Eavesdropper

Finally, some praise!

Having become used to nagging complaints from the industry, telecom minister Kapil Sibal was pleasantly surprised to find gratitude from the same quarters at the Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association conference as he announced the grant of infrastructure status to it. Soon after, a beaming Sibal couldn't let go of the opportunity to speak his heart out to the audience, "I'm delighted to be here, this is a rare gathering where we talk about kept promises and not the unkept ones."

We are all victims

And that wasn't all. Sibal even borrowed a leaf from the previous speaker, managing director of Bharti Enterprises Akhil Gupta's book, to explain his current position in a larger context. While Gupta had been lamenting over how the telecom industry was wrongly perceived as a villain while in reality it was a sufferer as it was the second-largest consumer of diesel, Sibal tweaked this to say, "Our condition is similar to the telecom industry's, we are also perceived as villains but actually we too are the victims of what is happening around us."

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