Another job lost to misunderstandings over blog posts!

I was doing a Google Blogsearch for “thinkpad” (yes, I’m an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad junkie after all), and I came across this interesting story.

Indian blogger Gaurav Sabnis had to resign from IBM over an issue concerning his blog posts criticizing the Indian Institute for Planning and Management (IIPM) for misleading/highly embellished advertisements.

Gaurav writes:

A few weeks back, I linked to a story carried by JAM magazine which examined the tall claims made by IIPM in its newspaper ads. Some days later I linked

to the blog of someone claiming to be an ex-IIPM-ite. The main purpose

behind these posts on my blog was to make a few people aware of how

these massively embellished ads may be painting an exaggerated picture

of their institute’s worth.

While

IBM clarified that the blog posts of its (now former) employee were

personal, and not reflective of any official IBM stand, the IIPM camp

believed otherwise, and threatened to cause IBM bad publicity unless

the blogger deleted his posts.  Hence, Gaurav maintains that he

chose to resign rather than delete his blog posts (which would be

against his freedom of speech) or let IBM suffer the bad press (in fairness to IBM, Gaurav also states that his former employer did not force him to resign).

IIPM Students Union had decided that if my blog posts were not deleted,

then they would gather all the Thinkpads they had been given by the

institute, and burn them in front of the IBM office in Delhi. Yes,

that’s right. Burn laptops!
…
IBM was being dragged into this unnecessarily. It was being made a

target of bizarre pressure tactics. If even one Thinkpad laptop was

actually burnt, it would cause a lot of bad press and nuisance for IBM.

So I did not want IBM’s well-being to be compromised in any way.

IMHO, IIPM’s scare tactics are sure to earn them the bad

publicity in the blogosphere and ultimately the Internet-at-large.  In

this day and age of democratized, grassroots publishing, the people

have gained control over the information exchanged across cyberspace. 

And the very bad publicity the institute wanted to avoid by forcing the

deletion of blog posts may very well be caused by their own actions. 

The threat of burning thinkpads may be IIPM’s own undoing.

Of

course, the claims of Gaurav are yet to be

validated, and will most likely be refuted by other parties involved (IBM or

IIPM).  But the very nature of grassroots publishing means it’s a

publish-then-filter system rather than filter-then-publish.  Soon

enough, when both sides are heard out, and when supporting documents or

details are made available, we will see who is worth listening to.

But for now, I’ll be following this story.  I’m against burning laptops, myself!

Update: Indian community blog DesiPundit has taken up the story and has quite a roundup of blog posts and other articles here.

We at DesiPundit condemn IIPM and their chamcha blogs (no links offered here) for their despicable attitude. Gaurav Sabnis, a popular Indian blogger has been served a legal notice (via email) asking him to retract his statements against IIPM. More importantly, this attempted supression of freedom of speech shall not be tolerated. Kaps has issued a call to join the fight against IIPM.

So do other blogs across continents: Instapundit, RedCouch, GlobalVoices, among others.

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