Pakistani ambassador Shahid Malik has encountered the same problem that Mani Shankar Aiyar recently faced. Someone hacked into his private e-mail and sent a message in his name to all those in his address book. The mail in the ambassador’s name is a sales pitch for cheap electronic goods. To add to the polished Malik’s embarrassment, it is written in what some chauvinist Indians would term as Pakinglish. “Dear Friend, how were you going?” is the opening line.

Look who’s talking

The Congress austerity controversy has thrown up some embarrassing facts which have left the party red-faced. While S M Krishna and Shashi Tharoor occupied five-star accommodation at their own expense, it turns out that all outstation MPs whose bungalows in Delhi are still being readied, routinely stay at the four-star Samrat and the five star Ashoka Hotel when in Delhi and the government foots the bill. Incidentally, the money spent by the Urban Development Ministry on the renovation of MPs’ houses in the last four years was a whopping Rs 100 crore.

Tweeting up wrong tree

Contrary to the claim of his detractors in the Congress that a chastened Shashi Tharoor has practically given up tweeting, the minister continues to tweet as frequently as before. On his site, Tharoor says he tweets for only twenty minutes a day. But his output is prodigious and he has now a phenomenal 200,000 followers. Tharoor is a victim of coterie politics in the Congress. His unconventional remarks, not just about “holy cows” and “cattle class”, but also dubbing Chinese actions as “outrageous” and declaring the Sharm el-Sheikh declaration as “not legally binding”, have been exploited by his detractors as ammunition against him. Many Congresspersons, particularly from his home state, are furious that a newcomer has had such a meteoric rise. Some mistakenly assume that Tharoor has got so far because of the backing of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his band of Malayali aides. With the knives out for him in the Congress, Tharoor could not have survived so long without the blessings of the Congress’s first family. The only question is whether it is Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi who is backing Tharoor.

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