Last year, I was subject to an irritating bout of solicitation by an organisation that wanted me to write articles for a publication they were launching. This campaign went on for three months, ending finally in August.

Starting in June 2004, I received more than a dozen individually addressed emails and faxes (in this day and age???), following up on this. I was in Germany for most of that period (initially because of my speaking at a conference there, then to deal with the death of my uncle). I wrote back to the people taking such great pains to telling them about this, and that I was not available, or in a state of mind, to write articles at that point. Their reply to this was a demand to send abstracts of articles I intended to write for them immediately.

When someone behaves the way these guys were behaving, I tend to get suspicious. On my return to India, I dug into the background of that organisation, and what I came up with didn’t smell of roses. The credibility they claimed appeared manufactured. I asked people I trusted, and they sort of hemmed and hawed, and let me know that it may not be too hot an idea to get involved with that company.

I finally ended this thing when I received an imperious sounding phone call, demanding to know why I had not sent in the article that I had “committed to”. It was a bad day that day for me – and when I got this babu-sounding person on the line talking to me like that, I lost it and told him what he could do with his company and their publication. While I accept the biological impossibility of the suggested act, I felt a lot better after that, and the harrassment stopped.

A year later, I find my gutfeel vindicated. Not very nice people, it appears, and their methods appear less than acceptable.