Thursday, April 06, 2006

These British Gentlemen

You can sleep on the bed! Apparently that’s what US’s foreign secretary, Condoleezza Rice offers to her British counterpart Jack Straw, during a seven hours flight to Baghdad. Well, Mr. Straw takes the offer and sleeps on the one and only bed in the plane but as he wakes up, he finds Dr. Rice, sleeping on the floor!
While a story of this kind could be hardly taken seriously anywhere in the world to be even qualified as news, in the land of “Gentlemen” they’ve made quite a big fuss out of it! “Diplomatic ethics aside, How on earth a gentleman could take the bed and let a lady sleep on the floor?!” they say!

In his defense, maybe Dr. Rice has offered the bed to her sleepy colleague insisting that she wanted to keep working and didn’t feel like sleeping at all. But eventually, she felt exhausted and slept on the floor. Considering my deep respect for Jack Straw, I have the tendency to believe my version of the story! :)

And although , it’s more like “much ado about nothing”, considering what’s going on in the world right now, it’s still nice to see there’re people in the world who so profoundly care about these kinds of social etiquettes which are considered by the main stream, obsolete!

Question: How come there are people in the world who demand their leaders not to be less than a gentlemen, on top of all leadership and political skills, and there are others who can’t get their leaders just to shut the hell up!?

P.S. An advice to Mr. Straw: Next time you were in the same situation, you’d better say (read with a posh British accent like that of Mr. Straw!) “I suppose the bed is big enough to hold both of us my dear!” :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

V for Vendetta