Accidents can bring you your 15 minutes of fame; it takes something more to parlay such unlooked-for largesse into something bigger.
Ask SR (Shekar Ramanuja) Sidarth who, as an 18-year-old intern, inadvertently torpedoed Republican Senator George Allen's bid for re-election and also his ambitions to parlay his political career into a run for the party's presidential nomination.
That moment came on August 11, 2006, when the six-foot-four Sidarth, interning with Democratic candidate Jim Webb, was filming an Allen campaign appearance. Playing to an entirely white audience, Allen called the Indian American intern 'macaca' -- a word with racial connotations, as it was habitually used by French colonists in North America to refer to dark-skinned people.
Though Allen subsequently apologised, the incident -- which received nationwide publicity -- was enough to subvert his election campaign and to give Webb, who at the time was trailing the Senator by several percentage points, an unexpected win that also helped the Democrats regain control of the Senate.
Sidarth's fame was inversely proportional to Allen's notoriety: Time magazine profiled him for the Person of the Year section in 2006; online magazine Salon magazine went one better and named him Person of the Year for having 'changed the course of history with a camcorder'.
More to the point Sidarth, who the Washington Post reported was a straight A student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology at the time of the incident, used his experience to win accolades at the University of Virginia.
In Fall 2006, when university Professor Larry Sabato was planning a seminar on election campaigns, Sidarth won a spot with a three-word essay that read, simply: 'I am Macaca'.
The young student, who has also interned on Capitol Hill for Senator Joe Liebermann, is back and this time, playing a role on a larger canvas.
Specifically, as Earth Times reports, Sidarth now works as paid staffer in the communications wing of Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson, where he compiles newspaper clips on all items of interest to the campaign, drafts press releases and performs other communication tasks.
