And so, as I read today's official transcript of remarks made by Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the G8 Summit in Japan, I wondered if the transcriber forgot to take a cotton swab to their ear that morning:

PRIME MINISTER SINGH: Mr. President, it is a great opportunity for me to once again meet you and to review with you the state of Hindu-American relations. (Emphasis added.)

Surely some mistake? (UPDATE 5.25pm: The White House has now corrected the transcript on its website, but the original version can still be seen here and here.)

Singh is known to be a soft-spoken man, but he is very clear on at least one point: his Congress Party, which heads India's coalition government, is intended to be a secular party, embracing equally the 230 million Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, Jews, animists, agnostics and atheists that live alongside India's 900 million Hindus. (Besides which, Singh himself is a Sikh.) A vote for Congress, so its leaders say, is a vote against what are darkly called "the forces of communalism" -- a thinly veiled reference to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India's main opposition, which believes Indians of every creed should revere and live by the wisdom of the Vedas and other ancient Hindu texts.

For once, the BJP might be delighted to read over Singh's remarks, but he actually said "Indo-American" relations, according to Sanjaya Baru, Singh's spokesman. ("An amusing mistake," Baru said with a chuckle, adding that they were seeking to get the transcript corrected.)

So have the "forces of communalism" reached even as far as the White House? Or is this just another example of the confusion some non-Indians have grasping the differences between "Hindu", "Hindi" and "Indian"?

The Pen Pricks, the Goan bloggers behind the hoax, have e-mailed me back, and have also updated their blog with a gleeful recounting of the prank. They won't say who they are, other than to say they are journalists based in Goa. They said they got the idea for the hoax after being disappointed in the media's coverage of recent high-profile murder cases, where, they say, "Almost every kind of rumour, tidbit was reported as the gospel truth". Here's another passage from their e-mail:

All we wanted to do, was expose the depths of depravity in the media by leaking this absolutely fake story to the media in Goa. As expected, once the story was picked up by a couple of papers, the national media just sucked in on it, without verification.  

It's interesting to see how different victims of the hoax are reacting. As far as I can see, only Goa's Herald has published a straightforward mea culpa. Other papers have shifted some of the blame onto hapless local police and intelligence officials, who had earlier been gently criticised for not knowing the details of the case.  

The Indian Express partly blames local intelligence officials for what "could be a media hoax". The New Indian Express said it regrets that it fell for the hoax, but also explains to readers it had confirmed the story with local police. (They did not include this confirmation in the original report, which only quotes a police officer who was "unaware of the incident".)

The Telegraph, however, has heard that "certain blogspots" are saying the whole thing is a hoax, but the paper is still hedging its bets (although it appears to have wiped the original story from its website). It says it is asking its sources in India's Intelligence Bureau to reveal the whereabouts of Mr Bach, the name of the concentration camp he had overseen, the name of the Perus Narkp agent who lead the operation, and to provide more details on that stolen piano. The truth is out there.

Nonetheless, the press release has been regurgitated on the front pages of the Deccan Herald and the Indian Express and inside the Telegraph, citing Perus Narkp, "the intelligence wing of the Berlin-based German Chancellor's Core (sic)", as the source.

Perus Narkp, a not especially Germanic name, is an anagram of "Super Prank".

The organisation's motto, printed at the top of the press release, is "Eht rea enp cabk skripc" -- clearly not the language of Goethe or Virgil, but another anagram: "The Pen Pricks are back".

The Pen Pricks, who run a blog skewering the Goan press, promised readers on Sunday they were about to break a "big, Big, BIg, BIG" story. It looks like they succeeded. Still, it should not take pranksters to remind us that gullibility is a dangerous flaw in journalism.

It takes Google only 0.13 seconds to establish that the Marsha Tikash Whanaab concentration camp at which Bach was apparently posted does not exist. The Express reporter, at least, telephoned the German embassy and Indian police for comment. The fact they had no idea what the reporter was talking about did not deter publication. Only the Times of India gave even a hint that it smelt something fishy, but ran a story all the same.

(I don't want to seem like I'm recklessly throwing stones in a glass house: no organisation is immune to occasional lapses in journalistic perfection, as readers of the Reuters' blog Good, Bad, and Ugly may be aware.)

I asked Ramakrishna Upadhya, a senior editor at the Deccan Herald, what might have gone wrong.

"We all believed that it was real because it had so many details," he said about the press release. "They should have been cross-checked," he added.

He said he is investigating what happened, and that the paper will run a correction if necessary.

An official at the German embassy in New Delhi very politely said they were looking into what happened but considered it too soon to declare it a hoax.

I have tried to e-mail the Pen Pricks. I'll let you know if I get any response.

Hopefully this was a singular blip and from now on we can once again believe every word we read in the press.

Then Mumbai announced it was building a statue of Shivaji Bhosle, a 17th-century Hindu warrior king more often known by the honorific title Chhatrapati Shivaji. The statue, city officials said, would grace Mumbai's Back Bay and be taller than New York's Statue of Liberty.

Mayawati's self-aggrandisement has provoked a mixture of amusement and scorn. The Hindustan Times pointed out that it takes a certain kind of chutzpah to spend public money on statues of yourself. Amit Varma, who blogs at India Uncut, worries we are at the start of a slippery slope: how long before Mayawati wants a statue of herself taller than Lady Liberty?

But perhaps Mayawati's chutzpah serves a greater good. Mayawati is both a woman and a Dalit, the name given to those born into the bottom of the Hindu caste system. Neither group, on the whole, has traditionally enjoyed much power in Indian society. Maybe Mayawati intends her statues to herald that changes are afoot? Perhaps she really is India's Lady Liberty?

Mumbai's leaders, at least, have chosen to honour a figure whose place in history is more established.

But is Shivaji the best person to be immortalised as India's New Colossus?

Although the statue is being planned by Maharashtra state's centre-left Congress-NCP coalition government, Shivaji's name is more closely linked with the nativist politics of Shiv Sena (the Army of Shivaji), a party in Mumbai which believes that India is an essentially Hindu society and that Mumbai's long-term residents have greater rights than more recent arrivals to the city.   

True, Shivaji was a Hindu who fought the Islamic leaders of the Mughal empire and annexed vast swathes of their land to create the Maratha Empire. But some scholars, including Rafiq Zakaria, have argued that Shivaji's name has been misappropriated by Hindu nationalists. Shivaji fought not for Hinduism, but for religious freedom, according to Zakaria. 

"To show bigotry for any man's own creed and practices is equivalent to altering the words of the Holy Book," Shivaji wrote, referring to the Koran, in a letter to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, who was felt to lack the religious tolerance of his more liberal predecessors. "Islam and Hinduism are terms of contrast. ... If it is a mosque, the call to prayer is chanted in remembrance of Him. If it is a temple, the bells are rung in yearning for Him alone."

Thanksy Thekkekara, the state government official who told me about the planned statue, said Shivaji was chosen because he was one of Maharashtra state's "greatest icons" who fought against oppression, including the "Muslim oppression of the Mughals".

She said he was a was a "great protector of the weak sections of society, including women and the poor."

What do you think? Is there someone else more deserving than Shivaji of being cast in bronze 300 feet tall and set on a pedestal out in the Arabian Sea? And with the cost of installing the statue expected to be in excess of 1 billion rupees, about $25 million, is this a luxury Mumbai can do without?