My friend sent me a link to a Vir Sanghvi column in an email with the subject line “Vir Sanghvi is a brain-dead prick.” Surely, I said, my friend exaggerates. Not brain-dead, I thought. The fact that the fellow is a major TV and newspaper journalist, I supposed that he knows how to write and talk, and therefore could not be brain-dead. But then I made a mistake. I read his column, “Setting the record straight.”

I had never read Mr Sanghvi before and now I wish that I had continued to be ignorant of his writings.

It appears to me that Vir Sanghvi has the morality of pond scum and the mentality of a cretin. You will have to read the column to see what I mean but don’t blame me if you feel nauseated. Self-righteous smugness and outrage oozes like puss out of an infected wound. He attempts to whitewash his influence peddling as routine journalistic procedures entirely above board, and fails miserably. In the end, the sole effect of his column is that it shows him to be a pathetic caricature of a journalist too far removed from reality.

My friend was wrong. Sanghvi is not brain-dead. He’s merely suffering from delusions of grandeur, as often happens when one’s senses of morality and ethics have been anesthetized by all the money that is floating around in high places.