I always thought that press conferences were meant for and targeted at journalists until one day I attended a C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) press conference. It was a press conference to announce the launch of a new Linux operating system by the organization, which was supposed to be better than any other Linux distributions in the market.The conference was supposed to take place at the company's office, which was no less a maze, which only the company officials could solve. When I reached the place about 30 minutes late, I was escorted to the secret room in that maze by a PR executive of the company. There were a few journalists already waiting there, but nothing had started. We were then told that it'll take another hour to get started. To keep us busy, the company decided to offer us 'snacks'. For some reason, they couldn't get those in the same room. So we were taken to another room through a similar maze, which had a huge conference table having a box of snacks and 'fruity' each for all of us.
After that 'delicious' treat, we were asked to stand outside the room for inauguration. All photographers were invited to click pictures, but since there were none available, someone from the company used his 'high-end' 2 mega pixel cell phone camera to click the pictures. Once the Chief guest entered the room, all the journalists were pushed back so that the C-DAC employees could interact with the IT-secretary. Perhaps they didn't want us to listen to their secret announcements which they called us for.
Use of a microphone seemed to be prohibited in the office. Though all of us (the journos, ofcourse) were interested to know what the new operating system had, even with a lot of effort, we could only make guesses about the features as nothing was audible. Nevertheless, the chief guest left after the presentation was complete and everyone thought that they'll now get some details about the new platform but no details were provided. Wondering why we were invited to the event, we realized that it was perhaps an exercise to test how techno savvy we were and how sophisticated gadgets we carried. Since, I wasn't carrying any spying gadgets in my arsenal, I failed the test to qualify as a tech journo. Disappointed at my defeat, I took a vow that I won't attend any C-DAC event unless I'm carrying enough hi-tech spy gadgets.
3 comments:
You also should have flaunt your high end phone which comes with 3.2 megapixel camera. Anyway,sarcasm galore all over..... i like it.Keep sharing your experiences.Will look out for more.....:)
I couldn't have flaunted my 'high-end' phone since although it has 3.2MP camera and a whole lot of other features, it'll be the last phone on earth that i would want to use for clicking pictures (picture quality sucks big time) :D
Well, i should have thought so. Who else would know about the picture quality of your 'high end' phone. :)
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