‘We live side by side but do not know each other.’

No ‘other’ way: Sanjive Mahandru says we share more similarities than differences

My first Yearly Meeting was a few years ago now, just a day visit from Birmingham. You may have noticed me, I was the brown-faced man wearing the Punjabi dress with gold Indian slippers. The energy caught me and I ended up staying for two days and two nights. Friends gave me love and time and loaned me a sleeping bag and floor space at a Meeting house. On the Sunday I joined worship there when a white middle-class lady in her seventies – posh with a lively glint in her eyes – said to me that ‘Quakers tend to be a bit pompous sometimes’.

I find it a humbling experience when Friends do not take themselves too seriously; it reminds me of how George Fox said we could ‘walk cheerfully over the world’. I am brown – Indian/British, born a Hindu in Birmingham (though I prefer to say I belong to the Vedic faith as the word Hindu is a recent word in the timeline of Indian history, and has some negative conations to it). My parents emigrated to Birmingham from the Punjab, and my mum was a refugee in her own country. She came from Lahore before the partition, when India was divided into two.

I was searching for something: the Bahá’í Faith, the Zoroastrians, Buddhism, Sikism, Jains and the Christian faith – I studied, read and worshipped with them all. How similar we are, but the media talks only about our differences. I made a study of humans. We live side by side but do not know each other. In Birmingham black, white and brown people tend to live in their areas, and maybe we feel safer within our own ethnic groups. The churches are white or black. How many Quakers make the effort and time to meet and get to know people who are not of their own reflection? I was at Yearly Meeting when they kept talking about diversity, a word that was mentioned so often that it made me feel uncomfortable. Looking round, there was only a handful of BAME people. It made me think. 

On Radio XL in Birmingham a chat show was discussing diversity. Asian callers rang in to say they had many white and black friends. But when the host asked how many of these so-called friends come to your home for tea or coffee, or God forbid dinner, there was silence.

I have made the effort to share my home with people from different ethnic backgrounds by using a couch-surfing website. Romanians, Czechs, Russians, Turks, Germans, French, Italians, Iranians, Americans, English and Indians have all lived in my home. I am here to say that we are more similar than we are different. What differences there are make us more interesting and add to our variety. I happen to be an Arya Samajist/Quaker and I see the light in all, including the plants and the trees, but I belong firstly to the human race.

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