New Delhi:
Yes! That's true. Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi are certainly no longer seeing eye-to-eye after the rather colourful and bitter events of the last few weeks. But that is in real life. In the virtual world, where the controversy all began - Twitter - the two are still friends!
Former Minister of State for External Affairs, Tharoor, who after a lot of prodding from the senior leadership of the Congress finally resigned, still hasn't deleted his nemesis, the suspended IPL commissioner from his Twitter account. And the same is equally true for Modi. Effectively meaning, the two former pals are still keeping a close eye on what the other is saying.
Tharoor, nicknamed Twitteroor after his propensity to the new age medium, is following 31 people which includes - Brahma Chellaney, professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, industrialist Anand Mahindra, director Karan Johar, author Chetan Bhagat, tennis star Mahesh Bhupati and several senior journalists.
Modi, on the other hand, has only joined the tweeting bandwagon recently and is keeping tabs on what 25 others are expressing. Most of them are known faces of the IPL "where cricket and Bollywood meet". However, Bollywood certainly scores over cricket here.
The cricketers Modi is following are: Yuvraj Singh, Damien Martyn, Michael Clarke and Shane Warne. The list from the glamour world is a little longer: Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta, Shilpa Shetty, Sushmita Sen, Sameera Reddy, Celina Jaitley and even Kate Moss.
Meanwhile, even as the IPLgate gets murkier, the number of people following Tharoor and Modi has shot up dramatically in the last two weeks. Tharoor, of course, has always been very popular and had over 700,000 followers when the scandal broke out. Now, he has almost reached the 751,000 mark, with followers being added every time the page is refreshed.
Modi too hasn't been too behind. On April 11th, when he first revealed the Kochi consortium's shareholding pattern, he had 60,000 odd followers. Now, with everyone wanting to know what he will reveal next as promised, he is inching towards 117,000 mark.
But after all the washing of the dirty linen in public, the acrimony and the bad blood, all because of one little tweet, who knows, perhaps Twitter could also help translate the 'friendship' status from the virtual to the real world!