India Insight

Those who spend much of their working week listening to speeches at the United Nations -- U.N. correspondents, for example -- might be forgiven for thinking there's not much difference between most of them.

But it's seldom you get as dramatic an illustration of this as happened on Feb. 11 when India's Foreign Minister began inadvertently reading out to the Security Council a speech written for another country's delegate without anyone, including himself, initially realizing anything was amiss.

The gaffe by minister S.M. Krishna occurred during a debate on the worthy but less than sensational topic of "the interdependence between security and development." This month's council president, Brazil, had organized the debate and invited as many foreign ministers as possible to take part.

The speech problem seems to have started when the speaker before Krishna, Portuguese Foreign Minister Luis Amado, decided to make off-the-cuff remarks to the council instead of his prepared text, which was instead circulated in written form to other participants. It was this that Krishna picked up and started to read when his turn came, thinking it was his own.

So general was the opening section that it could as well have come from India as Portugal, although it did seem a little odd when Krishna welcomed the fact that there are currently two Portuguese-speaking nations -- Portugal and Brazil -- on the Security Council. But hey, the Indian state of Goa was for centuries a Portuguese colony and Portuguese is still spoken there by some people.

The foreign minister of India took the floor at a UN Security  Council meeting this week, but in a rather embarrassing faux pas he  began reading out from the speech of his Portuguese counterpart instead of his own. Three minutes into the address, Indian diplomats realised that S. M.Krishna was reading off the wrong speech, and stopped him from proceeding further. He began again, this time with the right script.

It's not known what the Portuguese thought of the Indian official  reading their address as his own. Thankfully, the Portuguese minister had spoken earlier, or else Krishna might have been accused of stealing his thunder !

A small mix-up, the Indian foreign ministry later said, adding too much shouldn't be made of it.. Krishna  went on to make a "well received" speech, it said.

Given the ubiquity of BRICs and PIGS, it seems everyone else in the financial and business world is attempting to conjure up catchy acronyms to group economies with similar traits. All with varying degrees of success.

HSBC chief Michael Geogehan has been championing 'CIVETS' to describe Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa as the next tier of developing economies poised for spectacular growth.

Evoking the skunk-like animal blamed for the spread of the deadly SARS outbreak in Asia is not exactly auspicious but then it will probably be less offensive than the porcine moniker for Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. The collective term -- with permutations such as PIIGGS to include Ireland and Great Britain among the list of debt-ridden countries -- has been denounced by politicians in Portugal and Spain.