Was watching CNN IBN debate yesterday and was flabbergasted to see the pony-tailed crusader of quality education, Arindam Chaudhuri at his animated best. The obnoxious creep who has made a fortune off the aspirations and insecurities of India’s middle classes and who believes that all his students should pay a fortune to ‘study’ at IIPM, has filed lawsuits against publishers Penguin; magazines The Caravan, Just Another Magazine and Careers360 Magazine; authors Siddhartha Deb, Maheshwar Pai, Rashmi Bansal and even Google India on charges of “publishing, distributing, giving coverage, circulating, blogging the defamatory, libelous and slanderous articles.”
IIPM had earlier filed a lawsuit against The Caravan seeking damages to the tune of Rs. 500 million, in Silchar, Assam. Not in Delhi, where both the IIPM and the magazine’s publisher, Delhi Press, are based, but 2,200 km away from Delhi, 300 km from Dispur, Assam’s capital. The IIPM filed the case at the Court of Civil Judge in Silchar district, through one Kishorendu Gupta, who operates Gupta Electrical Engineers in a Silchar suburb, and is the first plaintiff. IIPM is the second plaintiff.
On Feb 14th, 2013 IIPM managed to have a directive issued by a Court in Gwalior. In pursuance of the court directive, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has issued an order directing Internet Service Licensees to block access to 78 URLs from India, 73 of which contained such criticism directed towards IIPM, ex-parte, without any pre-hearing notice. As a writer I am shocked how IIPM was able to play and cobble together a bureaucratic system of dealing with the Internet much worse than the censorship in place in Peoples Republic of China and thought that it will be appropriate that I too should contribute to my views.
I seriously wonder how a fraud like Arindam Chaudhuri is able to bend the system like this. Am sure in the coming days questions ranging from whether the court has the legal authority to give such an order to purge websites, especially of official organizations like University Grants Commission (UGC) to whether the order is flawed from lack of fair hearing opportunities given to parties affected, will be answered.
The most important point that was missed in the boisterous debate was that one of the URLs mentioned in the DoT order was a public notice given by UGC, dated July, 2012 confirming the unrecognized status of IIPM.
Mr. Arindam Chaudhuri accept it, you can make glossy brochures but the fact remains that IIPM is not recognised by the University Grants Commission (UGC), which is the competent authority regulating Indian institutes of higher education. You better not count your chicken before they hatch!!!
Picture Courtesy : The Caravan (Dec 2010 Cover Story “Sweet Smell Of Success”)
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