A couple years back, the story goes, a man visited Shaheed Baba Nihal Singh Gurdwara, a 150-year-old Sikh temple in Talhan, India, seeking help securing a visa to the United States. It's common for those in need to visit temples, and the man dutifully promised to return with the gift of a toy airplane should he receive a visa. The approval came four days later and the man, true to his word, returned with an airplane.
News of this spread quickly through the region, and making an offering of an airplane has become a tradition in India. The planes have become so popular with pilgrims that local shops started selling them and the temple must donate them to children in the community. Rajesh Vora has photographed the temple for Colors and says visas are in high demand as people seek better opportunities abroad.
“Besides Talhan, generally in rural Punjab, shrinking land holdings, lack of employment opportunities and increasingly uneconomical farming are responsible for people migrating to foreign land,” he says.
Leaving an offering at holy sites is as old as religion itself. Flowers and stones are common at gravesites, lighted candles and prayer cards in churches. At the Santuario de Chimayo in northern New Mexico, a priest blesses a pot of dirt and parishioners leave crutches and the like when the dirt eases their pain or helps heal their ailments. But toy airplanes surely are among the more unusual ways of requesting divine intervention.
Regardless of whether the offering works, many Punjabis continue leaving the country each year. Some 100,000 people from this state are jailed worldwide for illegal immigration, and almost every family in Talhan has at least one family member living abroad.
According to Colors, it’s not a taboo to leave the country illegally. In fact, it's celebrated. Many families of emigrants honor relatives living abroad by erecting water tanks that look like airplanes. These tanks, often perched atop the house, bear the logo of an airline from whatever country the relative now calls home. The British Airways livery is especially common. Vora says there is but one such totem in Talhan, but they're a common sight as you drive across Punjab.
“In rural Punjab, people often put up water tanks or models in the shape of football, religious symbols, vehicles, etc., to reflect their, beliefs, wealth, interest, profession and identity,” he says. “In the recent times airplanes also finds a place amongst such objects as more and more Punjabis are migrating and airplane models becomes a statement of their success in foreign land, their newly acquired wealth and status too in the society.”
