Fatehi 'The Discriminator' on Kazakhstan

Now Fatehi is a movie and travel critic. Maybe he'll do the women at Kennesaw State University a favor and move to Kazakhstan soon...

Depiction in 'Borat' doesn't do Kazakhstan justice

By KAMAL FATEHI
HASH(0x6208a0)
Published on: 11/08/06

Often, when people in the entertainment business want to tell a story about an overseas country, they will make one up. A good example is "Syriana," a story about Middle Eastern oil, which was set in a fictional country with a name that sounded something like Syria.

But when Sasha Baron Cohen invented his character "Borat," he didn't make up a country. He decided Borat should be from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.

Kamal Fatehi visits a marketplace during his stay in Kazakhstan as a Fulbright scholar. 'None of what is portrayed in the movie is what I have seen,' he writes.

Now this is brilliant...

[...]

"Why call them 'stan' countries?" I asked. "You don't say all of those 'land' countries. We have Holland, Poland, Switzerland, Iceland, Finland . . . you differentiate among those countries."

After all, the terms "stan" and "estan" mean "land."

Going to Kazakhstan soon to be a university tycoon?

Kazakhstan's economy is improving rapidly. I had a colleague, a Harvard graduate, who was working in one of the country's more recently established universities. He told me several years ago he planned to convert all his savings from dollars to tenges, Kazakhstan's currency. He said the tenge was appreciating, so he would benefit from it. In the last few years I could see he was correct; the currency had appreciated 20 percent.

If there is one thing I want people to know about Kazakhstan, it is that it is filled with smart, highly educated people who are modernizing the country quite rapidly, much faster than Russia. I tell people that if I were a citizen of the former Soviet Union, of all the republics I could choose, I'd want to live in Kazakhstan.

The real Kazakhstan may not be as funny as Borat's Kazakhstan, but it would be a shame to consider it one of those "stan' countries, and nothing more.

• Fulbright scholar Kamal Fatehi, originally from Iran, is a professor of international management at Kennesaw State University.

And he used to be the chair of the Kennesaw State University Department of Management and Entrepreneurship.