Your are presently viewing material from our prior layout. If you will find our latest articles by clicking the logo. Thank you, The Sikh Foundation
Land of freedom, opportunity
Editor’s note: As the 20th century draws to a close, the Appeal-Democrat
spoke with Yuba, Sutter and Colusa county residents, young and old, to
reflect on memories of the past, talk about their life as it is now and
what they hope the future will bring.
Harold Kruger
Appeal-Democrat
Jasbir Singh Kang came to the United States in 1986 seeking “better
Opportunity, more freedom.”
He found both. “There’s no other country like America in the world,” he said. “I
think it’s a big triumph we can teach the rest of the world that people
with different views can co-exist and can use their differences for the
betterment of society as a whole.” Now he’s looking forward to the millennium, which offers him an
opportunity to look back at his 37 years.
“It gives you the opportunity to look back at history, do some
introspection, how we can affect the future and how we can make things
better for us, the whole humanity,” Kang said.
He helps humanity by being a doctor in Yuba City. He earned his
medical degree from the Government Medical College of the Punjabi
University in India in 1986.
After he arrived in the United States, he completed a three-year
residency training in internal medicine at Cook County Hospital in Chicago.
He then looked to move on and explored several areas. He said he chose
Yuba-Sutter because it reminded him of his native Punjab.
In 1991, he started practicing at the Peach Tree Clinic in Linda
because he felt an obligation to “serve the underserved.”
He opened his own practice in Yuba City in 1995.
Looking at what the 20th century brought to the world of medicine and
technology and ahead to what the new millennium could hold, Kang said he
hopes the 21st century will allow people to learn lessons from the past.
“Man is man’s worst enemy,” he said. “No other disease or natural
disaster does what man does to man. We should try to learn how we can be
more civilized and co-exist with all the differences.”
Those differences were never more apparent than in his native India,
Kang said.
“My personal memory which changed my life was when the Indian army
invaded the Golden Temple in 1984 and there were riots in New Delhi,” he
said. “That really was the most dramatic memory. I never expected those
things can happen in a democratic country.”
Still with all the problems, Kang said, the 20th century produced a
bounty of breakthroughs.
“Being a physician, I think we made more progress in the medical field
than in any time in history,” he said.
But there’s still more to be done, Kang said.
“We have all the technology and the knowledge, yet we are still not
able to use that to improve the quality of life. There are still people on
this planet dying from very treatable diseases.”
Antibiotics were probably the greatest development for medical science
in the 20th century, he said.
“They saved the most lives,” he said. “I think antibiotics and
immunization were the biggest inventions which benefited the masses.”
The Internet also is significant, Kang said, because it puts medical
information at this fingertips.
“All the information is one strike away,” he said.
The Internet also provides some measure of freedom for people in
closed societies.
“It gives freedom to people in other parts of the world who are
suppressed and have so much censorship,” he said. “The Internet is a big
symbol of freedom of speech.”
Looking to the next century, Kang said his biggest concern is “the
uncontrolled growth of population in certain parts of the world and some
of the countries developing nuclear weapons, which can be the biggest harm
to mankind.”
But Kang is confident about the future because of his “strong belief
in the human spirit. It can have ups and downs, but the human desire to
succeed and survive has persisted and that will lead us to a better
society in the future.”
He said it is important that the family unit continue to be central.
“The only thing that bothers me,” he said, “we human beings,
especially in America, even though the individual is very important, we
should not let the families be destroyed. It’s very important for families
to exist. The material success should not destroy families.”