Friday, March 13, 2015

Tragic Consequences of Writing to the Prime Minister


If you ever visit the website of the Prime Minister, there's this link that beckons you: Interact with PM. Don't click the link!

If you do, you'll find on this page a couple of other links: To share ideas, insights and thoughts, and To write to the Prime Minister. Don't click on them!

A DAE scientist did click on them, and succumbed to the lure of giving some suggestions to the Prime Minister, and what followed is ... .

Well, read it all in this report and cry: Nuclear scientist lands in trouble with DAE for sending suggestions to PM Narendra Modi.

Here's a statement from a DAE official who really knows his Kafka:

As an organisation, we will follow the process.

* * *

Hat tip to Ankur Kulkarni for the comment-alert.

There was an Open Page essay in The Hindu about a month ago that described the author's experience of writing to the PM through his website, only to see his hopes (of conversing directly with the PM) dashed by a missive from the PMO informing him that his letter has been forwarded to some ministry or the other. The essay, which I am not able to locate, was dripping with mild sarcasm that made me chuckle here and there. At some level, this news item would also be funny if only the consequences for the DAE scientist were not so tragic.

2 Comments:

  1. Ankur Kulkarni said...

    This is really so so tragic. I liked how you have put it "read it all in this report and cry" and the reference to Kafka.

    That "write to the PM" link is like malware.

  2. Anonymous said...

    While we are talking about bad news, here is another one which shows that the disease whose symptoms we saw at the recent Indian science congress is not endemic to India. In a bizarre piece published in The New York Times, Stanford anthropology professor Tanya Luhrmann seems to be arguing---among other similarly weird things---that some mystical "power" she felt in her veins melted the bicycle lights she had in her backpack.