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Good morning. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” Those were the words of Jawaharlal Nehru exactly 75 years ago today, when India gained its independence from British rule. It was a pivotal moment in global history as around 400 million people across the subcontinent found themselves living in the newly formed countries of India and Pakistan. However, freedom came at a very high human price, with the Partition of Punjab and Bengal resulting in each of the provinces being cleaved in two. Families were separated from loved ones, and people became separated from the towns and villages they had called home. Punjab literally means the ‘land of the five rivers’, and in 1947 it became the land of two rivers in Pakistan and three in India. The name didn’t change, but the lived reality most certainly did, and since that day, very few Punjabis have had the chance to visit both the Indian and the Pakistani sides. Sikhs in particular found that many places that had supreme importance within the faith were suddenly out of bounds as they fled to India. The impact of Partition was so profound that a new line was inserted into the Ardas, the Sikh prayer recited every day before and at the end of any important tasks, to ask the Almighty to allow Sikhs unrestricted access to worship at the birthplace of Guru Nanak and all other gurdwaras and shrines which had been separated from the faith due to Partition The concept of being separated from that which we love has a wider resonance within Sikh philosophy. All living creatures are considered to be separated from their true love, the Divine Creator, and the ultimate purpose of life is to be reunited with the Divine. The pain and suffering during Partition was great with an estimated 1 million killed and 10 million displaced, and the memories have still not faded many generations later. However, Guru Nanak’s memory has led to a compromise of sorts between India and Pakistan at the gurdwara built where he passed away almost 500 years ago. Since 2019, people from both countries, Sikhs and non-Sikhs alike, have been able to undertake visa-free travel with relative ease to Kartarpur, and some have used the sacred land as an opportunity to meet up with loved ones and even siblings they haven’t seen for over seven decades. The situation is far from perfect, but it remains a glimmer of hope in the midst of the perennial tensions between the two nations. In the words of Guru Ram Das, the 4th Sikh Guru, “All living beings are Your playthings. The separated ones meet, and by great good fortune, those suffering in separation are reunited once again”.