Almost a year back, I had reached this site of one Dheeraj Rathi from the referrer logs to my home page at geocities. Now, my homepage is not a work of art, yet it is one of my original works. So it was natural to get startled by Dheeraj''s site, as it was a copy of my website, from the menu, to the layout, to the site theme. Offended, I wrote to Dheeraj, and he was quick to reply, which went like:

Hi, I fully appreciate what you feel like. I am extremely sorry for that. The site was not designed by me and was done by one of the summer trainee working for me. I had some simple HTML pages for my website which I have hosted few years back under my domain name when it use to be free by free domains. I will immediately ask him to remove the site at Lycos. In fact Lycos was just the testing site, the final site is hosted on geocities. I am not offering any excuse for the mistake I have been a part of. Currently I am in Colombo for 10 days on a business trip, should I request you to please give me some time so that I can also change my site at geocities, which is also I assume is based on your site. Apologies once again, awaiting your kind reply.

I don't know whether the LTTE took him since, as hostage or something, I see his mail today while doing a routine clean-up of my Gmail inbox and just out of curiosity click the link and lo, the site is still there, with no hints of correction. Funny part is, some of the links (for example, the link to “My Writings”) still point to my web page. I guess, the words guilt and repentance are not in the dictionary of this guy, who apparently has a blog too. The “owner of 3 houses” still has to resort to stealing when it comes to expressing, shame on you Dheeraj Rathi!