One Wisdom, Many Homes

Amardeep Singh, in conversation with Manu Singh — an Awakin Call hosted by ServiceSpace

A boy is sent to boarding school at seven and, without ever being told why, keeps returning to the town near his hometown where Kabir chose to die. A man picks up a fistful of soil from a bridge where his own relatives were killed in 1947 — and then, standing there, decides not to carry it home. Twenty-one years into a celebrated corporate career, something in Amardeep Singh simply stopped, and he walked away without a plan for what came next. And on a chapter of history many Sikhs hold dear, he says flatly: “There is nothing like a Sikh empire.” What follows are the nuggets from a conversation that moves from a childhood mystery in Uttar Pradesh to a verse reinterpreted from scratch, and keeps landing, every time, on the same single word: oneness.

The boy who kept going back to Maghar

Sent to boarding school at seven, Amardeep says he can only rationalize this now, much later: growing up, whenever he came home to Gorakhpur, something pulled him twenty kilometers away to Maghar — the town where Kabir chose to die, sandwiched between two places sacred to the Indic tradition. To the east is Kushinagar, where the Buddha left his body; to the west, Maghar, where Kabir did. Kabir had spent his whole life on the banks of the Ganges in Kashi, a place, tradition holds, where dying guarantees you heaven — and then, near the end of his life, he deliberately packed his bags and left for a place considered its opposite, so unclean by comparison that dying there was said to send you to hell. “Just to prove that point, Kabir packs his bag and goes there, and he leaves his body there.” Only in recent years did Amardeep work out that Maghar itself is built from two words — mag, from Magadh, where the Buddha gave his sermons, and ghar, meaning home. “I have found, as you rightly said, Kabir before Nanak, and he's always fascinated me... I think the seed was planted by Kabir.”

He found himself leaping

Twenty-one years at American Express, finishing as head of revenue management for Asia Pacific — by every external metric, Amardeep was winning. In 2013, he walked away from all of it. “Many a times people think that I left to do this,” he said. “No, I did not leave to do this. Something just pulled the shutter down.” He offered the youth listening a question rather than advice: “What is it that you have done in your life that the energy should choose you for a bigger purpose? Yes, it's going to be tough — to run on a treadmill for so many years, and if the treadmill stops, it's going to disorient you. It's but obvious. Whether you do it by choice, or it happens by force, whatever be the reason, it's going to disorient you for a while.” “And then your ego starts coming down, because things are not going to happen the way you've been used to — and that's where the transformation starts happening.”

Interpretation, not translation

Asked to define the difference between the reinterpretation work he's doing now and straightforward translation, Amardeep pushed back on the word itself: “I would take the 're' out of it. I'll just say interpretation versus translation — because re means someone's done it absolutely wrong, and we're going to do a 're' of it. Interpretation is a different way of looking at things.” He gave an example: a devotional verse that goes charan kamal tere dhoye dhoye pivaa — “I wash your lotus feet, and drink the ambrosial nectar.”

That gap — between what a line says and what it means — is what pushed him and his wife to reinterpret, from scratch, more than 1,600 verses of Nanak, Kabir, and the other Bhakti-period saints, and to record and sing every one of them in the raga it was originally written in.

Guru Nanak - the second most travelled person in the world

There is no autobiography of Guru Nanak, and no biography written by Bhai Mardana, the Muslim companion who traveled with him for decades — nothing to authenticate where he actually went. What exists instead is 928 of his own verses. To understand his mind, Amardeep and his wife spent over a decade retracing his footsteps across nine countries and more than 150 sites, and turned it into Allegory: A Tapestry of Guru Nanak's Travels, a free 24-episode docuseries with no commercial objective behind it. The scale of the man himself, Amardeep said, tends to get lost in how little he's taught in schools on either side of the border: “He's the only saint who has traveled far and wide beyond the Indian subcontinent. In fact, he's the second most traveled person in the world, after Ibn Battuta.” None of the other Indian saints crossed the ocean; he's the only one who did.

There is no Sikh Empire

Amardeep opened this one bluntly, and said the Sikhs themselves won't like it: “There is nothing like a Sikh empire. There is a Punjab. There is a Lahore Darbar.” The label, he explained, was coined by the British after they annexed Punjab in 1849 — the last territory they took in the subcontinent, and one they saw through the lens of the Mughals they'd just replaced. Because the ruler on that side of the Sutlej happened to be Sikh, their own chronicles called it the Sikh Empire and the two wars they fought to take it the Anglo-Sikh Wars, and every historian since has repeated the label. “So what happens then? You now have made this to have a perception that no one else existed there.”

Monism, not monotheism

The single biggest thing that's changed in him, Amardeep said, is realizing that “Guru Nanak first and foremost founded nothing. He was a man on a quest. A faith followed him.” He traced the monotheism label back to the British, who looked at Sikh teaching and concluded it resembled the Abrahamic faiths they knew: God is one. “But the moment you go monotheistic, God is different from you. God is sitting up there.” In the Indic traditions he grew up inside, by contrast, “there's a space for every thought — you can be an atheist, a materialist, a Sankhya philosopher, a Vedantic non-dualist, a dualist, everything coexists.” What Nanak points to, underneath all of it, is Ekonkar — the energy that creates, sustains, and destroys. “There is nothing like God is distinct and separate from you. I start seeing oneness in everything around me. You and I get intertwined. The tree and I get intertwined. The animal and I get intertwined. We become one ecosystem, and we are just a bubble here for a little while.” In English, he said, the closest word isn't monotheism. It's monism — non-duality, advaita.

