PM Singh not gatecrashed?
By Techgirl

Indian media organizations sent their most respected and experienced Editors to cover the President Obama and Prime Minister Singh meeting in USA.  Much was written about the importance of PM Singh being the first official guest at the White House, US seen through the China, India, Pakistan prism, civilian nuclear deal, terrorism and other important topics of national interest.

But this serious journalism was soon overshadowed by news reports that ‘Wannabe Reality TV’ star Michaele Salahi and socialite Tareq Salahi had gate crashed the State dinner in honour of our highly regarded Prime Minister. 

As the most powerful man in the world, the US President has 5 levels of security. And it seemed that fameballs Michaele and Tareq had used their wits to cleverly bypass all security layers to shake hands and be photographed with President Obama, VP Joe Biden, AR Rahman and other VVIPs.

As soon the White House function was over, they went home and triumphantly posted their photos in Facebook.  And tipped off a couple of ‘friendly’ American journalists. Great publicity quite often translates into good dollars.

World media lapped up the story about the greatest gatecrash ever. National newspapers, TV Stations and web sites ran the story.  Everyone was asking the question: “How could this happen”.  Were the secret services sleeping?

The US Secret Service tried to save face by saying no one was in real danger as everyone had gone through metal detectors. But they had some egg on their face.

While the world media is reporting it as a serious glitch in the security procedures, only one blog group dug a bit deeper.  And are hypothesizing that an Indian diplomat may have helped them get into the White house. Or they misused an existing relationship with the Indian embassy to gatecrash.

The powerful blog group Gawker (which owns tech blogs Gizmodo and Valleywag) published photos of the two gatecrashers happily being hosted by the Indian embassy in USA at a previous function on September 9.  Gawker put forward the following theory

“
1) US-based Indian diplomat Arun Singh invited the Salahis to the dinner as a reward for their work on the India Vs. USA polo match, but for some reason their names didn't make it on the official guest list. When they showed up and were turned away (Brian Williams told the Times the couple's car was turned away by the first ring of Secret Service, after which they "hopped out") they called up Arun K. Singh: "Dude, you said we were on the list!" Singh spoke to the Secret Service and got them in.

2) The Salahis showed up uninvited, confident that they could use their Singh connection to get in the party. After being turned away, they either name-dropped Singh or got him to vouch for them to the Secret Service.

Either way, the Salahis weren't just some random people who showed up at the White House and schmoozed their way past the Secret Service with their fancy clothes. The Salahis knew somebody; they likely leveraged their connection to Arun K. Singh—the Indian Embassy's polo liaison—to crash the state dinner and successfully roll their way to immortal fameball-dom.
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Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com