15 September,2009 07:20 AM IST | | Juliana Lazarus
Through school, I would be one of the first five. No, no, not on the merit list but where we stood in the assembly line. And I always remembered to thank God for L. She was shorter than me and therefore stood first.
And then there'd be well-wishers who'd tell me that if I wanted to look tall, I should hang out with tinier people.
(Many years later, research tells us that that essentially is the principle that people use when choosing their friends. That standing next to a less attractive friend makes you look better.)
French President Nicolas Sarkozy brought all those memories back. He'd already been snapped standing on a box to deliver a speech and the latest incident at Normandy last week beats that hollow.
According to a report on The Register, "Sarkozy was backed at a motor technology plant speech by the shortest workers the company could rustle up".
He addressed workers from a tallish, specially-constructed podium, supported by management and around 20 employees. It was all going fine till one of the diminutive 20 went and blabbered to a journalist (of all people!) that she'd been one of the chosen because she could not, not even on tip-toe, look down at her president. Oh well, not in so many words but you get the picture.
And then, it was all over the media with even French television faithfully broadcasting the whole episode, though a Sarkozy spokesman vehemently denied the accusations as "totally absurd and grotesque".
Maybe he's right. Or wrong. Who knows? What's the big idea, anyway, in posing with midgets on the one hand and then having an Amazon (relatively speaking) for a wife? And why should a Frenchman make such a big deal of his height when the most famous of them all was shorter than Sarkozy? And what of the dangers of Sarkozy surrounding himself with smaller people, literally and metaphorically?
While we're on the subject of tall and short, here's one other man's take on them. It's a far better way to end a column than Sarkozy's school-boyish attempts at standing tall.
At the 2008 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders' meeting at Omaha, Nebraska, someone asked Warren Buffett why people who join his company never leave. And here's what Buffett had to say: "I try to get quality people. I always say, hire someone in your organisation who is better than you are. If you do that, you build a company of giants. If you get people worse than yourself, you build a company of dwarfs."
So, now you know why Sarkozy so easily becomes an object of ridicule and Buffett one of respect.
