The curious case of Nandan Nilekani's Twitter account
Sidin Vadukut -
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 5:25 PM
On 2 July Bangalore Mirror reported that an impostor had been operating Nandan Nilekani's Twitter account:
Talk about IDs! Well, the Unique ID Authority of India chairman Nandan Nilekani’s ID on Twitter is not his ID. Those updates on the Twitter site are from someone who is pretending to be Nandan Nilekani. When asked about updates on the social networking site, Nandan Nilekani clarified that he does not have a personal Twitter account. So if you are on Twitter and you get an invite to “be followed” by Nandan Nilekani, hang on before getting impressed with yourself.
The updates themselves didn't seem to give things away. Observe below screen grab:
And some of those links lead to rather harmless looking sites as well. For instance the PanIIT link actually leads to the organization's website.
But step back a little, see the background of the 'Nilekani' Twitter profile and suddenly you notice a whole bunch of subtle and not-so details.
Now Play Things learnt yesterday that Twitter had suspended the impostor account. (Clicking on www.twitter.com/nandannilekani leads you to the Twitter suspended accounts page.) But thanks to good old Google cache we can still look at the finer points of the Nilekani twitter account. First of all there was the profile picture:
Notice the little call-center style headgear? The oft-heard call-center koan tucked in beneath in bright red letters? Clearly this is not an impostor who rates our outsourcing sector highly at all.
The background image of the Twitter account revealed plenty more. This is a snapshot of the whole page showing as much of the hotch-potch background as possible:
On the left, below a Tyson-like Nilekani, there is a snapshot of Nilekani's appearance on Jon Stewart's show where he came across as the most mild mannered man in the world.
On the top left are images from a book and a movie: Lou Dobb's Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas, and Outsourced, a 2006 film starring Ayesha Dharker:
Of course the impostor had not been resting since the Bangalore Mirror story broke. If you compare the screenshot on the Mirror story page and the latest one, the impostor has cleverly incorporated the Bangalore Mirror cover story image as well. Nice:
There are more book cover embeds in the background. But the two really telling embeds are charts. One compares salaries of Indian and American engineers:
The other chart estimates the number of US jobs expected to be exported by 2015:
At the time Bangalore Mirror broke the story it doesn't look like the perpetrator was identified. A day later tech gossip site Techgoss.com had a piece by 'Techgirl' about the fraud Twittering:
Just when I thought I had the tech satire market to myself, I get competition. And the competition has played the game so well that he suckered in a number of senior tech managers and journalists who thought they were talking to a real tech tycoon.
But perhaps this was a huge ruse in itself. By 12 July, which is when Google has the last cached version of the page, there was an addition to the anti-outsourcing mosaic image:
Turns out the same Techgirl as above may have something to do with the impostoring. The Techgirltalk blog, it says on the banner on top of the blog, is all about the 'Midnight confessions of IT/BPO/KPO managers'. The author gives herself the following intro:
To avoid hassles in the form of indiscriminate law-suiting I will refrain from referring to the fake, yet juicy titbits on that blog.
But now that Twitter has officially suspended the Nandan Nilekani Twitter ID, we will never know what wonderful fakeness Techgirl had in store for us.
As for Nilekani, Universal ID man, it all seems a little ironic no doubt.