An interesting news item linked from the front page of the Huffington Post
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1116038.cms
Students graduating from the Columbia Business school MBA class of 2005 may have expected some fizz in a commencement speech by Pepsico President Indra Nooyi, an Indian-American acclaimed as one of the most powerful corporate executives in America and a putative CEO of the soft drink giant.
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According to some students who were present at the graduation ceremony and who fired up the issue in the blogosphere, Nooyi then reserved the remaining finger for the United States (and not North America, they say), launching into "a diatribe about how the US is seen as the middle finger to the rest of the world."
Like all good programmers, I'm a Diet Coke drinker myself, but I certainly hope that Ms. Nooyi has the stamina to stick out the almost inevitable Bill O'Reily Pepsi boycott.
Update [2005-5-19 18:0:10 by darrelplant]: Since some folks seem to have not bothered to read the rest of the article, I've added some more after the break.
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Pepsico finally put the speech on its website on Wednesday morning with a message from Nooyi acknowledging using the analogy of a human hand to illustrate that people in countries around the globe need to join together to make the world work in harmony. "It is an illustration that I learned when I was a student, and that I have shared with others on many different occasions," she maintained.
Nooyi said her remarks at Columbia University were misconstrued and depicted in a different context as unpatriotic. "Although nothing could be further from the truth, I regret any confusion or concern that I may have inadvertently created. As I shared with the audience at Columbia, this country that I am proud and honored to call home is a "promised land" that I love dearly. I would never say or do anything to detract from our great nation and its people who have done so much for so many, including myself," she wrote.
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