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| Sardarji jokes anger me, along with any joke told at the expense of some other group, tribe, caste, status or sect, even religion, of the person telling the joke. Growing up in the southern US where I can only remember Sikhs being portrayed in Gunga Din and one Shirley Temple movie (both positive portrayals), I was surprised at 60 to hear my first "Sardarji 'joke', told by a Muslim friend, given I had never known there was such a thing. So today I was slightly miffed to see a story in Dawn News that began with one.
| | {{Delete}} senseless article |
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| The following 'joke' was recounted in a news article written during the "Lawyers' long march (2009) in Pakistan. (Fortunately the march turned out to be a very short march as a suicide bomber, perhaps, frustrated that the crowd stopped before reaching his assigned area (a bus stand) blew himself up killing several innocent bystanders and not the huge crowd he had hoped for).
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| The story in Dawn News.[http://www.dawnnews.net/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/a-presidential-punga-ha] concerns the word 'punga'. My wife had noticed the word Punga in the margin and asked me what punga meant. I had no idea and clicked on the link.
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| To my surprise it started with a stupid, so called [[12 O'clock joke|Sardarji joke]]. Apparently even though most Sikhs were forced to leave their ancestral homes with what little they could carry (those that weren't murdered during the pogrom, known as the Partition) it seems that such jokes, at another's expense, still linger across the border from Amritsar more than half a century later.
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| ==A presidential ‘punga’==
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| '''STOP''' me if you’ve heard this one: a Sikh was on a flight, with a parrot on the other side of the aisle. He noticed that every time a certain pretty hostess walked past, the bird would whistle appreciatively. The girl would give the parrot a dirty look, but nothing else happened.
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| The last straw was when she was nipped by the bird while passing by. She stormed into the cockpit and complained loudly about the lewd passenger. The captain said there was little he could do, and asked her to put up with the bird’s behaviour until they had landed.
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| The next time she walked past, the Sikh got into the act, and pinched her. This time, she blew up and threatened to resign if the captain took no action. ‘OK,’ he replied. ‘Throw them both out of the plane.’ As the two fell from 30,000 feet, the parrot asked the Sikh: ‘Sardar Ji, can you fly?’ When the panic-stricken man said no, the bird unfurled his wings and asked: ‘Then why did you take a punga with the hostess?’
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| For those of you who do not speak Punjabi, Hindi or Urdu you can click on the link above to read the rest of the story.
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| *Thinking about it, it reads just like the opening of Salman Rushdie's ''Satanic verses'' I think that plane was also at 30,000 feet. I wonder!
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