When Guru Gobind Singh Ji made the Khalsa, quiet people became brave people almost overnight.
Poet Santokh Singh Ji says it beautifully. Men who had never even dreamed of fighting, who went cold if you so much as mentioned it, drank the amrit and turned into lions. After that they wanted weapons, and they kept them on their bodies day and night.
But there was one thing Guru Ji would not let them have, and it was the thing everybody else thought you needed most.
Clever tricks.
People who fight usually decide, sooner or later, that lying is allowed, and cheating is allowed, and going back on your word is allowed, so long as you win in the end. Guru Ji looked at all that and said no.
Keep your honesty, he told them. Keep your good conduct. Take your strength from the Lord and from the Name, and not from tricks.
Later on, in the very last fight at Anandpur, his enemies swore oaths on holy things and broke every one of them, and Guru Ji kept his word anyway. They won that day. He kept the truth. And he wrote them a letter afterwards and called it the Sign of Victory, which is one of the boldest things anybody has ever named anything.
Now. On the road to Anandpur there was a village called Noh.
A group of Sikhs came along that road one day, carrying money they were bringing to Guru Ji from their own sangat, far away.
The men of Noh watched them go past and thought: look at all that. And they gathered, and surrounded them, and there were only a few Sikhs in that group who were armed. They fought as well as they could and it was not enough. Everything was taken.
The Sikhs got to Anandpur with nothing, and some of them were hurt.
Guru Ji listened to the whole story.
Then he said: this is a great wrong done to my Sikhs, and the men who did it are going to answer for it.
The Khalsa were up and gone almost before he finished. Drums beating, a small band of them, so few that when the villagers of Noh saw them coming they did not even bother to stand up. They thought it was a hunting party.
Then the Singhs were among them, and the village found out what it had picked a quarrel with.
Now the fighting had begun, and none of those Singhs knew where Guru Ji wanted it to stop. So they kept going.
And Guru Ji was standing a little way off, watching, and letting it go exactly as far as it needed to go and no further.
Because now Bhai Daya Singh Ji came forward into the middle of it, and called out to the villagers, and gave them the way out.
Fall at Guru Ji's feet, he said, if you want to be forgiven.
And they did. Almost every one of them threw down what he was holding and went and put his head at Guru Ji's feet.
They must have been expecting something to happen to them then.
What Guru Ji said was: You are forgiven.
Then live quietly, he said. But do not ever rob a Sikh of mine again, because I will not forgive it twice.
And that was the end of it. The Sikhs got back every coin that had been taken from them, and everybody went home.
The story travelled all over that country, and it did more good than a long war would have done. People who had been in the habit of troubling Sikhs on the roads, some of them with officials quietly helping, went very thoughtful about it.
And what they had learned was not only that the Khalsa could fight.
It was that the Khalsa stopped the moment a man said sorry.