At the end of the nineteenth century, the Thai king Rama V Sunandh Kumariratan lost his nineteen-year-old beautiful wife along with his little daughter, who were crossing the river in a boat, and she turned over in the middle - just in the rushing stream of water. No, the woman, of course, could have been saved, and many Thai residents witnessed this tragedy, but none of them lifted a finger to pull the unfortunate woman and her child out of the water.
The reason for this was the Thai law, which, on pain of death, forbade touching the royal person. And what is interesting, not a single man was found who would put his own head on the block to save the girl. In Russia, for example, such a fellow would certainly be found, and the king would surely forgive him later for such a daring act. This is where the broad and inexplicable Russian nature lies, in contrast to all law-abiding and correct citizens.
By the way, in our time the same tragedies occur, one might say, even more absurd than in Thailand in the century before last. In the United Arab Emirates, a Muslim father did not allow his daughter drowning in the sea to be rescued, because, according to his religious concepts, a stranger, touching her, would dishonor the girl, and thereby doom the family to shame and grief, much greater than death itself child. And again, the rescuers of the UAR turned out to be unable to oppose anything to these absurd beliefs of the fanatic father, and the Russian fellows who would have saved the girl and her idiot father on the ears were slapped, unfortunately, that was not on the beach …
