Are You the Cow or the Crow?

There are five words in this little book. Five.

ਗਾਂ. ਕਾਂ. ਹਾਂ. ਨਾ. ਆ.

Cow. Crow. Yes. No. Come.

That’s the whole vocabulary. A child who knows those five shapes can read the entire story out loud, alone, from cover to cover — probably in about ninety seconds, probably twice, probably laughing the second time. That was the design goal, and it’s a good one. Early readers should be short enough to finish and easy enough to win.

But somewhere in the drafting, the book stopped being an exercise and became a small argument about how to live. Because here is what actually happens in it:

A crow lands on a cow’s back and starts issuing instructions.

ਗਾਂ! Cow!

The cow, chewing, eyes half-shut, turns her head roughly one degree.

ਕਾਂ? Crow?

And the crow — flapping, indignant, pointing with one wing — begins the campaign. Come. Come! Come! Come! He gets louder. He gets faster. He multiplies across the page into three crows, a blur of urgency. He is, in his own mind, being extremely helpful.

The cow says ਨਾ.

Then she says ਨਾ again.

And then, when the crow has finally collapsed on his back in exhausted silence, when the flapping has stopped and the shouting has stopped and the very small deflated voice asks, ਗਾਂ… ਆ ਨਾ? — Cow… won’t you come? —

The cow stands up. She is enormous. She says ਹਾਂ.

She was always going to come. She just wasn’t going to be hurried.

The crow is not the villain

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a story about a good animal and a bad animal, and that’s not what it is.

The crow is not cruel. He isn’t mocking her, he isn’t excluding her, he isn’t trying to make her smaller. He genuinely wants her to come along. He has somewhere to be and he is certain — with the total, uncomplicated certainty of a creature who has never once doubted himself — that she should be there too, and that she should be there now, at his speed, in his way.

That is the thing about the crows in our lives. They are almost never villains. They are friends. Cousins. Classmates. Coaches. Comment sections. Aunties at a wedding with an opinion about your career. Very often they mean well. That is exactly what makes them hard to say ਨਾ to.

And here is the uncomfortable part, the part I didn’t expect when I was laying out spread seven with three crows on it:

I am frequently the crow.

Ask my children. Hurry up. We’re late. Why are you still standing there. Just get in the car. I have flapped. I have pointed with one wing. I have multiplied across the kitchen. Any honest parent reading this knows exactly the sound of their own cawing.

So this is not a story about other people. Hold on to that.

The mind that cannot sit still

Guru Arjan Dev Ji opens a shabad on Ang 10 with a line that I think about more often than almost any other:

ਕਾਹੇ ਰੇ ਮਨ ਚਿਤਵਹਿ ਉਦਮੁ ਜਾ ਆਹਰਿ ਹਰਿ ਜੀਉ ਪਰਿਆ ॥

Why, O mind, do you plot and plan, when the Dear Lord Himself provides for your care?

— Guru Arjan Dev Ji, Ang 10

That is the crow, precisely. Not evil. Just frantic. A mind convinced that if it stops flapping for even one second, the whole arrangement will collapse. The shabad goes on to point at fish in water and stones in mountains — creatures nobody is scheduling, nobody is nagging, all of them somehow fed.

The crow’s problem isn’t his goal. His problem is that he has confused urgency with importance, and he has confused the cow’s pace with the cow’s refusal. She never refused. She simply had not finished being where she was.

There’s a companion line worth putting beside it, from Guru Amar Das Ji on Ang 441:

ਮਨ ਤੂੰ ਮਤ ਮਾਣੁ ਕਰਹਿ ਜਿ ਹਉ ਕਿਛੁ ਜਾਣਦਾ ਗੁਰਮੁਖਿ ਨਿਮਾਣਾ ਹੋਹੁ ॥

O mind, don’t be so proud of yourself, as if you know it all; the Gurmukh is humble and modest.

— Guru Amar Das Ji, Ang 441

As if you know it all. The crow knows it all. He knows where they should go, when they should leave, and how she should feel about it. He has never once considered that the cow might be right.

What the cow actually knows

Now the other side of the page.

The cow does not argue. She does not defend herself. She does not explain her reasoning, produce evidence, or ask the crow to please respect her boundaries. She has one syllable and she uses it: ਨਾ.

For a child learning to read, that’s just a fun word. For a child learning to live, it may be the most useful word in the book. ਨਾ is a complete sentence. It does not require a footnote.

But where does that steadiness come from? Not from stubbornness. Digging your heels in for the sake of digging your heels in is just crow behaviour with the volume turned down.

The cow’s calm comes from somewhere else. A few lines further into that same Ang 441 shabad:

ਮਨ ਤੂੰ ਜੋਤਿ ਸਰੂਪੁ ਹੈ ਆਪਣਾ ਮੂਲੁ ਪਛਾਣੁ ॥

O my mind, you are the embodiment of the Divine Light — recognize your own origin.

— Guru Amar Das Ji, Ang 441

This is the whole thing, really. You cannot be talked out of a shape you already know you have. The pressure to become someone else only works on people who aren’t sure what they are. Guru Nanak Sahib Ji puts the same instruction plainly on Ang 1041: ਚੀਨਹੁ ਆਪੁ ਜਪਹੁ ਜਗਦੀਸਰੁ ਹਰਿ ਜਗੰਨਾਥੁ ਮਨਿ ਭਾਇਆ ॥ — Know yourself, and meditate on the Lord of the Universe; let your mind be pleased with the Lord, the Master of the Universe..

