As a small child in India, Pummy Kaur says she learned about injustice early – through personal experience. For example, her father assumed her brother would get an education, but the same was not true for Pummy. “Females were invisible,” she says.

“I was not neglected. I was fed and clothed. But in terms of all the education and nurturing, I was ignored.” However, in some sense, she says, being invisible “was a huge advantage, because I was kind of left to my own devices.”

In 1959, at the age of 10, Pummy, her mother and brother went to live in Leeds, England, before immigrating to Canada, where Pummy went on to study at the University of Manitoba. As a woman with a degree in math and physics, she again suffered injustice.

“I was one of only two or three females in a class of 200 men,” she recalls. After graduating, she applied to teach high-school physics in Winnipeg, but was turned down strictly on the basis of gender. “The principal said it would be ‘unseemly.’” She did, however, go on to teach, training first in Winnipeg, and later at SFU, UBC, UVic and Western Washington, with further studies in Australia at Northern Territory University.

Fast forward to 1986: Pummy divorces her second husband. Their two children are three and six, and another is on the way, but she feels liberated. “The stress of an unhappy marriage was gone, and I was free to become who I wanted to be.”

The person she wanted to be, it turned out, was an activist, educator and writer who encouraged her audience to consider their own complicity in social justice issues. Since then, she has written extensively for publications such as The Humanist in Canada and The Global Educator, all with the same theme - erasing injustice and increasing compassion.

Her first book, What Would Gandhi Do? Simple Solutions to Global Problems, was published in 2008. Her most recent, A Season of Non-Violence: 64 ways for 64 days, was published in 2011. Both are available from www.whatwouldgandhido.ca and www.seniorlivingmag.com/bookstore

In A Season of Non-Violence (the cover was designed by her daughter Cadence Kaur Warner), Pummy develops the notion of setting aside a season of 64 days, between January 30 and April 4, to practise and inculcate peace and an absence of violence in daily lives.

As she explains, January 30 marks the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s death (in 1948), while April 4 commemorates the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1968 assassination. During these 64 days, as Steven Staples, president of the Rideau Institute in Ottawa and author of Missile Defence: Round One, writes in the book’s forward, human beings everywhere might set aside a few minutes every day to think about “positive peace.” 

This concept encompasses not just the absence of war, but asks people to form relationships, perform everyday actions and make choices filled with “non-violent energy. Seen in this light, peace becomes the responsibility of the individual.”

Today, Staples writes, people often feel powerless “in the face of atrocity, limitless technology and seemingly unstoppable disasters.” But A Season of Non-Violence shows that, through daily actions and choices, war and oppression can be stopped.

A Season of Non-Violence offers 64 short readings and a quotation for each day. For the 29th day, for instance, the reading is entitled “Exercise your intellectual capacity and learn about the world from many sources,” and the quotation is a Baha’i prayer. Day 36 suggests asking the question of whether an action is good for children; the quotation is by Jane Adams, joint winner of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize.

“My ultimate aim is to empower people to take charge of their own lives,” Pummy says, and putting a stop to violence is a big part of that. “If people are living fulfilling lives, we eliminate most of the human-created problems.”

In 1980, Pummy came west to White Rock, and a year later, started to teach in Surrey, where she was most recently involved in designing an enrichment program for gifted, creative and talented children. Now about to retire, she looks back at a career that, in addition to classroom work, allowed her to help create a global education curriculum with a team of teachers from the B.C. Teachers’ Federation. She also spent 23 years with the BCTF’s Peace and Global Education Provincial Specialists Association, and lectured at conferences all over the world.

In 1992, Pummy became the founder and director of the Global Education Centre, dedicated to “education as if life really matters.” In 1995, she and her children lived in the Australian Outback in a small Aboriginal community, because she wanted her children to understand “a different reality.”

When she’s not writing, Pummy loves to dance. She recently “fell into” the Argentine tango. Previously, she studied classical Indian dance and later became a champion ballroom dancer. She also describes herself as a “nester” who loves to be at home, surrounded by bright colours and rich textures. After her retirement, with several more books in various stages of completion, she plans to speak on the international lecture circuit.

JANUARY 2012 SENIOR LIVING MAGAZINE VANCOUVER & LOWER MAINLAND