The soil under the bridge

Amardeep's own family carries the weight of Partition: his mother-in-law's parents were killed in the onslaught in Kashmir, and a distant aunt was left behind in Pakistan, raised as a Muslim, whom he eventually traced and found shortly before she passed. He grew up with the story of what happened at Muzaffarabad in October 1947 — people lined up on the bridge and shot on both sides. “That story had built a lot of hate in me,” he said. “And I entered with a very different perception into the country.” Everyone told him Pakistan-administered Kashmir was impossible to enter. His team tried anyway — no one stopped them that day, no checkpost — and he picked up a handful of soil from under the bridge to carry home. Then something stopped him.

That was the moment of change, he said. He dropped the soil, and came back. “Last 14 years of my life have changed me totally toward more positivity, more oneness, more inclusivity. Challenges will happen, negativities will always be there — we have to look beyond them.”

Devotion as self-unfoldment

Manu described watching devotion pour out of pilgrims at the Golden Temple, and admitted his own discomfort with devoting himself to a definition of faith that someone else had handed him. Amardeep's answer reframed the whole idea of devotion: “Devotion should be, as I understand from Nanak's perspective, towards self-unfoldment. The reason why he's giving you the word, or Kabir Sahib has given you the word, or Farid has given you the word, is to — through that — unfold yourself. Understand yourself, what your body's internally made up of.” The vocabulary of Gurbani — mind, ego, emotions, the five thieves inside the body — all points the same direction. “Ultimately, it's self-unfoldment. Once you've unfolded yourself, you start going back into your static consciousness. And that consciousness is the same everywhere. That's what these saints are talking about.” He added, without softening it: “But it's not everyone's cup of tea.”

Singing takes us to 36000 feet altitude

Amardeep drew a distinction between Shankaracharya's Vedanta — “a very structured, very well-articulated school,” where self-unfoldment happens through peeling back layers, with no bhakti, no singing — and the path of Kabir, Farid, Nanak, Jaidev, Ravidas, and Namdev, who are all, in his words, “proponents of the Bhakti period. They are singing. In the ecstasy moment of your thought process, you've discovered a jewel, and in ecstasy, you start singing.” Singing has its own risk, purely rational non-duality has another: “You can be a very rationalist-driven non-dualist of the Vedantic school, and you might just develop your ego out there. But the singing suppresses it down — singing brings humility.” “Singing takes you right up at that 36,000 feet. But no one is teaching you the grassroots level, so it has to be brought in together.” Left untethered from that grounding, he warned, devotion curdles into ritual: “Once a structure develops, a religion develops around a Bhakti school. Easiest is just to anchor into that faith — I have to go light a lamp, I have to go dip inside, I have to go bow down, and everything's going to happen. Now you've fallen back into the same trap these Bhakti saints were trying to take you away from.”

Bowing before the argument

“Nanak is not ridiculing anyone,” Amardeep said. “Nanak is questioning. Questioning and ridiculing are two different things.” His proof: episode 18 of the docuseries, set in the Kailash-Mansarovar region, where Guru Nanak meets the Nath Yogis and the Sidh Gosht — an intense philosophical dialogue — unfolds. Growing up, Amardeep was always told in the Gurdwara that Nanak won that dialogue. “There's no winning or losing out there. He's having a dialogue.” What people skip over, he said, is how it opens: “The divine powers have got us together. First, we, in humility, bow to that power. Then we bow to each other.” Only after that mutual bow — a level of respect already established — does the argument begin, and it can get fierce: “The dialogue can be very, very tough — it might, to an outsider, look like they're fighting. But it's a dialogue!” Nanak goes on to name the six schools of Indic philosophy — che ghar, che guru, che updesh — “six philosophical homes, six teachers, six different sermons” — before landing on the point: gur gur eko, the wisdom at the pinnacle is only one. Whichever tradition the divine is being sung in, that's the greatest one.

The next breath

Asked what it takes to build a pluralistic society, Amardeep turned the question back onto the idea of authorship itself, by way of a verse sung by Nanak (episode 22): “You see the word Aadmi (meaning human)? It's made up of two words — aa, to come, and dam, breath. Dam aaya: the breath comes, so therefore I exist. I exist because I've got the next breath. Therefore, I am Aadmi.” “My point is, I don't even know if I control my next breath. It is a fallacy if anyone thinks you are doing the projects, because you don't even control your thought. The thought comes to you.” The real question, he said, isn't who gets credit — it's why the thought arrives at all, and what you've done to be ready when it does. “When the thought comes to you, and you say, let's pick the bags and go ahead and do it — that's where the pluralism, the oneness, comes in.”

Balance sheet going red, parachute appearing

Not a single day was wasted across eighteen months of filming, Amardeep said — which mattered, because five cameramen still need to be paid daily whether or not anything gets shot. “We were going literally blind, with just a passion. Our balance sheet never saw anything into a green zone. We were always red or yellow, red or yellow, red or yellow. As I would go into red, a parachute would open from somewhere.” He's been banned from entering Pakistan three times — the first time after his book Lost Heritage, which showed the ruins of a historic Gurdwara the authorities would rather not have documented. “I called a spade a spade. I did my first book and called it Lost Heritage, because I truly believed it was lost heritage. I'm not mincing words.” Each time, somehow, the gates opened again. Coming home was no easier: “No one is going to look at the depth of the message that you've done... every intelligence agency is just trying to question you.” “I've faced a problem on all the sides. But yet, we've come out unscathed. That itself is the biggest miracle.”