Not “believe in yourself” in the poster-on-a-classroom-wall sense. Something sturdier and stranger than that: you are lit from the inside, you came from somewhere, and no amount of flapping changes it.

Praise, blame, and the same face for both

Here’s the test, though. It’s easy to be steady when someone is shouting at you and you don’t like them anyway.

The harder version is when the crow is charming. When the crowd is applauding. When changing yourself would make you more liked, not less.

Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib Ji, on Ang 219:

ਉਸਤਤਿ ਨਿੰਦਾ ਦੋਊ ਤਿਆਗੈ ਖੋਜੈ ਪਦੁ ਨਿਰਬਾਨਾ ॥

Renounce both praise and blame; seek instead the state of Nirvaanaa.

— Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji, Ang 219

Both. Not just the blame — the praise as well. That’s the line that stings. Most of us have made peace with being criticised; almost none of us have made peace with being admired. Applause is the crow that lands so softly you never notice you started walking in its direction. And in the same shabad: ਸੁਖੁ ਦੁਖੁ ਦੋਨੋ ਸਮ ਕਰਿ ਜਾਨੈ ਅਉਰੁ ਮਾਨੁ ਅਪਮਾਨਾ ॥ — one who knows that pain and pleasure are both the same, and honor and dishonor as well.

I don’t think it’s an accident that this teaching comes from the Guru who gave us the most consequential ਨਾ in our history. Delhi, 1675. An empire flapping and pointing with one wing. A single, quiet, immovable no — offered not for himself, but so that people who did not share his faith could keep theirs. That is what a ਨਾ can be when it comes from a settled place rather than a stubborn one.

For our children, specifically

If you are raising a Sikh child outside Panjab, you already know why this book exists.

Our kids are asked, constantly and mostly without malice, to be slightly less themselves. Trim the name so it’s easier at Starbucks. Don’t bring that for lunch. Nobody says it cruelly. Nobody has to. The crow doesn’t need to be mean to be effective — he only needs to be persistent, and to be there every single day, and to make staying yourself feel like more effort than moving.

And the pressure is not only from outside the community. Sometimes the loudest crow is the one telling a child she isn’t Sikh enough. That crow does more damage than the first one, because it lands on the very back the child was trying to climb onto.

What I want for my children — and it is genuinely what this daft little book is for — is that they develop the cow’s centre of gravity early. Not defiance. Not a chip on the shoulder. Just an unhurried certainty about what they are, so that when the flapping starts, it registers as weather rather than instruction.

ਆਈ ਪੰਥੀ ਸਗਲ ਜਮਾਤੀ ਮਨਿ ਜੀਤੈ ਜਗੁ ਜੀਤੁ ॥

See the brotherhood of all mankind as the highest order of Yogis; conquer your own mind, and conquer the world.

— Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Japji Sahib, Ang 6

Notice the order. The world comes second. It always comes second.

But the cow does come

I want to end on the part that people miss.

This is not a story about refusing. The cow gets up. On the final spread, she is walking, the crow is riding on her back, and they are going exactly where he wanted to go all along.

She was never saying no to the destination. She was saying no to being hurried.

That distinction is the entire moral load of the book, and it’s why I’d resist reading this as “stand your ground, ignore everyone.” Being yourself is not the same as being immovable. The cow listens. She answers every single time the crow speaks — ਕਾਂ? ਹਾਂ? ਨਾ — she is never rude, never absent, never checked out. She is simply operating at her own tempo. Gurbani has a beautiful word for that tempo:

ਸਹਜਿ ਸੰਤੋਖਿ ਸਦਾ ਤ੍ਰਿਪਤਾਸੇ ਅਨਦੁ ਖਸਮ ਕੈ ਭਾਣੈ ਜੀਉ ॥

Intuitive peace and poise, contentment, enduring satisfaction and bliss come through the Pleasure of the Master’s Will.

— Guru Arjan Dev Ji, Ang 106

ਸਹਜ. Not slowness. Not laziness. Poise. The natural, unforced pace of something that isn’t afraid of missing out.

And notice what finally moves her. Not the shouting. Not the three-crow escalation on spread seven. What moves her is the moment the crow stops demanding and starts asking — small, deflated, in the smallest speech bubble in the book: ਗਾਂ… ਆ ਨਾ?

She was reachable the whole time. He just had to stop cawing long enough to say please.

So — which one are you?

Read it with your child tonight. Let them do the voices; they’ll be better at the crow than you are. And then, somewhere around the second reading, ask them the question:

Are you the ਗਾਂ, or are you the ਕਾਂ?

Then be brave and let them ask you the same thing.

My honest answer is that I’m both, on different days, and often within the same twenty minutes. I am the cow when someone tells me what my children should be. I am absolutely the crow at 7:40 on a school morning.

The goal isn’t to be one and never the other. The goal is to notice which one you’re being, while you’re being it. That noticing is where all of it starts — the ਸਹਜ, the ਨਾ that doesn’t need defending, the ਹਾਂ that comes when you’re actually ready.

The cow was always going to come.

She just wasn’t going to hurry.

🎨 Colour it in

We’ve made a free colouring sheet from the story — ਗਾਂ and ਕਾਂ, ready for crayons, with the five words to trace underneath.

Download the ਗਾਂ! ਕਾਂ! colouring sheet →

And you can read the whole book free at maastarji.com/readers/. Five words. Ninety seconds. One very large cow.

Maastarji.com makes free, English-first Punjabi and Sikhi learning resources for diaspora families.