KAZAKHSTAN: Chris Stephen reports from Astana, capital of the world's ninth largest country and one of the most remote places on earth
Kazakhs still remember the evening last month when they tuned in to watch America's MTV music awards, beamed for the first time to central Asia - to be confronted by Borat and what most here see as the racist depiction of their menfolk.
It was a huge shock to see themselves portrayed by London comedian Sasha Baron Cohen, the compere, as drunken wife-beating anti-Semites.
"I don't think he knows Kazakhs that well," says Elimira Orazbayeva, a 20-year-old finance student. "Why we are upset is that many people do not know about Kazakhstan - they think we all live in yurts [A traditional nomad tent]."
Far from it: Astana, the capital, has been transformed by this country's oil boom into central Asia's equivalent of Dallas with its gleaming glass skyscrapers.
"We would like to give him a kind of lecture and explain to him what Kazakhstan is in reality," says fellow student Ainur Uteubayeva (21). "We have shortcomings but we try to resolve them."
Cohen, aka Ali G, has brought the house down in the West with his depiction of Borat as the epitome of the polyester-suited thugs often found in eastern Europe.
Borat's declaration that tolerance was on the rise "because women can ride on the inside of buses and homosexuals no longer need to wear blue hats" is a fine send-up of the racism in certain other parts of the world. But central Asians are not laughing.
For one thing, Kazakhs do not resemble Borat - they are Asiatic while his features are European. And his volatility and heartiness is a world away from the more placid central Asians.
More to the point, Kazakhstan has no history of anti-Semitism: historically, its problem has been friction between its three tribes, and the attentions of rapacious neighbours including China and Russia.
What sticks in the throat of the people here is that they want so badly to be noticed by the outside world.
Despite being the world's ninth largest country, their location, south of Russia and north of the Himalayas, makes them one of the most remote places on earth for Westerners.
Government advertising campaigns pointing to their being one of the most tolerant Muslim-majority nations on earth failed to raise their profile.
And then came Borat.
The foreign ministry has threatened to sue, although this probably won't work because ridicule of a nation is not considered libel. They are unable even to get their flag removed from Cohen's Borat website.
Kazakhstan's Jewish community has another idea: it has invited Cohen to journey here to see the ethnic tolerance.
"I want him to see for himself that there is no anti-Semitism here," says Avraham Berkowitz, head of the Federation of Jewish Communities for the former Soviet Union. "If I were to travel with him to see for himself not just the Jewish community but other ethnic minorities he would think differently."
As evidence, Berkowitz points to the big blue-and-white Astana synagogue on the edge of town which last week celebrated its first anniversary.
Under the former Soviet Union, Jews, like all religious groups, were oppressed, but since Kazakhstan's independence religion has flourished. The synagogue sits a stone's throw from the red brick Roman Catholic church, opened by the Pope in 2001.
Inside, businessman David Benani, born in the former Soviet Union and now an Israeli, shows me around.
"The situation between the nations here is good," he says.
But would Cohen get a visa? "He says women here have the last position after animals," says Orazbayeva. "Actually he offended Kazakhs badly."