Gurdaspur Diary: Harjit Kaur Saggal now toast of the town

Not all women are created equal. The best among them become Army officers. One such woman is Harjit Kaur Saggal. She was born and married in Gurdaspur and later shifted to Australia with her husband and son Dilraj Singh. She has become the toast of the town by becoming a proud officer in the Australian Army, an absolute rarity for a woman hailing from the backwaters of Punjab that Gurdaspur district is. Her achievement is being talked about in the entire district and particularly in Bahian village where she is married to Sarwan Singh Saggal. In 2009, she arrived in Australia to complete her Diploma in Business Management. By 2015, he had become a full fledged Australian citizen. Being the daughter of an Army Officer, Kashmir Singh, she studied in the best of army schools in India. Here ends the pleasant part and now starts the trial and tribulations of Harjit. Before getting inducted in the Army, she started suffering from bouts of Hypothyroidism which is a condition in which thyroid glands stop producing enough of certain hormones to sustain normal body functions. She displayed ample grit and determination to fight the disease. On the recommendation of her doctor, she started regularly going to the gym where she charted out an elaborate schedule for herself. “Get up, get out and get it done,” she would tell herself every day. She knew she had to get rid of the disease if she had to make a mark in life. And she finally triumphed. It was a triumph of her spirit more than a triumph of her physical being. Her news of getting appointed in the Australian army was greeted with glee with residents of Bahian village. The entire village is proud of Harjit Kaur Saggal. Local administration officials and NGOs are queuing up to facilitate Saggal whenever she decides to visit her home country. “Success is the doing, not the getting, in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be. If we do our best, we are a success,” said Saggal.

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Batala covid health officials get going

The Batala Civil Hospital authorities have started door-to-door vaccination of residents. On many occasions, the health teams come across politicians who too have started door-to-door campaigns in the absence of rallies which have been banned by the Election Commission of India (ECI). The vaccination rate has definitely improved with teams knocking the doors of even those people who were earlier reluctant to get themselves inoculated. Officials admit that the vaccination numbers are going up. Batala has definitely scored over all other satellite towns of Gurdaspur district where door- to-door jabs have yet to start. “We do not want complacency to trigger off yet another wave. Hence, we tend to keep the programme going,” said a doctor engaged in the process.

UK-1 is favourite brew of voters

It is a normal sight in Gurdaspur district to see the political class distributing the UK-1 brand of whiskey to voters. This is so because this type of liquor is cheap in Chandigarh and Haryana and politicians have no problems in ferrying it to this border district. The excise officials know this and hence are raiding sugarcane fields and tube-wells of leaders. It is at these places that the brew is stored. At Maujpur village located on the banks of river Beas, a local satrap tried to brow-beat the cops and the excise people but later relented. Eight bottles of UK-1 were recovered from his sugarcane fields. Now, he has become a whistleblower. Excise officials claimed that they had information that hundreds of bottles of UK-1 were lying at a place and would conduct raids anytime.

(Contributed by Ravi Dhaliwal)