terrfic, but ironic, joke

dec 2nd

this was on the kqed forum interview of vikram seth by michael krasny. (do get itunes and pick up the podcast for forum, and the podcasts from stanford etc. and you dont even need an ipod, you can listen to them on your PC! it's great stuff, especially when you are sitting at your computer and doing your normal stuff, to listen to these interesting discussions.)

on to the joke:

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so this young jewish man escapes from the warsaw ghetto of world war II, leaving his father behind. the young man goes to britain and makes a fortune, and then launches a rescue operation to get his father. the father comes to britain, and the young man tells him, 'dad, this is the land that saved me and made me prosperous, and now it has saved you. i want you to think of yourselves as an englishman now on.'

he takes his father to bond street and gets him a new suit. then he takes him to a hair-dresser's where they cut his jewish sidelocks off. and the old man bursts into tears.

the son asks, 'dad, are you crying because you're losing your jewish identity?'

the father says, 'no, i am crying because we lost india!'

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think about it for a minute: how easily we bcome comfortable in our new roles! this is what has happened to the chrisist converts and the marxist converts (of course, it is required of mohammedan converts). you give up every shred of your old identity, and slip on this new identity as though it were a new suit.

and then we abuse those who haven't actually put on the new suit.

i thought it was a brilliant joke, totally unexpected twist in the tail (tale?).

seth responds with an anecdote that shows how uncle shanti had taken on a veneer of britishness, rebuking seth's parents for not being british enough.

seth does state that he is indian, incidentally, almost in a defensive, reflexive way, when krasny asks him whether he has come a long way from his original interest in chinese economics at stanford.

michael krasny, not surprisingly, brings up caste and dalits. and seth says that there has been a great deal of movement forward; so does krasny.

overall, seth comes across as a much less obnoxious person than salman rushdie; there was, as i have mentioned here before, another forum interview with rushdie recently.