Saturday, May 31, 2008

A Thoughtful Message

I received this message from one of my friends, and was really shaken up by the sheet audacity and power of the message.

It is very short and brief, and to the point straight. We love forwarding mails to friends only if it contains some junk or jokes, but never end up even reading messages like this.

I invite upon you to read this through, and share it with as many your friends as possible, as we all have a social responsibility to fulfill.

A Thoughtful Message

Cheers
P.K.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

A collection of Jokes

Though we have a lot of respect and affection towards the Sardar community, some of the easy going Sardars started writing and publicising some ethnic jokes about themselves, and it is probably the largest and widely circulated ethnic jokes in India.

Some of the dominant traits of the Sardar jokes include the Sardarji being shown as naïve, inept, unintelligent, unclean, or not well-versed with the English language.For example, here is a joke adapted from The Unofficial Joke Book of Mind Blowing SMS (ISBN 8184191901), compiled by a Sikh author:

A Sardarji is travelling for the first time in a plane, headed for Bombay. While the plane is landing, he starts shouting "Bombay, Bombay!".

The air hostess says, "Be silent".

Sardaji says, "OK", and starts shouting "ombay, ombay".

Some people feel that it is targeting to show an important community as naive and unintellectual, but the fact remains that most of these jokes were written,circulated or published by Sardars themselves.

In "The Other Face of India", M. V. Kamath wrote about "the Punjabi's enormous capacity to poke fun at himself, a trait that seems peculiar to the Punjabi, especially the Sikh."

In his book President Giani Zail Singh, the Sikh author Joginder Singh states "...who can enjoy a good joke against himself or against his tribe except a Punjabi and more particularly, a Sikh?"

I personally feel that these are jokes which just carry Sardars' names over there instead of any other, and should be used without hurting any particular community, and could be made general-class jokes. So, read through the collection attached herewith as it applies to just anybody / any situation, without focusing any thoughts about the sardar community.

Collection of Jokes

Cheers
P.K.