The next time you call up Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s Delhi mobile, you could well get to hear “services to this number have been temporarily disconnected”. A few days ago, while Mukherjee was holding a meeting with his top bureaucrats, he got a call from a Vodafone customer service executive who said that since the bill, of a fairly large amount, had not been paid, the company would have no option but to disconnect the phone in another day or so.
Mukherjee lost his cool and asked the official how he dared to call him up in the middle of a meeting. After that, he called officials to find out why the bill had not been paid — in the meanwhile, he said, “Please take this phone away, I don’t want to use it.”