The Israeli education minister, Shai Piron, who is also a rabbi, has done what I always wanted to do. Piron burst into a laughing fit over the word 'penetration' during a speech about smuggling in prisons.

Piron was addressing parliament on a new law against smuggling cell phones into prisons. At the mention of the word ‘penetration’ in his speech, Piron began to giggle but then tried to recover his composure. He broke down again over the perceived sexual innuendo when the word 'penetration' came up in the text for a second time. When audience members also began to laugh, Piron could not contain himself.

Despite repeated attempts, he could not get through the speech without laughing. He eventually had to abandon the attempt and let a cabinet colleague take over.

A video of the hysterical minister has now gone viral on Israeli websites.


I have had these silent paroxysms of laughter, forcing me to throw up my arms and legs in my extra small cubicle for the past one year and a half. This is because editing e-governance copies is one of my many responsibilities.


So, for Mr. Piron, I have better usages to offer — which I have collected and neatly preserved in my memory over months of lingual assaults.

Over 18 months ago, when I was new here, I asked the guy who headed the egov section then (and always wore a necktie with pin and insisted that ‘e’ in the e-governance will be small case while ‘G’ will always be capital) if ‘penetration’ was actually necessary — more so since it carries a strong sexual innuendo and can be easily replaced with the sober ‘outreach’ or ‘spread’. He sported the grin of an almost pervert and told me curtly that it was a ‘technical’ usage and could not be replaced.

I moved on. And laughed silently until I came across accompanying adjectives and burst into cachinnations.

As India made progress into the field of mobile governance (‘m’-governance), ‘penetrations’ suddenly became ‘massive’. And for the humble ‘e’, ‘penetrations’ were often ‘rough’ or not very ‘smooth’. In remote rural parts where connectivity is yet to reach, e-governance has only a token presence in clusters and the ‘penetration’ here is lopsided and ‘slippery’.

Then ‘tools’ – not necessarily of ‘penetration’ – were also frequently used and ‘handholding’ was favoured as a matter of policy.    

But ‘penetration’ is not the only thing on the minds of e-gov guys. ‘e’ is another. A ‘district’ becomes ‘e-district’ and the circle ‘e-circle’. ‘e-forms’ are available in the ‘e-office’ of the ‘e-treasury’ which you have to ‘e-fill’ and make the ‘e-payment’ through of course the ‘e-gateway’ and then your ‘e-service’ is ‘e-delivered’ and you go back ‘e-happy’! You have to ‘e-believe’ to ‘e-see’. I am sorry for my lingual excesses: months of ‘e-penetration’ and ‘e-abuse’ are sure to do this to anyone.

Then there is this case of cases — lower and upper. The department of electronics and information technology forms an acronym with the last ‘Y’ as the upper case — DeitY. Everybody knows how it’s to be written and nobody knows why. Or WhY! Then there is also the national optical fibre network which in its short form surprisingly takes a small ‘o’, as in NoFN. More surprisingly, in the e-gov circles, it is colloquially reduced into a very, very strange acronym – ‘NoFuN’.

Editing e-gov is certainly no fun.