Below the line

The Union Health Ministry has been receiving flak at the hands of Twitterati for posting ‘insensitive’ graphics with its advice on exercise or depression.

The latest was the Ministry’s tweet suggesting seven ways to cope with depression, including ‘being creative’, ‘eating fruits’, and ‘taking multi-vitamins’.

Before this, the tweets from the Ministry have come under the scanner for plagiarising an international artist’s post from Instagram which portrayed an anorexic woman eating vegetarian foodstuff while a heavyset woman eating egg, meat and cheese.

Time and again, on tweets related to using sanitary napkins, the graphics show a huge flower stuck right in the middle of a sanitary napkin.

Whatever is the Ministry thinking?

The CA Institute staff in the capital are an unhappy lot. They are staying away from work, and are on a strike. The reason is not far to seek. The ICAI has so far not implemented the Seventh Pay Commission award for its staff. What is more irksome for the CA Institute staff is that the competing professional institutes are understood to have handed out salary hikes for their staff.

Now, journos covering the CA Institute are at the receiving end as their requests for comments from the top brass go unheard. Hopefully, things should get sorted out and the strike would end by Monday. Journos are keeping their fingers crossed.

Vice-President of India M Venkaiah Naidu is known for speaking his mind. On July 13, interacting with the scientists of the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) and the National Tsunami Warning Centre in Hyderabad, he called upon various scientific organisations in the country to work in synergy, and not in silos, for improving people’s lives.

You must give it to the Cost Accountants Institute for being “cost conscious”. So much so that the Institute of Cost Accountants of India neither had a media kit nor did it publish the programme list for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations graced by the President, Ram Nath Kovind. So when a hack tried to find whether there was a reason behind this, an official of the Institute talked of the savings in paper achieved by not publishing the programme agenda.

With hundreds of participants at the event, this turned out to be a good move resulting in some cost savings for the Institute. But ithe media and participants surely missed the programme list. Next time round, the hacks hope that the Institute will go digital, WhatsApping the programme list to its members and media fraternity.

Following British lawmaker Lord Alexander Carlile’s allegation that India had revoked his visa and denied him entry due to pressure from the Bangladesh government, the Ministry of External Affairs was quick to respond. The spokesperson explained that Carlile, who was a legal consultant to jailed former Bangladesh Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, did not have an appropriate visa. “Carlile had applied for a business visa while he wanted to address a press conference. Since his intended activity in India was incompatible with the purpose of his visit….it was decided to deny him entry into India upon arrival,” he said.

However, when a journalist asked him the category under which one could apply for visa to address a press conference, he parried the question by saying that it was the prerogative of the host country to deny or grant a visa for any purpose.

Can one then conclude from this that visas will not be issued for addressing a press conferences especially if it is against the government of a friendly neighbouring country?

Our Delhi Bureau