Langar was served to over 200 homeless people at United Kingdom’s Birmingham station this Christmas.
A Sikh charity group on Christmas Eve hosted a feast for 200 homeless people inside a train station in Birmingham, England. Midland Langar Seva Society (MLSS), an organisation run by Randhir Singh Heer and Parmjit Singh, converted a part of the New Street Station in Birmingham into a temporary dining area with rows of tables and chairs.
Speaking to The Indian Express, Parmjit Singh said, “We served langar to over 200 homeless people in Birmingham among other food items. Their joy and happiness knew no bounds. This is the true spirit of Christmas — to serve those who are in need. The homeless people have no one to provide them with food. We decided to rope them in the celebrations so that they do not feel left out.”
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The dinner was hosted by Midland Langar Seva Society.
The all-vegetarian feast included tomato soup, roasted vegetables and cakes and custard for dessert. The guests also received gifts from Santa Claus who distributed winter wear donated by the local community.
A part of the New Street Station was converted into a dining hall to serve langar to over 200 homeless people.
Parmjit also said that the concept of Guru Nanak’s langar is not limited to any religion or festival.
“We keep distributing langar on a daily basis but here, the idea was to do it for the homeless. The volunteers prepared delicious food and served the homeless people we had invited to the station,” he said.
In June this year, the society had won the prestigious Queen’s Award, the highest honour given to local volunteer groups across the UK to recognize the outstanding work done in their own communities. Currently, the society serves langar in 17 cities across the UK.
Divya Goyal is a Principal Correspondent with The Indian Express, based in Punjab.
Her interest lies in exploring both news and feature stories, with an effort to reflect human interest at the heart of each piece. She writes on gender issues, education, politics, Sikh diaspora, heritage, the Partition among other subjects. She has also extensively covered issues of minority communities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She also explores the legacy of India's partition and distinct stories from both West and East Punjab.
She is a gold medalist from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Delhi, the most revered government institute for media studies in India, from where she pursued English Journalism (Print). Her research work on “Role of micro-blogging platform Twitter in content generation in newspapers” had won accolades at IIMC.
She had started her career in print journalism with Hindustan Times before switching to The Indian Express in 2012.
Her investigative report in 2019 on gender disparity while treating women drug addicts in Punjab won her the Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity in 2020. She won another Laadli for her ground report on the struggle of two girls who ride a boat to reach their school in the border village of Punjab.
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