Members of Lasalle’s SikhTemple Association plan to hold a procession on Sunday, May 22 to celebrate the Khalsa Festival. Three flat-bed floats, a marching band and groups of people in orange turbans and white shirts will leave from the Gurdwara Guru Nanak Darbar at 7801 Cordner at 1:30 p.m. They’ll slowly follow the route approved by the borough council last March, which runs along Cordner to Lapierre, south to Newman, west to Thierry, north to Juliette, west to Lise, north to Danièle, northeast to Gervais and then east again on Cordner. They’ll arrive back at the temple at about 3:45 p.m.
Punjabi food will be served throughout the event from the temple kitchen in the basement and from five tents to be installed in the parking lot.
Local police are scheduled to oversee road closures and make sure that the parade and the festival afterwards proceeds calmly.
“We expect between 7,000 and 10,000 people to participate, depending on the weather,” says Hardev Singh, a Sikh Temple member who helps organizers when needed. Singh says that visitors come from Ottawa and Toronto to participate in the procession, which honours the first five people to be baptised into the Sikh Religion in 1699.
The Khalsa parade has taken place in Montreal every year since at least 1993, although it began in Lasalle in 1996, says Singh. “It used to be held downtown in Victoria Square, but the shop keepers there were always unhappy about losing business. After we bought land in LaSalle for our new temple in 1995 [their previous temple was located at 1090 St. Joseph in Lachine], we started gathering on that piece of land instead. Most of our route travels through a residential area, and people here really like it.”
(Note: This article first published in The Suburban, City Edition, p 1, May 18, 2011)
