Soon after I assumed a consulting assignment last year, I was looking for an excuse not to write.
God read my thoughts and sent a WhatsApp message to some guys who vowed to take the world down for some strong, maddening, philosophical reasons. They quickly acted and hacked my site. One morning, I was lazily trying to go to my blog to check if there are any comments (they come very frequently once a month). I could not. The moment I typed wordsaretools.in and clicked, a million windows popped up and hanged my computer. I quickly shut down the computer and tried opening it on my phone. It struggled for a few minutes and finally opened up to a screaming screen “we are taking you down – enough is enough’’ with pictures of skulls and swords around these words. There was also a GIF of a knife red with blood dripping slowly. It had many hate-India slogans.
I tried to recall if I had written anything controversial. Nope. I know quite a few people who hate my writing (wait for a separate post on that) but I was wondering who hates me so much that he had to take efforts to knock my site down. Did not look likely. I was intrigued by the intellect of the guy who did this. My site neither had a huge traffic nor was it so iconic that hacking that would make some difference to world. Poor guy.
Anyway, I was happy that I don’t have to write temporarily and sent a WhatsApp message to my Webmaster Ramesh (he is more of a web-student) based out of a small remote city in India. He assumed that since he was remote, he can afford to reply to messages once a week. After a week, he sent a cryptic message that he would check. Not happy with his delayed and meaningless response, I called him through WhatsApp. No luck. Tried through the regular phone. Hmm. After a few days, probably out of compassion, he replied that he was in Mysore and would fix the problem as soon as he returns.
Almost after one and a half months, one fine morning Ramesh sent me a message saying the website is alright. Eagerly I jumped in to check. OMG. While the website was working there were hundreds of new posts (which I had never posted) mostly about ‘How to write essays’’. I was wondering if somebody online was trying to teach me about how to write blog-posts. But there were also some strange marriage advertisements and hundreds of comments posted on my earlier posts, all in Russian and French. I got mad and messaged Ramesh again. No reply. Called. No response.
After 3-4 days he messaged that he was in a marriage and will attend to the issue. No luck. After a few days, I called him again. He promptly messaged that he had a throat infection and could not speak (as if he was speaking diligently when his throat was well).
A few weeks went by and after my constant nagging, Ramesh said he is attending to some more important issues (?) and his friend would help fix my problem. It was like Indo-Pak discussions. It was going on for ever without a solution in sight. Finally, my webmaster got married without solving my problem and went on a long honeymoon. His friend Suresh messaged that the malware is on the hosting side and the hosting company had to solve the problem. I decided that this is not going to work anymore.
I found a new webmaster. The website is operational now and my onslaught on you is commencing from today.
I pray that my current webmaster attends to all my issues promptly and if he does so, God will bless him with lesser traffic on Bengaluru roads, banks will tag his Aadhar card to his bank account without creating any problems and he will get wifi signal in every inch of his house. Thathasthu.
