Sacha Baron Cohen upset the Kazakhs with his portrayal of the country in Borat.Credit:AP
I'm big in Kazakhstan. And by big,I mean incredibly unpopular. Hated,in fact. I may never be able to return to the land of eagle hunters and grand modern architecture. I've received actual death threats. I've been told to go back to riding kangaroos.
My crime? I insulted the food. Not all the food – just a couple of (apparently) cherished national dishes. I mentioned in a recent feature story that,to my palate,boiled horse meat with pasta sheets and stewed onions is not very tasty. I also stated my intention to never drink kumis,a beverage of fermented horse milk that's extremely popular in Kazakhstan,ever again.
Thestory was published a few weeks ago,and nothing happened. Tumbleweed rolled by,just like the few bits of rubbish that blew through the cold streets of the Kazakh capital,Astana,on the days I visited.
Beshbarmak. To my palate,boiled horse meat with pasta sheets and stewed onions is not very tasty.Credit:Shutterstock
And then,everything changed.
I posted a photo on Instagram and geotagged the country. The snap was nothing special,just a picture of a Soviet-era statue in a park in Almaty,the nation's former capital. A few Kazakh people started following me. A comment or two appeared from the locals. Normal stuff.
And then more comments came in. And then more. A lot of them were written in Russian. A few were in English,and said things like"you're stupid",and"Die. Die. Die. Die. Die."I decided not to translate the ones I couldn't understand.
Pretty soon the trickle of fairly nasty comments had become a steady stream.
It wasn't until one of my new Kazakh friends screen-shotted a local website and sent me the link that I figured out what was going on. A Kazakh news service haddiscovered my feature story and translated it into Russian,with a few slightly unfair flourishes of their own such as,"the writer added sarcastically"– when I hadn't,in fact,intended any sarcasm – and a few mistranslations that made my review of the horse dish seem a lot snarkier.