Anyone who knows the basics of public relations, also knows how to pull off a press conference. There are some ground rules. You identify your key messages. If your spokesperson requires it, you put him through a media training session. You teach him some tricks of the trade on how to dodge tough questions and bridge back to the key message and never ever make a comment off-the-record. Then you brief the media on what the press conference is about, set the tone, set a time limit, lay out some cookies and tea, make a presentation and open up the floor for questions.

Going by these basics, I have to admit that Sam Pitroda and his team seemed to have ticked all the boxes necessary to hold the perfect press conference. And most importantly they’d managed the surprise element.

It wasn’t just a momentous occasion because our silence-is-golden government was actually speaking to the people – okay, the “tweeple”. They were breaking from tradition and using Twitter to do so. Was it a rub-off of NaMo’s little dalliance with Google+? Maybe it was, but it’s still impressive and a stroke of brilliance that a government which has come under fire for clamping down on free speech on social networking sites, uses one of the errant social networking sites to speak to the people.

Sam Pitroda, of the American-spelt “adviser” to government fame, invited everyone to “join us on Tuesday, 25th Sep at 3:30 PM IST for the first ever#press conference on #Twitter in India on ‘Democratisation of Information’.” And come 3.25 pm, we were requested to look at two presentations on youtube. The first had a disgruntled Pitroda tell us why Democratisation of Information is important to create Public Information Infrastructure in India . The second explained why a virtual press conference was planned on Twitter. In this one, an unsmiling Pitroda – it is a serious matter after all to venture out from behind the Iron Curtain – told us that through Twitter you can “reach out to a large number of interested people” on “the subject all over the world. And really keep the focus of the subject. And avoid rambling messages.”

Tutorial done, we were then allowed to participate and watch this “virtual press conference”.

Keeping with format, Pitroda spent the first 15 minutes keying in – very slowly – his entire speech. In 140 characters. With typos. Which made, at least me, believe that it was indeed him and not Ramesh his secretary, keying in the tweets while he dictated. He then proceeded to repeat what he had said in the youtube video, in case we were hearing impaired.

To quote – and do imagine this in tweets of 140 characters so even you can go squint-eyed like I did: “He firmly believes that #Information is the 4th pillar of #democracy along with legislature, executive and judiciary. #Information brings about openness, accessibility, transparency, accountability, networking, decentralisation & as a result #democratisation. All this will require innovations, new business models, process reengineering, new products and new services and lot more. We need your support and help in making this happen. Please visit our websites and give us your ideas and inputs. We have the #open government platform at http://www.data.gov.in  will provide access to govt. data and documents. The NKN has enormous possibilities: Virtual Classrooms, Research Collab, etc. Read the NKN Brochure for details: http://nkn.in/download.php?file=NKN_Brochure.pdf … I believe that the NKN is a game changer and is going to revolutionise the way we #connect, #collaborate and deliver#education. Do go through our detailed #presentation on Public #InformationInfrastructure at: http://iii.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=107:public-information-infrastructure&catid=48:presentations&Itemid=2 …To build PII, we need multiple open platforms for Broadband, UID, GIS, Security, Applications, Payment and Portals. PII also includes fibre connectivity to all 250000 #panchayats #DoI. PII includes the NKN to connect 1500 nodes for universities, colleges, R&D labs, Libraries, etc. Visit http://www.nkn.in . However, it will require new mindset and commitment of the young to change the course. This will have far reaching implications on delivery  of #publicservices, #Governance, #Education, #Health, #Agriculture, etc. UPA Govt also has political will to make it happen. UPA Govt has various plans to build robust Information Infrastructure to democratize information on a scale that has never been done before. Public #Information Infrastructure (PII) will transform India’s 1.2 billion people into 1.2 billion opportunities: http://iii.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=107:public-information-infrastructure&catid=48:presentations&Itemid=2 …Now that #India is a country of a billion #connected people, the challenge is to create a new paradigm for #development. Information is power and not many wish to share. Info is critical for development and needs to be timely available to people. #DoI”

As is obvious, the silver-haired Pitroda is not particularly silver-tongued. Once he’d dipped you in the jargon and the many hashtags, he opened up the floor on his Twitter wall to questions. Which is when the fun began.

A comedy of errors ensued. Because Pitroda not only refused to answer questions directly – which you can’t blame him for, because that’s the lay of the land he lives in – he also didn’t know the basics of Twitter. Since he didn’t mark who he was replying to, random statements were popping up without any clue what or whom they were in response to. And the session soon devolved into a tutorial on Twitter for Pitroda.

What you got at the end of it was whole lot of gobbledygook jargon and obtuse answers. @GeorgeVergese asked him – “When will panchayats come to cloud computing”. To which Pitroda’s informative answer was, “Move to cloud computing will ensure common standards”.

Say what?!

Also, not realising that you must reply in the same thread, Pitroda routinely answered the wrong person. It was like being in Sukumar Ray’s nonsense masterpiece, AbolTabol (Gibberish). The key difference being that that was literature and entertaining. This was neither of the two.

Sample this gem of an exchange:

Or this exchange which silenced even the ever-verbose Nitin Pai:

@ayesha-minhaz asked him “@pitrodasam what are the steps government is taking to monitor the DOI on social media #DoI”. Pitroda responded with, “@ayesha_minhaz @pitrodasam That was the idea of the press conf.#DoI”.

It was like watching my uncle who is in the first stages of Alzheimer’s trying to conduct a conversation, which in his world is lucid. But in our world is very difficult to comprehend. This virtual press conference was simply put, an exercise in futility and an experiment gone haywire. By the end of the hour, you didn’t know what Pitroda was saying. I don’t think he knew what he was replying to by the end of it.

We did get multiple links to websites, presentations and youtube videos, in case we were so inclined. And a few chuckles. But an insight into the machinations of the government’s mind when it comes to information and its democraticasation – public/ private or otherwise? You can forget about it.

So while kudos should definitely be given to the government for trying something new and showing us that they aren’t disconnected with modern technology, they definitely have a lot to learn. I’d strongly suggest that next time round a crash-course on replying to messages on Twitter be undertaken.

One also can’t help wondering why this was called a press conference? It was a Twitter chat at best. A press conference by definition means that the media is being spoken to. Or is it that after blocking Shiv Aroor and Kanchan Gupta, the government believes that the only media worth speaking to is on Twitter? Good to know that the government’s myopia isn’t limited to just governance.

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