VEG SPREAD

As Sushma Swaraj visits Bangladesh, chefs in Dhaka’s plush Pan Pacific Sonargaon hotel have an unenviable task.

As Sushma Swaraj visits Bangladesh, chefs in Dhaka’s plush Pan Pacific Sonargaon hotel have an unenviable task. They have been asked to cook vegetarian meals for the minister — that too without garlic. This has put the cooks in a difficult situation, who are used to preparing non-vegetarian, spicy cuisine for the Bengali-speaking customers. Since Sushma is a vegetarian, the Bangladesh foreign ministry is planning only a vegetarian spread at the lunch hosted by Foreign Minister A H Mahmood Ali. Their reasoning is simple: you cannot offend the chief guest by gorging on non-vegetarian food in front of her. This would mean officials and guests, too, will have to make do with the vegetarian spread.

BASIC NEEDS

Some ministers in the Narendra Modi government are finding themselves in a peculiar situation. They haven’t yet got official letterheads bearing their name and designation. As a result, their official communications even to state governments are typed on plain papers. They are just hoping there are no forged communications, which had happened the past even on the letterheads of parliamentarians.

TWEETS IN AIR

To keep pace with social media savvy Home Minister Rajnath Singh, babus in his ministry are now increasingly taking to Twitter and other social media platforms. Singh, an avid user of Twitter, recently launched a Twitter handle for the Home Minister’s Office. Singh also has a Twitter account, which is operational from the time he became the BJP president. Following the launch of the Home Minister’s Office Twitter account, many bureaucrats opened or renewed accounts to keep themselves abreast with the minister’s tweets.

TECHINICAL GLITCH

Causing a flutter in government circles, many important government websites, hosted by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), crashed Wednesday evening. With apprehension of a cyber-attack doing the rounds, the government clarified that some sites were down because of technical problems and malfunctioning of equipment and that the sites would be up and running soon. Interestingly though, while sites like pib.nic.in and loksabha.nic.in were unavailable for a few hours, the one NIC-hosted site that didn’t see any hiccup and continued to operate normally was the pmindia.nic.in.

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Sushma Swaraj