“Dear Krishna, all is forgiven. Don’t catch the wrong flight.”
This is not a message to the external affairs minister from his boss, the Prime Minister but is what Dr Yum Yum Singh, a fictitious Manmohan Singh, wrote on his Twitter on Sunday commenting on Mr Krishna’s faux pax in the UN Security Council (UNSC) on Friday.
At the UNSC meeting, Mr Krishna began reading the wrong speech by inadvertently reading the Portuguese foreign minister’s English translation of his text for about three minutes before being corrected by India’s envoy to the UN Hardeep Singh Puri.
Mr Krishna’s mistake made headlines in the media back home and the Pakistani press gleefully played it up too.
A lot of traffic was generated on social networking sites since the goof up became public with many bloggers poking fun at the expense of the external affairs minister but leaving many others wondering what the fuss was all about. After all many a public figure have committed such gaffes. US President Barack Obama began reading the speech of the Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen at the UN in 2009 after the teleprompter mixed up their speeches. Former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan G. Parthasarathy, now a well-known commentator on foreign affairs, said, “It is a mistake which even Obama has made. It makes good gossip, but more important is what he said in substantive terms. It can happen. Everybody in the Security Council knows that ministers are busy people. It is not an embarrassment for the country.” K. Natwar Singh, one of Mr Krishna’s predecessors, declined to say anything on the episode.