r/PunjabSuba

Jathedar Singh Sahib Giani Kuldeep Singh Gargaj rejected the request citing the December 28, 2025 decision by the Five Singh Sahibans banning films, animation films and artificial intelligence videos on ancient Sikh warriors as Nalwa falls in this category. The proposal was made by co-producer Shri Bhavesh Bhanushali of Mumbai-based Bhanushali Studios Limited through a letter to the Jathedar seeking discussion with him and Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee members. Secretariat in-charge S. Bagicha Singh said written rejection along with copies of the original order and English translation has been sent to caution for future Sikh subject films.

Nobody told me what the word means.

I heard it in songs and assumed a ring,

a simple metal loop,

a love story with the usual arithmetic.

I nodded along.

***

But a chhalla and a jhalla are more than rhymes.

Jhalla is a madman.

At Harike Pattan,

where the Beas and the Satluj meet,

a boatman named Jhalla sent his son into the river.

The son never came back.

***

Chhalla beri boor e.

He is the blossom of the ber tree,

the flower that arrives before the fruit.

The fruit never came.

This is not a Shakespearean tragedy.

This is the cruelty of being.

This is what drowning looks like when the river is slow:

you don't notice how far from shore you've drifted until you can't see it anymore.

***

Panjaab’s grief was never allowed to be silent.

It was always performed, always shared, always witnessed.

But the witnessing changes nothing.

Panjaab sent its sons into the world.

And then Panjaab stood on the bank and waited.

The sons sent envelopes full of money

but kept the grief.

because the grief had no postal address.

***

The chhalla is given as a promise.

A circle with no end,

meant to mean forever.

Chhalla keeps returning to the loss.

He keeps circling the void of the thing he used to be.

The river didn't kill Chhalla. The river just revealed what was always true:

some men are blossoms that arrive before the fruit,

and the storm just has to show up before the fruit does.

- fatey joote

 

I have written a full essay on Chhalla and its influence of Panjaabi folk tradition, you can read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/fateyjoote/p/chhalla?r=202jha&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

The psychological tendency to apply rigorous logic only to other religions while shielding one’s own faith from similar scrutiny is a central theme in the outsider test for faith developed by John W. Loftus. This cognitive bias often stems from the geographical lottery of birth, where individuals adopt the dominant religious beliefs of their culture and upbringing without objective analysis. While the human belief engine naturally utilizes patternicity and agenticity to find meaning and purpose, it frequently defaults to rationalization rather than genuine skepticism when evaluating inherited doctrines. This protective mechanism is reinforced by a deep-seated fear of eternal punishment, social ostracization, and existential dread, causing a significant disconnect between how we perceive foreign mythologies and our own personal truths. By failing to use the same logical standards for our childhood religion that we use to dismiss the claims of others, we remain trapped in a cycle of cultural conditioning and motivated reasoning that prevents a truly universal application of critical thinking and intellectual honesty.

...The word jugni comes from jugnu, a firefly. A small, self-illuminating thing that travels through darkness. The metaphor is so obvious it embarrasses itself: she carries her own light. But what people forget about fireflies is that the light is not free. Every flash is a metabolic event, a tiny expenditure of the body’s resources. The firefly loses a little of itself with every flicker. And nobody thinks about this when they are praising the fireflies.

Jugni also means an ornament. A necklace. A necklace that does not choose who wears it. The necklace also does not decide when it comes off.

Jugni is the light and she is the decoration and she is not, in either version, the one who gets to rest.

In Punjabi folk music, Jugni is a traveler. She arrives in a city and she looks around and she comments on what she finds. She is funny. She is incisive. She notices everything.

Jugni jaa varhi Kalkatte — Jugni arrived in Kolkata. And then she tells you exactly what is wrong with Kolkata, with precision and wit, and there is a refrain, and you laugh, and then something catches in your throat because buried inside the joke was the truth. The children are hungry. The women are helpless. The lips are sewn but the eyes keep weeping.

She delivers tragedy as comedy. This is her gift and it is also her sentence.

She is the one who makes you laugh about the thing you cannot cry about. She holds the community’s grief in the shape of a punchline so that the community can process it without collapsing. She does this at every stop on her route. She arrives, she observes, she makes the unbearable bearable, and then she leaves. She is always leaving. That is the structure of the Jugni verse.

She arrives, she speaks, she goes.

Where does she go? No verse has ever addressed this...

Full Essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/fateyjoote/p/jugni?r=202jha&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web