A short blog, but I could not help writing it considering the hilarity of it all.

It was Christmas time and I was on my customary two week holidays. Since we could not finalize any vacation plans I was lazying around at home. WOW… such a luxury!  I could regularly read the daily newspaper [not the online one mind you] during this period. On one particular day, as part of the chronicling 2017, the newspaper had highlighted the tectonic political events of 2017. One particular article caught my attention. It was about Mr Nawaz Sharif and was titled something akin to “Sharif Sans Serif”. Serif?!?!?! Or should it be Sharif?!?!?! Why was the Microsoft font being associated with the ex-prime minister of Pakistan?!?!?! My joy of spotting a mistake in a major daily was short lived.

The event that was being highlighted was the ouster of Mr Sharif as the Prime Minister of Pakistan as fallout of the Panama papers scandal. I will try to quickly summarize it for the uninformed. The Panama papers exposed many famous and infamous personalities [and otherwise] on how they exploited tax havens to purchase properties abroad; hide their stash; indulge in tax evasion; etc; etc… well you know what this is all about. Mr Sharif’s name cropped up in these. I will not get into more details, but suffice it to say that an official inquiry was instigated. And of course dear Mr Sharif had to prove his innocence in all of this.

Understandably various documents were submitted to the court. Amongst them were a set of papers dated early 2006. It was purportedly one of the many that proved Mr Sharif was not party to all this foul play. Interestingly this turned out to be the proverbial Achilles Heel. Someone [he must be someone with more than an eye-for-detail] observed that this particular document was written in Microsoft Calibri font. This font belonged to the sans-serif family of fonts commonly available in Microsoft Office packages. And… hold your breath… Microsoft had not released Calibri to consumers until early 2007!!!

This was sufficient to prove that the documents were doctored and fake and subsequently proved that Mr Sharif was guilty. I wonder what happened to the person who prepared these fake documents. Maybe his fingers were….

I don’t think I am the right person to judge Mr Sharif. So I let that be. My take on wrong deeds is simple. The ones who are caught obviously suffer, whereas the clever ones continue to remain the king of good times.

Moral of the story : Get naughty but don’t get caught