After having spread a couple of copies of the recent Indian Budget along the 'net, Aman arrived at his office one morning to find the following piece of mail in his InBox.
------------------- Mr. Chidambaram's mail follows ----------------
From: Shri.P.Chidambaram@fin.ind.gov
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 1997 7:12 PM
To: Aman Kochhar
Subject: Broadcast of my speech!
Priya Kocharji,
I was shocked to see my Budget Speech being distributed on the internet ! The originating address was yours ! India is our motherland and its budget is our private property. It was very sad to see that you are distributing this highly secret document to eveyone on the net ....
Our international lawyers will be seeing you soon....
- P. Chidambaram,
Minister of Finance,
India.
------------------- End of Mr. Chidambaram's mail ----------------
This caused Mr. Kochhar a great deal of distress. Beset on every side
as he was by American lawyers, he had no great desire to add
international lawyers to the list. He lay low for a couple of days,
attempting to locate the person who had betrayed him to Mr. P.
Chidambaram.
Eventually, some kind soul explained to Mr. Kochhar that E-mails can be forged, and that it was very likely not Mr. Chidambaram who had sent him that mail. This caused great relief to Mr. Kochhar, who had been pondering various methods of avoiding the forthcoming plague of lawyers.
Overcoming that small element of doubt within him that suggested that Mr. Chidambaram might find him a worthwhile subject anyway, Shri Kochhar began to search around for possible suspects.
"This requires a MIND !" proclaimed the astute Mr. Kochhar. "Not only that, the person doing it must have DBA skills ! Hmm ... "
And much like JC before him, it wasn't long before he sprung to the
conclusion "Bala must be behind this !"
In the absence of any further corroborating proof, Aman continues to hold fast to this theory.
"And what is the morale of the story ?" asked Aman in his note.
[Note: To convey the full flavour of the message to the reader, I have refrained from any editorial intervention of any kind, including spelling corrections]
"You should never trust what you see with your own eyes unless you reply to the E-mail !" he explained.
Of course, it remains possible for a sender to forge an existing E-mail address, such as clinton@whitehouse.gov, which is something that seems to have bypassed Mr. Kochhar's train of thought. It should be interesting to note the response Mr. Kochhar obtains from the White House if he indeed did respond to such an address with his normal style of reply.
And people wonder where I get the material for these pages ...
* * *
Seethalakshmi has touched down in the US, and has already made short work of finding her old flame, Harpreet Singh. She has overcome the initial shock of finding that dashing bachelor and carefree man-about-town married. Rumour had it that Harpreet had gone to Germany to obtain an MBA degree in order to marry, but Seethalakshmi now believes this to have been merely a rumour.
It is not known whether she has made any attempt to find the third member of their little trio, but given the fact that he was recently engaged, she is probably unlikely to take the chance of such a shock again.
* * *
Following in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor Gaurav Sharma, Pankaj Jain appears to have disappeared from sight. No word of him has appeared on the Internet in quite a while, and several correspondents, ranging from the East Coast of America to the islands of Indonesia, have quite lost all hope of hearing from him.
The theory has been put forward that this is a seasonal hazard that occurs to all Jains, and indeed, Vinod Jain's name has been put forward as a prime example of a person who rarely communicates. Vinod Jain had moved away from the East Coast to avoid the nuclear holocaust that he expected in 1997; Pankaj Jain also tends to avoid the East Coast. Both Jains have also avoided communicating with Jayant Amritkar for a long time, and have been known to work closely with Jagdish Chandra. With the pattern forming, one must indeed conclude that we remain unlikely to hear from Pankaj for a while.
Some reports have mentioned sighting Pankaj outside Cinema Halls, in the accompaniment of a rotund, smiling character, eagerly looking at the ticket booths, but knowing his reluctance to see any film without his wife, this is hardly a reliable report.
* * *
Another recepient of NIIT's Award of Excellence was left out of these pages earlier. I trust the readers will join me in extending warm congratulations to the ex-Country Manager of Indonesia, Mr. M.M. Bhutani.
That's enough travel ... now let's head back home