India has taken a lesson from the Wikileaks exposes.

While the South Block would like to gloss over the rather embarrassing  yet colourful  language of American diplomats, the crisp and to-the-point style of US telegram writing has caught the Centre's eye.

It is understood the South Block has asked students at the Foreign Services Institute (FSI) to emulate this style if possible.

While China may have blocked the Wikileaks, the Ministry of External Affairs is asking its youngsters to read them and get a hang of the brevity with which thoughts and facts have been expressed.

On the other hand, Indian diplomats often digress from the issue at hand in the long-winding style of theirs. This, despite repeated annual reminders by present and past Foreign Secretaries asking their mission heads to be brief. They have often asked diplomats to sum up events in a maximum one-and-a-half page cable.

The issue of crisp diplomatic telegram writing has been raised by top Indian diplomats with the mission heads time and again with some senior diplomats actually being ticked off by the Foreign Secretaries for treating top priority telegrams as dispatches. While sensitive diplomatic telegrams are marked all the way up to the Prime Minister and the National Security Advisor, dispatches containing voluminous information are only read at the South Block and in the concerned departments.

Earlier this year, one top diplomat raised the issue of crisp telegram writing with National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon and pointed out that specific telegrams from New Delhi were like press releases designed to promote Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's foreign visits.

The diplomat referred to Prime Minister's historic Saudi Arabia visit, which was the subject of a laudatory telegram from a Secretary-level officer in New Delhi, to point out that it was economical with the truth. The New Delhi telegram had made mountains out of King Abdullah receiving the PM at the airport, but the fact was that not only King Abdullah, but his entire Cabinet had come to the airport to receive Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai just days before Manmohan Singh's trip to Riyadh.

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