New Delhi: Over two weeks after Lalit Modi tweeted the Kochi consortium's shareholding pattern and opened the proverbial can of worms, on Wednesday Shashi Tharoor finally severed all relations with the beleaguered Modi.
Tharoor, who until Wednesday morning had been following Modi on Twitter, finally clicked the 'unfollow' button to mark the complete end of their erstwhile and stormy friendship.
After the rather colourful and bitter events of the last few weeks, it was expected that the former Minister of State for External Affairs, who after a lot of prodding from the senior leadership of the Congress finally resigned, would immediately end all association with his nemesis, the suspended IPL commissioner. But with that not happening, it effectively meant that the two former pals were still keeping a close eye on what the other was saying.
Meanwhile, Modi, who still continues to follow Tharoor justified it by tweeting: I like following him on Twitter. It was never personal.
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 left too behind. On April 11th, when the controversy erupted, he had 60,000 odd followers. Now, with everyone wanting to know what he will reveal next as promised, he has 117,922 followers.
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 bring the two closer, in the virtual and the real world!
As they say: In politics and in cricket, there are no certainties!