NDTV anchor Nidhi Razdan quit her job of 21 years, spent half a year without pay, and became the butt of ridicule of the world, but all this could’ve been avoided had she only deigned to listen to some sage advice on Twitter.
Nidhi Razdan now claims that she was the victim of a “phishing attack” by internet pranksters that made her believe she had been offered a teaching position at Harvard, which made her quit her job and declare to the world that she was an Associate Professor of Journalism. But this wasn’t the first time that Razdan had been so “attacked” — in early 2018, she’d tweeted that her “Income tax details” had been hacked. “Absolutely distressed to know that my Income Tax details have been hacked, all my details have been changed on the govt of India portal, with NO alert to me on my registered mobile. How are we supposed to believe our data is safe?” she’d complained on Twitter.
At this point, senior ORF fellow Sushant Sareen had tried explaining to her she’d fallen prey to a phishing scam. “If your previous tweet is anything to go by, you fell for a phishing scam. You obviously handed your details on a platter without exercising caution or due diligence. Don’t blame your mistake on the system. We all have rec’d such mails but have been cautious to not fall for them,” he wrote.
Sareen then went on to explain how he himself had received such emails. “I have recd doc claiming to be from PMO. It was extremely seductive because the doc excited my curiosity. Then you ask yourself why the hell would PMO send me a classified file and that too on my email. At that stage you just delete the mail. In your case curiosity got the cat,” he wrote to her.
This could’ve been a learning experience for Razdan — someone on the internet was giving her life — and potentially career-saving — advice for free. But Razdan was in no mood to listen. “I’m not some dumb bimbo, you can shove your mansplaining where it belongs,” she declared.
Three years later, the completely, definitively, self-declared non-bimbo received similar emails from Harvard, and was strung along with seven whole months believing she’d received a job offer.
There couldn’t be an incident to more accurately capture the left-liberal attitude towards the world. Millions of people have accounts on the Income Tax portal; yet only Razdan’s was hacked. Instead of wondering what might’ve gone wrong at her end, she chose to blame the government for her troubles. When someone helpfully pointed out what the problem might’ve been, her feminist values made her immediately dismiss it as “mansplaining”. And in doing so, she was crass, rude, and asked Sushant Sareen to shove the mansplaining “where it belongs”.
Karma, though, clearly had other plans.
