Diwali SMS of the famous and the powerful

New Delhi. Apart from being festival of lights, sounds, merriness, feasting, gambling and a symbol of victory of good over evil, Diwali is also the day when people send and receive SMS very actively. Faking News was no exception to it. Although we couldn’t send any SMS as outgoing calls and SMS facility was debarred from our mobile number for lack of documental proof of being a pagal patrakar, we received quite a lot of SMSs from the famous and the powerful people in the country.

We realized how much rewarding it was to be a part of the journalistic fraternity, even though we declared ourselves fake. Our SMS inbox is now strong enough a reason to scare any person of our ‘reach’ in the higher echelons. Picture some of the SMSs we received:

“Sukh, Shanti, Samadhan, Samruddhi, Aishwarya, Arogya, Pratishtha ya Saptarangi Divya ni aaple jeevan Prakashmay hovo. Diwalichya Shubhecha - Marathi Manoos (MNS)”

It was sent by Raj Thackeray himself! Initially we thought he had sent some SMS targeting Bachchan family as Aishwarya’s name seemed there and we didn’t know Marathi (oops, our Mumbai office may remain a non-starter now). But soon we realized it was a Diwali wish and we stopped ourselves from making a headline.

Within seconds of receiving Raj Thackeray’s SMS, we got this SMS:

“Sukh, Shanti, Samadhan, Samruddhi, Aishwarya, Arogya, Pratishtha ya Saptarangi Divya ni aaple jeevan Prakashmay hovo. Diwalichya Shubhecha - Marathi Manoos (MNS)”

The sender of the SMS was Uddhav Thackeray!

Before we could understand what was happening, we soon got a corrected SMS from Uddhav, with Shiv Sena’s name (SS) instead of MNS in the same SMS.

Faking News Intelligence Group (FNIG) concluded that Uddhav must have forwarded the SMS of Raj Thackeray in a haste to mediapersons so that Raj doesn’t get all the attention, and in the haste, he forgot to edit the party’s name in the compose box – a mistake he soon realized and corrected, but not without making a fool of himself.

Then the third SMS we got was from PRO of Government of Bihar, who sent us the following message:

“Subh Diwali - Nitish Kumar (Janta Dal United), Lalu Prasad Yadav (Rashtriya Janta Dal), Ram Vilas Paswan (Lok Janshakti Party), Meera Kumar (Congress) and others”

FNIG concludes that due to constraint of 161 characters in the compose box, the leaders couldn’t say much as their main concern was to have their presence registered with Faking News instead of conveying any message.

Our SMS inbox was almost spammed with many other messages from political leaders but to keep this news report short, we’d now let our readers know the SMSs we received from non-political people. For example, we got this SMS:

“Happy Diwali dudes! Fly High and Feel Happy! Our company cares for everyone! I’m not under any pressure to send this message. Enjoy the day!”

Yes, you guessed it right. Sender is Jet Airways chairman Naresh Goyal.

Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan also graced us with his SMS, which read as, “Each Diwali is ‘Unforgettable’, enjoy it and make it special for you and your family. Thanks for wishing me health. God bless you.”

Another Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan sent us an SMS as well that read as, “Each Diwali is a ‘Temptation’, give in to your desires and enjoy the day to the fullest. Happy Diwali. Love you guys. Muaaah”

Although we told our readers that we won’t publish any SMS of any more political person, but at this point we have to mention one SMS we got from a political leader having good relations in Bollywood as well. The SMS read as:

“Each Diwali is unforgettable, enjoy to make it special for you and your family, but don’t give in to temptations. Bade Bhaiya thanks you for wishing him health.” It was sent by Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh.

We got SMSs from many other people as well – fashion models, cricketers, bankers, stock brokers, doctors, and even underworld dons. Seems all of them need media attention and all of them need blessings of Goddess Laxmi.

We don’t know about Goddess Laxmi, but we have surely obliged some of them, and will keep obliging them in future too.