On September 15, 2001, I received an email from my close friend and Stanford classmate Valarie Kaur, an email that would launch us both into a whirlwind over the subsequent decade .. A Sikh man in Arizona had just been shot. His name was Balbir Singh Sodhi, he owned a gas station in Mesa, and someone drove up and shot him because he was wearing a turban on his head and they thought that made him a terrorist.