On a lighter note, if the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE), Maharashtra Government and the ‘mai-baap’ of the Maharashtra MBA-CET continues its chat room on its official website, it is sure to give dating and matrimonial sites a run for their money. One can not only ‘make frens’ on the website’s ‘Chat with the PRO’ feature but one can also plan ‘kahan milne ka’ and communicate using the choicest of expletives.

It all began last week when I visited the DTE website to download a scheduled media update about distance-learning MBA. Finding that the circular was not yet uploaded on the website, I decided to try out the ‘Chat Room‘ option, which said the following in bold letters:

“In this chat Room you can pose any quries related to the admission in First Year Engineering/Architecture/MBA-MMS/Polytechnic/Pharmacy to the PRO at DTE Office”

(PRO = Public Relations Officer. For the uninitiated, DTE handles the Maharashtra Common Entrance Test (CET), the biggest state-entrance exam to domicile MBA programs such as those in Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS), KJ Somaiya and Sydenham, all in Mumbai. Just like for the CAT one deals with Prometric, for the CET tens of thousands of MBA hopefuls in Maharashtra deal with the DTE).

Little did I know that the experience would turn out into a day of hilarity, least of all informative.

The chat room asks one to log in with just a name. After this, there is no looking back for those who want to have fun and something more. When I logged in, the chat room was busy with people named Ani, Priyanka, Scorpio, Sweety, Shweta and Shantanu all furiously chatting with each other. The conversation in the chat had little to do with the DTE. It was about one person asking another for a date and still another asking for a phone number. There was no sign of a PRO.

Upon asking for the PRO, I received varied responses from the members in the chatroom, such as “No PRO comes here”, “There is no PRO” or “GO TO DTE WEBSITE THERE WILL BE LINKS”.

A few hours later, we logged in again to find the discussion having turned into a verbal flog-fest, with the choiciest of abuses being shared on the education ministry’s website. While all this was happening in the chatroom, almost in a poetic sort of way, there was a continuous scroll running on the chatroom page reading ‘Wel-Come to the Directorate of Technical Education, Maharashtra State Chat Room.’

After we had had our dose of entertainment, we paid a visit to the DTE headquarters in South Mumbai. DTE’s Director SK Mahajan, when asked about the chatroom on the website, said it was doing well and was updated too. When told the truth, an aghast Mahajan phoned an A Jadhav from the Computer Department and asked him to speak to us.

Jadhav, who sits on the first-floor of a building at the rear-end of the complex, laughed out when told about the chatroom. “This was all happening earlier. The Mantralaya (State Ministry of Education) had fired us for it and so we had closed the chat room. I don’t know how it has come up (on the website) again. Maybe it was updated, so the page appeared all over again.”

Since the chat room also stated that one could ask queries to the PRO, we asked around for the PRO at the DTE headquarters but it turned out that there was no such person at DTE. While Mahajan’s assistant pointed to a young man sitting in the reception areas as the PRO, the man himself refused to acknowledge it. “I am not the PRO,” he said. When told about the chatroom, he laughed and said that officials in the Computer department would be the best to answer the question.

When Mahajan was asked why the chatroom asked students to speak to the PRO, when there was none, he replied that there was a temporary PRO (who was apparently the same person who told PaGaLGuY that he was not the PRO). “Our (publicity) work is basically for three months of the year so we don’t need to keep a fulltime PRO. The person you saw sitting at the reception area is the PRO and students can ask him questions.”

Two hours after speaking to Jadhav, the chatroom link was removed from the DTE homepage. However, the chat web-application was still functioning at the old URL two hours later, like before, answering all kinds of queries about dating and ‘making frens,’ but having nothing to do with the Directorate of Technical Education. If you’re ‘lucky’, it still is (warning, the content may be a bit hard on your sensibilities).

Update 1, July 6: Times of India covers the story too.

Update 2, July 6: DTE takes the chatroom completely offline, the site now returns a ‘Page not found’ error at the chatroom URL.