It appears that the Georgians are as argumentative as any desi. At the Royal Asiatic Society the other day, Robert Parsons, a journalist, was explaining his take on Mikhail Saakashvili's electoral loss. He said that there were several achievements to Saakashvili's credit, among which was the massive infrastructural developments in the Armenian and Azeri minority areas of Georgia.
One Georgian fellow in the audience piped up, "I'm sorry but why do you call them Armenian and Azeri? They are all Georgian citizens."
Parsons said, "Could you wait till I finish, please? You can ask me all the questions you want at that time."
The fellow said, "I am sorry, but I cannot hold back. This is not nice at all to say Armenian and Azeri."
A Georgian woman sitting next to me jumped up, and exclaimed, "Yeah, and it's not nice to interrupt when someone is speaking."
A little while later, a red-faced dude began to rant about the appalling penal system in Georgia that incarcerated people for eight to ten years just because they had a sprig of marijuana on them or they collected fallen twigs in a forest for firewood.
The woman jumped up and said, "This is not true. You get a penalty for possessing marijuana. Two times you get a penalty. It is as I say. I have friends who have had penalties."
The red-faced fellow said, "And I can name eight or nine friends who have been put away for years!"
0 comments:
Post a Comment