This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Khalsa Aid International was founded in April 1999 by Ravinder Ravi Singh, a British Sikh moved to act after seeing television coverage of refugees fleeing the Kosovo War. A small group led by Singh drove two trucks of aid to the Albanian border for the organization's first emergency mission, an act inspired by the Sikh principle of Sarbat da Bhalla, well-being for all, the recognition that a duty of care extends to every human being rather than to one's own community alone. The year of the founding also marked the three hundredth anniversary of the creation of the Khalsa, the initiated Sikh community, a coincidence the organization has treated ever since as an occasion to put the core teachings of the faith into direct practice rather than only mark them.
Khalsa Aid has since become known as the first cross-border international humanitarian organization built explicitly on Sikh principles, extending the tradition of langar, the communal kitchen that feeds anyone who comes regardless of religion, caste or background, from the gurdwara into disaster zones, refugee camps and conflict areas across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. What started as two trucks driven to a single border crossing in 1999 is, on its own telling, still guided by that same instinct: to go where a crisis is unfolding and feed and shelter whoever is there, a founding act the organization has treated as the template for every deployment since rather than as a one-time response to one particular war.