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Just 7 years after the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, the awards this year have been a triumph for Asian talent. The biggest winner of the evening was the film ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’, which won 7 awards. When Michelle Yeoh was asked how she felt about becoming the first Asian woman to win Best Actress, she talked about the importance of representation on screen, adding “I hope that I’m not the last, and this is just the beginning”. New beginnings and fresh starts are on the minds of many of us at the moment. It may not feel like it but Spring officially starts in just a few days’ time. For Sikhs in particular, today is the first day of the New Year. The Sikh New Year hasn’t really been a major festival in the faith’s calendar, and in fact when I was growing up, I along with many Sikhs across the world mistakenly believed that the festival of Vaisakhi in mid-April was the start of the Sikh New Year. If you go online and search for it, most websites still refer to it as being Vaisakhi instead of the 14th of March. However, since a new calendar system was introduced a quarter of a century ago to ensure that the Sikh calendar was distinct from those for other religious communities, a new generation of Sikhs has emerged for whom the 14th of March is important and significant. For them, it marks a new beginning, an opportunity to take stock and look forward to what the following 12 months will bring. The calendar system has caused division within the Sikh community, with some still marking the festivals in accordance with the ancient calendar of Northern India as they consider that to be definitive. But those who introduced it felt that the reforms would make the Sikh faith stronger, uniting the community and allowing it to use its own lens to describe itself through rather than a system which predated the faith. Within the Sikh scriptures, there is a calendar poem composed by Guru Arjan Dev, the 5th Guru, which goes through each of the 12 months. Gurdwaras will mark today with a reading for this new month. The Guru says “In the month of Chet, by meditating on the Almighty, a deep and profound joy arises”. It’s the start of something new, and with it, the sense of the ever present and ever constant Divine being with us. The new and yet the familiar. Like Michelle Yeoh, I look forward with hope to this new beginning, and as the curtain rises on this new year, I can’t wait to see what the next 12 months have in store.