The story of the “Shepherd boy and the wolf” from the Panchatantra (herewith attached) occurred to me when I received an email this very afternoon from the Goethe Gesellschaft with subject “bad moment”. One would wonder after reading the mail if the Gesellschaft has really had a bad moment. The word Gesellschaft means society in English. Really? The society has had a bad moment somewhere in Ukraine and all the people on the contact list of the society receives an email requesting for help.
The same happened to me a few months ago. Almost everyone in my contact list received an email that I was in an awful situation and that I needed help from my friends and colleagues. Help rather an urgent help of financial nature!
I have likewise received several times an email from people in whose contact list I happen to be. When you try to cross-check with those people about the plight they are in, they would deny that anything as such happened to them. And that I should delete this mail from my account immediately. Of course I do that. But when I got an email of the same type from the Goethe Gesellschaft, I couldn’t help but felt sorry for the hackers.
But this is not what I am concerned about in the moment. If I read the story of the Shepherd boy and the wolf carefully for myself and my fellow account holders from whose account a fake email requesting for immediate financial help goes to almost everyone in the contact list, this will be construed as a liar and and insignificant stuff worth nothing even if once for God’s sake the request is a genuine one. People in real need will unduly suffer and not get any assistance because of the general nature of such an email; even though there are others perhaps willing to help the person in trouble.
So here goes my request to all the hackers who work hard at midnight and try to obtain certain sensitive information from the email account of people they hack – not to do so. Your habit may one day really put a person in a serious and grim situation. Hope you will read the story carefully and pay some heed to my request. I would also be interested in knowing if you indeed gain something from this immoral act of yours. Sadistic pleasure or something really significant?
Chandrika Kumar 