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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Last Monday, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister of India, and his host, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the President of Kazakhstan, took an hour out of their busy schedules to participate in a ceremony. Their schedules were busy because they, along with fourteen other Presidents and Prime Ministers, were taking part in something called the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia. The purpose of the ceremony was to mark the renaming of Panfilov Street, in Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city. The old name honored Ivan Panfilov, a Red Army hero. The new name is--wait for it--Mahatma Gandhi Street.
Although the twentieth century's greatest advocate of nonviolence had a pretty good sense of humor (asked once what he thought of Western civilization, he replied that he thought it would be a good idea), this was one joke he might have found a bit forced. And although Mohandas K. Gandhi knew all about paradoxes (he turned a homespun loincloth into a raiment more commanding than any bemedalled uniform), this...
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