 "Lucknow lad who took PMO Twitter handle is Lenovo's face")
Qaiser Malik, the Lucknow-based IT whiz kid who last year had acquired @PMOIndia, the official Twitter handle of the Indian Prime Minister's Office (PMO) for half-hour before it was restored to PMO, has been roped in as the brand ambassador of PC maker Lenovo.
To increase PC penetration, Lenovo has launched a programme "Start up with Lenovo" wherein it has tied up with Bajaj Finance to offer interest-free EMI scheme for owning its computer devices.
Under the programme, Lenovo is roping in region specific brand ambassadors and Malik has been signed up for UP, the company's head consumer (marketing and digital) said here.
Lenovo has launched similar initiatives Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh also.
It was in May 2014, when Malik, then only 19 and a budding entrepreneur running a social networking site Picxter.com and working on two other projects, owned Twitter handle @PMOIndia for about half-hour.
It happened so as the PMO of outgoing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had shifted the then existing account to another account @PMOIndiaArchive. Around the same time, Malik happened to be searching for a smaller Twitter handle and chanced to find @PMOIndia available.
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"It was inadvertent. I realised my mistake pretty soon and sent an apology to Pankaj Pachauri, the media advisor to Manmohan Singh," the teenager had quipped while talking to Business Standard soon after the episode.
In no time, Twitter had also recouped @PMOIndia handle and restored it to the PMO for then PM designate Narendra Modi, who was later sworn in as the 15th PM of India on May 26, 2014.
However, the faux pas had brought instant fame to Malik with newspapers profiling him in their pages, including this paper.
Mailk, who ardently admires Steve Jobs and Larry Page, has now founded another social networking platform Qupid. Now, he is now pursuing a computer science course in Bangalore although his parents are settled in Lucknow.
Lucknow-based IT company Trendsetterz is now the technology partner for Qupid, Malik informed over telephone from Bangalore.