NEW YORK: At a time when Sikh Americans are still being made targets of hate crime especially in New York since 9/11, Sonny Caberwal is turning heads for very different reasons. As the latest poster boy for US fashion giant Kenneth Cole, Caberwal can be seen all over Manhattan with an in-your-face attitude that says it’s cool to be a turban-wearing Sikh.

Caberwal’s unconventional looks (by New York’s traditional standards of model looks) symbolize the fashion house’s new catch phrase ""We all walk in different shoes." In an online video at KennethCole.com celebrating "Non-Uniform Thinkers", Caberwal, who co-owns the hip Tavlon Tea Bar in New York’s Union Square, recalls how September 11 increased his resolve to keep his faith and not shave off his beard or discard the turban.

"When September 11 happened, I was in law school, and I was watching TV with all my peers, and I looked around and the Taliban came on TV. And they looked just like Sikh people," said Caberwal who graduated from Duke University in 2001 and went on to get a law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center. "We’re often, in this day and age, mistaken for Muslims. I always drew strength from keeping this unique identity to remind me that I am different.

For me it’s a matter of reinforcement, but for other people it’s become a symbol of hate, and a symbol of fundamentalism," he says in the video. "I can’t walk through an airport without getting special security screening, and having people look really afraid... In the United States we hold the idea of freedom so dear, but I think that what happens is that most people find that their limitations are not what other people impose on them. It’s the limitations they impose on themselves."