"Philosophy," said the caretaker. "Here I am a caretaker, you know. But in my home country I was a great thinker."
He turned and blew the smoke away from me.
"That's the good thing about being an immigrant," he said. "You can always tell people what you were in your home country."
"But you're pulling their legs?" I said.
"Never," he said. "Well, actually, in my home country I was one of the country's greatest leg-pullers. I won a competition. The National Leg-Pulling Championship."
"Philosophy," said the caretaker. "Here I am a caretaker, you know. But in my home country I was a great thinker."
He turned and blew the smoke away from me.
"That's the good thing about being an immigrant," he said. "You can always tell people what you were in your home country."
"But you're pulling their legs?" I said.
"Never," he said. "Well, actually, in my home country I was one of the country's greatest leg-pullers. I won a competition. The National Leg-Pulling Championship."
But the Ukraine Crisis Media Center's Tsekhanovska points out that communications are often down in zones most affected by the war, making this sort of cross-referencing a luxury many cannot afford. Now safely in France with his spouse and three of his children, Kliuchnikov scrolls through Telegram to learn about the devastation happening in his home country. Despite Telegram's origins, its approach to users' security has privacy advocates worried. Stocks closed in the red Friday as investors weighed upbeat remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin about diplomatic discussions with Ukraine against a weaker-than-expected print on U.S. consumer sentiment. Pavel Durov, Telegram's CEO, is known as "the Russian Mark Zuckerberg," for co-founding VKontakte, which is Russian for "in touch," a Facebook imitator that became the country's most popular social networking site.
from nl