Singh's Speech

Indian scientists have achieved a major breakthrough in acoustics engineering. A device that converts silence into sounds was successfully demonstrated at the ramparts of Red Fort from where Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appeared before the nation on the occasion of 66th Independence Day.

His 35-minute silence was converted into sounds and amplified through the speakers. Though Singh maintained his trademark silence, all the countrymen got to listen to his message on a myriad subjects. The words flowed through the speakers and reverberated across the Red Fort ground while television channels beamed them live.


Not many know that there is science behind the sounds. “It is a red letter day for the scientific community. We have demonstrated a key technology that gives voice to the voiceless,” said a spokesman of the Advanced Acoustics Research lab at IIT, Delhi.


The indigenously developed technology should not be confused with the Speech Generating Device (SGD), made famous by internationally renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. “Unlike Hawking who uses an advanced computer system to build up words and then send them to a voice synthesizer, our Prime Minister can just remain silent, as he usually does, and the device will take care of communicating with the world,” explained a researcher associated with the CSIR-funded project.


A complex set of algorithms and intelligence systems built into the system will enable the Prime Minister to produce some re-assuring sounds, whether it is about the gloomy economy, power outages, scams or threats from Mamata Banerjee. For instance, when terrorists strike any part of the country, the phrases like “we will not be cowed down by acts of cowardice”, “Terrorism has no religion” and “We will bring the culprits to book” will flow from the wonder machine even while the Prime Minister remains tight-lipped.


In tune with the new technological development, the rules and procedures of the Parliament will be amended to replace the expression “written reply from Leader of the House” with “digitally synthesized reply”. Consequently, no supplementary questions will be handled by the Prime Minister.


The technological invention has cheered up the Congress leadership which has been facing constant criticism over Prime Minister’s deafening silence even in the face of serious crises. “This device should silence our critics. If BJP takes pride in its “Loh Purush” (Advani), we are proud of our “Silicon Purush”,” said an AICC spokesman.


However, the saffron party is not impressed with the invention. “We have a Prime Minister whose functioning is remote controlled by 10, Janpath and now we are told that even his voice is not his own. At best, we can describe Manmohan Singh as the country’s first ventriloquist Prime Minister,” said BJP spokesman Ravishankar Prasad.

NASA to probe Indian Parliament

After successful landing of rover on Mars, the NASA scientists are planning an ambitious mission to launch a robotic probe inside Indian Parliament to search for signs of probity in public life.

Christened as NETA (New Experiment in Troubled Asia), the research project seeks to find answers to the age-old questions like whether honesty ever existed in the precincts of the massive circular edifice or whether it ever offered conditions favourable to sustain civility

However, some sceptics within the NASA establishment have questioned the rationale behind the exploration. “The chances of this mission proving successful are as bright as finding a twin of Sunny Leone on Mars,” said a dissident scientist.

“This is the most complex and challenging experiment ever undertaken because we are out to explore something that many believe is non-existent,” a top NASA scientist said.  Even a feeble sign of integrity in nano dimension will be picked up by the advanced radars fitted to the nuclear-powered rover to be lowered inside the Sansad  Bhavan using a complex set of manoeuvres.

The sophisticated rover will thoroughly survey the barren and lifeless six-acre area of the Parliament House including its famed sandstone columns, looking for “upright souls”. Its robotic arms will collect the samples like copies of government bills and statements, abandoned by the MPs on their tables or dustbins, and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover.

The high resolution images of the members’ antics inside the House, particularly in the central hall, will be relayed to the NASA control room for psychological evaluation of their conscientiousness or lack of it.  The rover will use its on-board instruments to analyse the gibberish speeches and verbal duels to understand whether there was any period in the Parliament’s history that was conducive for honesty to survive.

“The scientific objective of this mission is to understand how the world’s largest democracy has come to be governed by two simple yet elegant instruments---deception and falsehood,” the project director said.

The Indian-origin scientists, who constitute a major chunk of the workforce at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, are excited about the experiment.  “Look, we finally have an opportunity to prove that our decision to leave our lousy country was right,” said a young Indian-born scientist.

Back home, the politicians across the board, on a predictable note, found the title of the project provocative. “This is yet another display of American imperialism and a blatant interference in the internal affairs of our country,” thundered the CPI (M) General Secretary Prakash Karat.  The BJP and its saffron affiliates saw the NETA mission as an affront on Indian sensibilities. They went a step further and claimed that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was in fact a “robot” planted by Americans as part of their larger agenda to capture the Indian market.

The Congress spin master Kapil Sibal, however, said that the impact of the NASA experiment on India’s image was only “notional”.