When I received a stray tweet on Tuesday night, asking me if there was any problem with my Twitter account since it was not accessible, it didn’t strike me that mischief was afoot. I thought it was a local ISP issue which would get resolved on its own. On Wednesday morning, there were several such messages. It was then that I sensed something could be wrong. By late evening there was a flood of tweets, each saying my profile page was not accessible and that my tweets were not visible.

Earlier that afternoon, a friend had helpfully provided me with a copy of the Department of Telecommunications letter to internet service providers listing all the URLs that were to be blocked. Tucked halfway through the list were 15 Twitter handles (one got repeated twice by the babu who had done the shoddy copy-paste job) to be blocked also. Among them was @KanchanGupta.