Of full stops and gaffes...

HRD minister Prakash Javadekar dropping a clanger in a speech is probably par for the course given what a serious hazard the microphone poses to politicians of every hue. It is of course the same mike that lets them touch base with constituents who hang on their every word. Mr Javadekar was guilty of a historic gaffe, from which he was quick to retract, saying it was matter of an innocent full stop or, more appropriately, a punctuation mark that becomes a pause in the course of a speech that did the damage. Life is complicated these days for politicos who must master teleprompter cues as well as steer clear of speechwriters’ faux pas, if any.

The way his speech was rendered made it sound as if the minister believed “Subhas Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, Pandit Nehru, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru sabhi phaansi par chadhe (all were hanged)”. While the disappearance of the first is still a mystery, the second and third named, both giants in the freedom struggle, died entirely of natural causes. The British colonisers were guilty of many crimes, but not to the extent of hanging all the freedom movement’s great leaders. Given HRD ministers’ recent history, however, Mr Javadekar’s slip may rate low on the clanger scale. Why, even gifted orator Narendra Modi was guilty of a slip when he mixed up, by over 500 years, Chandragupta Maurya with the Guptas of Pataliputra. The minister will be well advised to read Lynne Truss’ book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, that teaches a zero tolerance approach towards punctuation.