. If we consider our world to be a well-made, fragrant potpourri, with each ethnic group contributing a particular fragrance, removing even a single group would alter the very delicate balance and ruin the final product.

It is true that man is not an island unto himself. Man is a social animal. He needs to interact with his fellow beings. The more varied, this group is the richer his experience and the better his performance. After all, humanity has always had the yearn for knowledge.

If you consider any of the modern world languages, they have been enriched by words from other languages. Words like "shampoo" and "chutney" in the English language have been borrowed from Hindi, and English words like "platform" and "signal" are commonly used in India. The German language is based on Sanskrit, the same as Hindi and numerous other Indian languages. Italian, Spanish, French and English are all Latin-based languages.

The same kind of exchange has happened with food, music, literature, and even fashion.

Pizza, originally from Italy is equally at home in America, India, Pakistan, Australia, Bahrain, along with a host of other countries. Spaghetti, considered an Italian food, is a modified form of noodles, which owe their origin to China. Tandoori Chicken, a specialty of Indian cuisine, is a must in most British royal feasts and British take-outs.

While western music is part of the lives of the youth in almost every country, Bhangra, a vibrant North Indian dance form, has made inroads into exclusive clubs in America and the United Kingdom. It is not an uncommon sight to see young Americans jiving to Bhangra rhythms.

If one were to see the fashion runways today, it would be difficult to say where in the world Carmen Sandiego is. There is such a fusion and bind of the East and the West.

God, the master painter, has given us a full pallet of colors so that we the inhabitants of this world can paint a beautiful, vivid and vibrant picture. When the bigots talk of racial purity and ethnic cleansing, they are removing essential colors from the magnificent rainbow. They are negating the very God is whose name they say they are taking those actions. No religion of God condones racial bigotry.

In the Guru Granth Sahib, the scared holy book of the Sikhs, it is written:

"Awall Allah Noor Upaya,
Kudrak Kay Sabh Banday,
Ek Noor Tay Joug Upjia,
Kaur Bhaloug Ko Manday."

It means that God first created light and then by his omnipotence made all the mortals. From the One light has welled up the entire universe. Hence, whom can we call good and who bad. Therefore, when we hurt or harm another human being, we hurt God himself.

In fact, the sacred Guru Granth Sahib is a compilation of the works of the nine Sikh Gurus and includes the teachings of Hindu Muslim saints like Kabir Das jee and Farid jee. It is truly a secular work which stresses tolerance and assimilation of the good teachings no matter from which religion or race they originate.

Similarly, different religions have stressed the importance of treating all human beings as our brethren. The Christian Ten Commandments states that saving a human life is above the observance of any other rule, the Hindu greeting of Namaste which means that I bow to the divine in you, all teach us to be good to and to respect all of God's creatures. And yet selfish and ignorant people exploit peoples' religious sentiments to spread hatred and bias.

Carl Jung, the famous German psychologist propagated the theory of the Collective Unconscious. In simple words, he believed that all humanity had a group memory and that even if a generation of humanity were wiped out, the group memory would be revived in the next generation. He said this to explain why people living in different regions and diverse backgrounds still shared similar myths of creation, death, the Flood, and the Apocalypse, as also symbols like the Snake, the fear of darkness, as well as the positive connotations of light. Joseph Campbell, another great mind of the 20th century came to similar conclusions and recently scientists say that they have isolated a God gene, whereby human beings are predisposed to spirituality and a seeking of God, almost like a tiny microchip in our genome.

With all this evidence piling up, how can we hate another human being? It the wisdom of all the sages in the past have not been enough for us, maybe we should listen to the modern day sages, like the researchers of the genome project. They inform us that all humanity shows 99.9 percent our exact genome. All the diversity amongst us is caused by the .1 percent difference. And what a difference! How amazing and beautiful it is!

I think it is up to us, the youth who are inheriting this wonderful planet to learn to appreciate and embrace our diversity and then and only then can our dream of a utopian society come true.