According to Obhrai, the hilarity began when he found himself sitting around a table with the prime minister of Malaysia, the president of Vietnam, the president of Papua New Guinea, and none other than Putin, himself, during the APEC summit in Bali, Indonesia, in 2013.<\/p>\n
Obhrai was parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs at the time, which earned him a seat with the world leaders.<\/p>\n
After some small talk with Putin, and chuckles about whether Canada or Russia is colder, Obhrai said there was a lull in the conversation, so he decided to share a story with the Russian leader about how he had caught a fish in a nearby bay when he had visited Bali a few years earlier.<\/p>\n
Putin, naturally, asked how big the fish was. And Obhrai, naturally, answered using his hands.<\/p>\n
![\"Deepak](\"http:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/0d3eb_deepak-obhrai-big-fish.jpg\")
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The fish was this big, Vlad, I swear! (Facebook\/Screenshot)<\/p>\n
The Russian leader then paused, looked at Obhrai and held out his own hands \u2014 much closer together \u2014 while saying: “No. This big.”<\/p>\n
Obhrai\u00a0said his response was “total confusion.” He didn’t understand what Putin\u00a0meant.<\/p>\n
But, he soon learned, this was all a set up to the knee-slapper that was coming down the pike.<\/p>\n
“‘Parliamentary secretary,’ he says, ‘Let me tell you a joke.'”<\/p>\n
And then Putin launched right into it.<\/p>\n
Two Russians meet in a cafe…<\/h2>\n
To paraphrase Obhrai’s\u00a0retelling of the gag, it went roughly like this.<\/p>\n
Two Russians, a hunter and a fisherman, meet in a cafe one morning and have a friendly chat before heading out for their daily duties. They meet again in the same cafe that evening and the fisherman tells the hunter about the fish he caught.<\/p>\n
The hunter asks, “How big?”<\/p>\n
The fisherman holds his hands out wide and replies, “This big.”<\/p>\n
Then the fisherman asks the hunter how his day was, and he replies that he shot a deer.<\/p>\n
“That’s great,” says the fisherman. “You must be happy?”<\/p>\n
But the hunter says no, because when he went to get the deer, a ranger intervened and told him he couldn’t touch it because he didn’t have a permit.<\/p>\n
So, the hunter explained, he shot the ranger. Then an assistant ranger came by. So he shot him, too.<\/p>\n
The fisherman then looks at the hunter and figures the guy is dangerous.<\/p>\n
So he holds out his hands, closer together this time, and says,\u00a0“Mr. Hunter, my fish was small.”<\/p>\n
![\"Deepak](\"http:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/0d3eb_deepak-obhrai-putin-joke.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Deepak Obhrai explains a joke Vladimir Putin told him in 2013 about a hunter who intimidates a fisherman by telling stories about how he murders people who stand in his way. (Facebook\/Screenshot)<\/p>\n
That’s the joke.<\/p>\n
And don’t worry. If you’re not laughing, you’re not alone.<\/p>\n
Once Putin delivered the punchline, Obhrai said there was stunned silence and confusion around the table of world leaders.<\/p>\n
“But I understood what he was talking about,” Obhrai said. “So I turned around to him and I said, ‘Mr. President, my fish was small, too.'”<\/p>\n
“And, lo and behold, he went berserk, laughing so loud \u2026 because I understood his jokes and the others didn’t.”<\/p>\n
But wait, there’s more<\/h2>\n
Obhrai said Putin\u00a0then left to give a speech, but he bumped into him again later on and the Russian president said he had another joke to tell him.<\/p>\n
But, as luck would have it,\u00a0Putin’s handlers ushered him off to the next event before he could share the yarn, but he promised to tell Obhrai\u00a0the next time they met.<\/p>\n
This, Obhrai said with a wry smile, is why you should vote for him as leader of the Conservative Party.<\/p>\n
“When I become the Prime Minister, I’m going to meet him,” he said. “Then I’ll find out what his second joke was.”<\/p>\n
Seriously, though,\u00a0Putin’s enemies get murdered<\/h2>\n
Of course, every good joke sprouts from a kernel of truth, so it’s probably important to remember that many of the people who have stood in Putin’s way have wound up murdered in real life.<\/p>\n
Boris Nemtsov, a charismatic opposition leader and one of Putin’s\u00a0sharpest critics, was shot dead in\u00a02015<\/a> near the Kremlin, one day before a planned protest against the government.<\/p>\n Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative reporter who had just written a book documenting widespread abuse of civilians by government soldiers in Chechnya, was also gunned down in Moscow<\/a> in 2006.<\/p>\n Ivan Safronov, a journalist who was preparing a report in 2007 about allegations that Russia planned to provide sophisticated weaponry\u00a0to Syria and Iran, mysteriously fell five storeys to his death<\/a>\u00a0before the report came out.<\/p>\n They were among 20 journalists killed in Russia since 2006, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists<\/a>.<\/p>\n There is no conclusive proof Putin, himself, is behind the murders.<\/p>\n