(Image via blog.jiji.ng)
Shivram Manikundi, a programmer with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has added his voice to the rising uproar against Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his silent encouragement to rising intolerance to dissent in India. The techie did so by bravely returning 0 in a void main() C++ code block.
“As every programmer knows, when a main() function is prefixed with the return type ‘void’, the function isn’t supposed to return anything at the end, but Manikundi submitted the code with a ‘return 0;’. Wonder what got into him!” said a bewildered Mohan Kumar Yeramasetty, Shivram’s colleague at TCS.
“To be honest, he has been behaving a bit weirdly recently. As such he has been cribbing about Modi ever since he became the PM, but he seemed particularly agitated over the past few days. He kept reading articles about writers returning their awards as a mark of protest against Modi and kept mumbling to himself ‘Must show solidarity, must return something’. Who’d have guessed he’d return 0 in a void main function!” added Mohan.
News of Manikundi’s brave act soon went viral, and within hours, his phone began ringing off the hook with invites from journalists to participate in TV debates.
“I salute Manikundi’s courage. It takes extraordinary gumption to do something like this when a fascist government is out to get you,” said Sanjay Jha on the Newshour.
“There are times in history when you have to stand up and be counted. And this is one of them,” said writer Nayantara Sahgal on NDTV, lavishing praise on the techie.
“This is a landmark moment,” said Gopal Gandhi on India Today. “More programmers should return integers, floats and characters in void main() functions!”
Back in TCS, the code Manikundi submitted threw a warning when compiled – something that did not amuse his project manager one bit. The irate manager called Manikundi and demanded, “What the hell is wrong with you, man? You have 7 years of experience and still you make a rookie mistake like this! How do you explain this?”
Manikundi responded by claiming that the very fact that the C++ compiler was warning him for registering his protest proved that institutions are getting increasingly intolerant in Modi’s India. Upon which, Manikundi’s manager promptly took him off the project and returned him to the bench.
(Based on an idea by Ashwin Kumar)