{"id":9312,"date":"2010-07-22T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-22T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/07\/22\/indian-americans-do-get-the-joke-but-does-time-get-hindu-americans\/"},"modified":"2010-07-22T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-22T12:00:00","slug":"indian-americans-do-get-the-joke-but-does-time-get-hindu-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/07\/22\/indian-americans-do-get-the-joke-but-does-time-get-hindu-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"Indian-Americans Do Get the Joke. But Does Time Get Hindu-Americans?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: www.hindustantimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

NEW DELHI, INDIA, July 21, 2010: (HPI: The following essay by Anika Gupta is a response to Joel Stein’s recent column in Time Magazine about Indian-Americans.) <\/p>\n

After reading Joel Stein’s column in Time magazine about Indian-Americans, many want to know why Indians can’t just take a joke. <\/p>\n

Stein’s jokes about race, about religion and about food are accurate — but that doesn’t make them good. Why don’t Indian-Americans laugh? We have laughed. A thousand times. Every single Indian-American kid has laughed off a joke about his religion, his color or his food. We grew up laughing. Even when we asked for better treatment, we were polite. When I was 15, I circulated an e-mail petition to my friends, respectfully asking an American company to stop making toilet seats with the faces of Hindu gods painted on them.<\/p>\n

But by the time I saw Stein’s column, I was tired of laughing. I wondered why it was okay for him to crack that same old joke about the many-armed Gods — in 2010! Or why it was okay for Time to run an article that may as well have been called, “Indians: They’re only good for funny names and ethnic buffets.”<\/p>\n

I’m an American, and I’m also of Indian origin. I worship many-armed Gods, and I eat really spicy Andhra food. But here’s the thing that Joel Stein never saw — I’ve fought to be accepted; I’ve assimilated in ways he can’t see. The Indian grocery, the Hindu temple — these are now part of the Indian-American identity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: www.hindustantimes.com NEW DELHI, INDIA, July 21, 2010: (HPI: The following essay by Anika Gupta is a response to Joel,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}