Borat Makes Good Publicity for Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

By Aditya Bothra

Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev recently said that all publicity is good publicity, when asked what he thought about the movie “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” Well done Mr. President, only it took so much time to realize this but nonetheless it is a step forward considering that less than a month ago Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev was threatening legal action against Sacha Baron Cohen, the brainchild of the popular film that has earned more than $100 million in box office sales in the US alone. The comic film is the story of a Kazakh television reporter sent to make a documentary on the US of A, who portrays Kazakhstan as a country where people drink horse urine and whose national pastimes include incest and shooting dogs. For the Kazakh government, as reflected by the president’s comments, the harsh reality has finally set in- it is hard to argue that a movie may be harming the image of a country when the country doesn’t have an image to begin with.

The film is essentially a comedy and anyone who has ever seen one knows that contents are more often based on stereotypes and newly manufactured contents rather than facts. Even according to the Cambridge educated, Mr. Cohen, the joke never was on Kazakhstan. “I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist - who believe that there’s a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to 9 years old” he told Rolling Stone Magazine. The Kazakh government must have had an overdose of Paris Hilton and gang to hold such a pessimistic view of human intelligence; the world is not stupid enough to believe that there is an annual “running of the Jew” held in Kazakhstan, as reported in the movie.
Rather than launching a lawsuit that isn’t going to go anywhere or paying for expensive special advertisement in the New York Times, Kazakhstan should see the movie as a golden opportunity to market itself to the world and set itself apart from its neighbors -Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Parkistan, Tajikistan and other members of the “stan” family. The government public relations and tourism department should channel the new found interest and curiosity generated by the movie to attract foreigners and much needed money into the country. Rather than attacking Cohen, the Kazakhstan government should be compensating him; after all, he single-handedly ran a successful campaign promoting Kazakhstan, doing a better job at it than the government could boast of in all the years combined since independence.

Thanks to Cohen, those that have watched Borat and his wild adventures in the US of A will be able to identify Kazakhstan and perhaps even go further in understanding and exploring a country whose economy grew by more than nine percent last year and who possesses an abundant supply of accessible mineral and fossil fuel resources. High five!