The apple doesn't fall far from ... Kazakhstan?

A high school friend was on a business trip in, yes, Kazakhstan.  The women there are pretty, he adds.  Where are the women not pretty, right?  Another high school classmate puns (in Tamil) that the country should then be called Azhaghastan (Azhagu = beauty)

I wrote to them that he guy's alibi in going there is that he is checking out the apples :)

Why apples, you ask, to which I reply: it is the geographic home for all the apples of the world. 

Well, until yesterday, as Johnny Carson often said, "I did not know that!"

Even in blogging, the only note I have had on Kazakhstan was on a completely different topic!

I was diving back home and listening to The World, when the show's host, Lisa Mullins, posed the geoquiz about the origin of apples. 

I would never have thought that apples originated from the mountains of Central Asia. 

Even more hilariously educational was the hypothesis on how perhaps the fruit spread: animals ate the best of the fruits, and then the seeds passed through their guts, which then led to new plants in new places.

And, of course, the roles of the Silk Road, the Roman Empire, the wanderers ... and then eventually to the US, and now we associate Washington with apples.  Who woulda thunk it was a story out of Central Asia!

I will add this to my repertoire of fun stories for my classes. 

This blog entry by itself will be a convincing answer to the student, "J," who asked me yesterday what I do for fun :)

Going where no man has gone before: An Indian academic in Kazakhstan

No, I am not heading to Kazakhstan.  (editor: I bet your colleagues will be happy to pay for a one-way ticket out. Awshutupalready!)

There I was reading The Economist on a slow Saturday morning, and I come across an ad for faculty positions in the business school in Almaty, Kazakhstan.  I am intrigued.  I keep reading and find that the contact name is "Kishan Rana, PhD" ... An Indian name!  And that he is the "Dean of the Bang College of Business."

"Bang College" sounds so much like one of those diploma mills in India, until you note the compensation stated in the ad: "after-tax salaries up to $115,000"

The naturally curious person that I have always been, well, a quick Google search led me to more info about Rana, who is there after his years in Canada; he notes:

I was commissioned in the Indian Navy as a lieutenant after completing my bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with honors.  I was in the top three of the graduating class. After my initial training of about 14 months, I was put in the warship-building program.  I was in uniform, not a civilian, and was in charge of building warships for several years.  I also served on warships at sea and participated in all kinds of exercises, including a war during the 1970s.

Kind of ironic, isn't it--a navy man now in a landlocked country, and even the Caspian Sea is far, far, away from Almaty!  Amazing how far and wide people of Indian origin are scattered around the world.

I suppose this Kazakh ad caught my attention because only a couple of days ago I read this piece in the New Yorker, (subscription required) about the country building a brand new capital city in Astana.  It is crazy that the country is spending so much of its resources into this. 

Astana has been the capital of Kazakhstan only since 1997, three years after the country’s leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, told a stunned parliament that a prosperous, independent country like Kazakhstan ought to have its capital “in the center” of the country, rather than on the border. Almaty, the old capital, was pleasantly situated in the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountain range, and was famous for its apple orchards. And Astana? It was six hundred miles to the north—that is to say, toward Russia—and bitterly cold.

And, hey, not any ordinary buildings in this brand new capital city. But, expensive structures like this--"The Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center at night":

And this--"The Palace of Peace and Reconciliation":

The article wonderfully and easily paints a picture of a cold place in the middle of nowhere.  It will not be a surprise, however, if this isolated place by the Steppe has an Indian tandoori eating place run by some guy from Kerala :)

But, to some extent, one need not be surprised with the Indian/Central Asian connection at all.  The map below, which I pulled up from my post about the Uighurs, makes the connections a simple case of geography. Well, not that simple!

Maybe it is a misnomer: not Indians as much as the wanderers, eh!