Culture of respect: The Singh family

The Singh family who now live in north-west London came to the UK from Uganda in Africa.

Anup Singh Choudry, 56, arrived in 1969 as a student.

His mother, Narinder Chowdhary, 75, migrated permanently to the UK three years later with the rest of the family as a result of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin expelling all Asians from the country.

Mr Singh, a businessman, has three children - an 18-year-old daughter and two sons, one aged 11 and 17-year-old A-level student, Satvir.

My Sikh background was very important in forming my concept of respect. I respected my parents and my elders but these days we can't be sure whether our children will respect us or not.

"My own six children respect me - now I am disabled they come and help me, if it weren't for them I wouldn't be able to do anything. For me respect is when children do things for their elders, they want to respect them. But these days I don't think there is any respect in this country.

In any decent society or civilised society we all have the same values as human beings and our values have a base in our spiritual values. At the moment society is looking to its social fabric to give it values and forgetting the spiritual base. And that is where we are losing respect as we would define it in the previous generations.

In my generation I was taught to respect elders, neighbours, the authorities and teachers. The moment that discipline breaks down what happens is a loss of respect for teachers, for your parents, your religion and the law.

Within a family context I think respect means loving and looking after each other, listening to each other and not going against your parents. Within the context of society I think it means showing a level of tolerance to other individuals and obeying the law.

There is a lack of respect in society but that's probably true for all societies, every society has its bad points. I'm sure in the old days anti-social behaviour used to go on as well. But these days disrespect takes different forms like 'happy slapping'. People will always find new methods of anti-social behaviour which the government really can't stop.

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