Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. The My castaway this week is Lord Inderjut Singh, creator of the Sikh

messenger magazine and co-founder of the Interfaith Network.

He also has the distinction of being the first member of the House of Lords to Weirr turban,

although given his family history, he had to get used to standing out from the crowd pretty early on.

The Singh family arrived in England from Raal Pindy in 1933 and were at the time part of an Asian community in Birmingham that numbered little more than a thousand.

His dad, an experienced doctor, initially found it

impossible to get work and more than 25 years later my castaway would find that

race was still an issue when in spite of his first-class degree in engineering no one in the

UK was willing to offer him a job either which might go some way to explaining why much of his

time since has been spent trying to build bridges between apparently disparate communities and faiths.

He says if God had human emotions, I believe the dominant one would be total exasperation at the antics of our human tribe.

So good morning and welcome Indarjitzing.

You're known to Radio 4 listeners then

for your contributions to thought for the day.

When you do it, are you conscious of representing the Sikh

perspective or are you simply conscious of representing a spiritual perspective?

I don't think there's much difference between both because the Sikh

perspective is looking outward at the whole commonalities between religions.

The ethnic makeup of our nation is under scrutiny, I would say almost like never before right now here in the UK.

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