I was teaching my 11 a.m. English composition class a few days ago when I received two phone calls in succession, just as I was titillating my students with tales of thesis construction and coordinating conjunctions. I have a constant fear that I’m going to be in the middle of sternly warning a student not to use their cell phone in class or it will adversely affect their participation grade . . . when my phone rings. So, fortunately, I had it on vibrate. The first voicemail was from my sister. The message, a mix of Punjabi and English, started with a deep breath, indicating she was about to disperse a lot of information in a very short amount of time: “Papa isn’t picking up his phone and he never sent me his itinerary so I don’t know what time his flight is and we have to drive to San Francisco to pick him up. Call me as soon as you get this message.”

The second voicemail was from my dad and the reason I stepped out of the room while I let my students ponder over the great ethical question of whether Frankenstein would have freaked out over his creation had he looked like a male model. I thought perhaps there was a flight delay. My parents had flown to Seattle to drive up with some relatives to Canada to attend a concert by Mamta Joshi, a very well known Sufi singer from Punjab, who was singing, “Umber Di Shehzadiye : To the Princess of the Skies,” one of my dad’s poems, and had especially invited him to attend the concert.

My dad’s message, purely in Punjabi, which I’m including here simply because the focus and urgency of it is so entertaining in its original wording: “Mai apne blog te gya te dvd ni disdi. Menu phone kareen.” Click. which roughly translates to “I went to my blog site and I don’t see the DVD. Call me.” He calls an embedded youtube link by many names; DVD is just one of them. His flight, it turned out, was the next day, but I find the transformation of my father’s priorities fascinating.

Just a few years ago, my dad would have been the one incessantly ringing my sister, me, and anyone remotely involved in operation pick-up-mum-and-dad-from airport, making sure all of us knew the flight and gate number in addition to the type of engine the aircraft they would be flying on was using. These days, however, making sure his websitewebsite, tweets, blog, youtube channel, and FaceBook fan page are updated is more of a priority.

A Quick Snapshot

My father, Pashaura Singh Dhillon, a Punjabi singer, poet, and retired landscape architect, has a beautiful voice, and at over 70 years old, has more friends, fans, twitter followers, and page hits than me and my wife do! He doesn’t have any aspirations of being rich and famous. He’s perfectly content living on his acre and a half with chickens, fruit trees, and even a tandoor in his back yard.

But no matter what, poetry has always been a part of my father’s life. I don’t recall a time when he didn’t have a little notebook in hand with scribbled lines of Punjabi, or wasn’t at least humming a tune. He has always been very passionate about social issues, particularly those involving Sikh history, tradition, the environment, and human rights.

Retired?

You wouldn’t realize my father is retired by looking at the way he spends his mornings. He loves going for a morning walk with our dog, Moti, collecting eggs from the kukrian (chickens) before doing some yoga. Then making an omelet for breakfast with fresh veggies from the garden. In the evenings he and my mum have some delicious grub from the homemade tandoor and yes, that does occasionally include tandoori chicken. Or rather, it did. My mum, as of a few months ago declared the chickens part of the Dhillon family. And apparently we don’t eat family members. We can still steal their eggs for our breakfast though. After his omelette, he does a little gardening and on Tuesdays, goes golfing with his good friend, Glenn. He sounds like a retired man so far doesn’t he?

After the early  morning hours, my dad gives me a ring and engages in small talk for under 30 seconds. It’s very impressive and usually goes something like this: “Mera Puth aj ki kariya? Kavya te Sona ki karde? Acha aj mai apna blog likh ke te fer mai apne FaceBook te jaake wall te ki likhaan?” which translates to : How is my son doing today? What are Kavya (my 8 month old daughter) and Sona (my wife) doing? Right, so today after I write my blog, what should I write on the wall in FaceBook?” He takes blogging and FaceBook quite seriously, even if he isn’t one hundred percent sure about the difference between writing on somebody’s wall and somebody writing on his wall. Or what a wall is, really. And has no idea what you’re on about when you “like” a post. That conversation will probably take place tomorrow morning though! And let’s not forget his weekly radio show that he co-hosts on KBIF 900 AM in Fresno. As focused as he is in the mornings, and even though he thinks he isn’t very tech savvy, he manages to use Skype to video chat with his grand daughter quite regularly. He even uses it as an adjective!

He has always been very active in the community, and something I’ve been trying to ween him away from so he can concentrate on his poetry. Yes, it’s all my doing., And he has significantly weeded out the million organizations and events that were running his life. So now, he still has some organizations and events that he’s part of, but they are all things that he has a passion for. One of those things is the Punjabi language promotion in schools and colleges and bringing Sikh awareness to the community.

And while this endeavor has been fairly fruitful with getting the gears churning in being a part of creating basic level Punjabi classes at the school and college/university level, as a poet, he wants more than a generation of kids who can have elementary conversations in Punjabi. He wants them to appreciate the language for its literary traditions. But it is a powerful stepping stone that he is a part of.

His collection of poetry, audio cd, and magazine articles were all limited to a Punjabi speaking and reading audience rendering a poem about the importance of  Punjabi language a little redundant. People who read these magazines on their own accord, even in India, are definitely not my generation. So essentially, it was the equivalent of passing out fliers to PETA to raise their awareness of animal crueltly. As soon as he started receiving comments on how moved people were by the translated and Punjabi poems set to images and his voice on youtube, he began to want to do more. So when he started the blog, we decided to just call a section Moving image Slideshow.

The idea to create a Moving Image Slideshow set to my father’s voice came about when he wrote a poem about Barack Obama back when Obama  was still campaigning. My father was and continues to be an avid supporter. The poem was entirely in Punjabi, which we released on youtube to nominal success. But then after tons of comments asking for an English translation, we released the translated version and it shot to over 40,000 hits:

But the main reason we continued with the English translations was that it was reaching a completely new demographic that my father had never envisioned would be interested in his poems. And growing up, my father would sort of tell me the meaning to the poems he wrote, but I wouldn’t really understand the context or even if the word choice he used actually conveyed the meaning. Most of the time, the poetry was gone the second he started translating.

One of my favorite poems of his is called “Umber Di Shehzadiye : To the Princess of the Skies.”  The premise is incredibly creative and was written over 40 years ago. It is a poem of the Earth writing a letter to the Moon, her sister, warning her of the nature of man, who, having destroyed Earth, is now attempting to woo the Moon. In an incredible stroke of luck, a very well known Sufi singer from Punjab, Mamta Joshi, listened to the poem on youtube and became my father’s “friend” on FaceBook. They started chatting on FaceBook and she wanted to sing his poem using Sufi  taals at her first concert in Canada.

Initially, his fans were people that he knew. But within a very short amount of time, that wasn’t and is definitely not the case now. Before his FaceBook. Blog, Youtube, and twittering, my father would routinely call me to figure out how to open Microsoft word. Now he rings me to get my suggestion on more SEO terms to attach on his blog post. Pretty soon, I’ll be the one ringing up my dad for technical advice!

Here is his most recent blog post: Kavita Di Kahani, the Story Behind the Poem “Dheeaan,” a powerful poem about the value of daughters in our society. If you like his music, check out his page at PashauraSinghDhillon.com.

It’s hard not to be impressed with how technologically savvy my father has become, given his age. Even if he still types with one finger. I won’t say my father is Superman, but if Superman had a FaceBook or Twitter account . . .