by Sharique on August 22, 2007
Adnan Patrawala, a teenager, was abducted. His abductors demanded a ransom of 2 crores.
The victim, Adnan Patrawala, left home in a Skoda at 11 pm on Saturday after he received a call from a friend. “Adnan told his family that he was going to meet some friends. After a while, Adnan called up his residence and said he was playing pool and would return in the morning. But at 10 am on Sunday, the Patrawalas received a call from an unidentified person who claimed to have abducted the boy and demanded Rs 2 crore for his release,” said a police officer.
And then he was killed. And media is blaming orkut. AND I OBJECT TO IT.
Media is pointing fingers at a profile on orkut, Angel, as she was known previously. She is being accused of luring Adnan to meet her somewhere. I really can’t confirm this as it is upto the police to verify. If you are a regular user of orkut then you would appreciate that fact that orkut is a den of despos, obviously men looking for females. Profile of females are flooded with ‘hi, wanna be friends’ scrap. Friendship day is like eid/diwali for orkut users as it throws an opportunity to make oneself acquainted with new females with those beautifully decorated scraps. So this was nothing ‘out of the box’.
So why is media pointing all the blame on orkut? Well to obviously shift the blame. If you have followed the news closely then you would have noticed that Adnan’s abductors killed him because of the hoopla by the media. The arrested abductors have confirmed that they strangulated Adnan out of fear of getting caught because the media knows about this. So who is the real culprit? Obviously the abductors but media is also partly to blame. Sensible reporting is something media personnel should get accustomed to. They should realise the gravity of the situation and refrain from reporting if it could harm the concerned party.
Saying all these, I am not very hopeful of media realising this. Our media turns someone into a hero based on single good performance and also reduces someone to ground based on single bad performance.
Team India ne Indian ki naat katwaye (Team India humiliates India)
Star News screamed. But it’s the same team India which won the test series in England. Even though,according to media, Dravid was the villain of the win for his coward decision not to force follow on in the 3rd test, India did give us lot to cheer about.
Anyways I can only hope that media learns by these mistakes and the particularly the lower end news channels.
by Sharique on May 17, 2007
Part I
For 2 long years the pleasure of Internet eluded me. When it finally got to lay my hands on a private Internet connection, I was elated beyond imagination as my Miss Yahoo messenger was just few steps away. Orkut was the initial attraction. My first day on Orkut was spent visiting profiles of girls irrespective of their nationality, well that obviously includes a scrap ‘Hi..wanna be friends’. I was overwhelmed by the never ending web of connections that was available. I remember spending hours visiting profiles. Then those girls finally decided that they had enough of this despo max dude and they sent me to Orkut jail for a day. It was a lesson for me but I learned a lot about orkut flirting- (Golden rule of flirting on orkut)
1. ‘Hi..wanna be friends’ is the worst way of starting a conversation. Some try to impress by praising something linked to the profile but I don’t approve of that. The best way is to explore her communities. Try to find out her views by participating in discussions with her on communities. Impress her with your knowledge and converging views.
2. The next step is to directly interact through scraps. Generally people tend to discuss a lot on scrapbooks so try to explore her and her friends scrapbooks. Gather as much information as you can. But don’t reveal this directly to her or else she might take you as a pervert. Be patient for an opportunity to help her in time of distress.
3. You can now move on to messenger. Add her to your messenger list. You would have come more closer now so feel free to express yourself. Don’t make a fool of yourself by investing emotions or expressing your weakness in front of her. Remember, don’t show too much interest and on the other hand make her feel important.
4. If you fail in the step 1 then either the girl isn’t interested in opposite sex or you haven’t done your homework well. All girls are not flirtable so no point in banging your head on a wall. (Bhains ke aage been bajane se koi faida nahi). You can move on to step 2 directly if the girl is easy going.
There isn’t much you can do with just Orkut so direct contact is the only way of developing the relationship. I leave the morals and ethics involved to your judgement.
Coming back to my story, well I made a big time fool of myself with girls. But you need to make mistakes to learn. My dreams of finding Miss Yahoo messenger was slowly fading. And the one fine day I installed Skype, searched for “18-22 F India” and typed “hi…wanna chat?”. My luck was about to change. These were first signs of rains after years of draught. She replied in affirmative and I fell in love even before she sent me the second message.
To be continued.
[tags]orkut[/tags]
by Sharique on November 6, 2006
Rumours are that google would soon integrate its Google Talk instant messaging and VOIP service into Orkut. Apparently, google talk and Orkut development teams are busy putting the finishing touches on the integration. The announcement will likely be made sometime next week.
This would mean orkut members will be able to text message and voice chat with other members of the community if they choose to communicate in that way and not scrap each other. In other words, this means that orkuters would no longer have to keep asking each other in scraps for IM ids to make their conversations private and one to one.
Another tactic my google to promote its conked Gmail service 
. Gmail these days has become highly unreliable. I missed few important mails and not just that but also the sender wasn’t even notified about the undelivered messages! At least yahoo informed me regarding it. Gmail is much slower as compared to yahoo mail beta and most of the time I get the default message that gmail cannot be loaded because of slow connection. And there are no in-build smileys on Gtalk. The editor needs a revamp and include a lot of things like superscript,subscript and various other symbols. When Gmail first came in the interface was highly appreciable but the present yahoo mail beta’s interface is far better with drag & drop feature and flexibility of window size and it also includes RSS feeds. Perhaps the only thing that can now google boast off is the search engine. I must confess that Yahoo and MSN search are weird! (especially MSN) I never use them.
Just search for orkut on MSN (click here) and the first result you get is his profile! There is no orkut.com in the first page and perhaps many pages to come.
But I wonder how will this move affect members. I don’t want to add all those 300+ people in my friends list to gtalk! I am someone who logins to orkut only when someone scraps me. I generally aviod as they call orkutting. And then if i login someone or the other scraps me, “if you are online then why don’t you tell me”. The first thing I do is logout. I am not as social as orkut expects me to be 
Garima Dhiman further goes on to say (and I love this line 
)
Social networks are almost like living legends now, only if some of them could sustain around 10 more years, i would actually be able to tell my kids something like – “oh! OrkuT – son i actually met your father there”.(PS: this is just an example, infact maybe of the worst case scenario 
)
I have known few who have actually met on orkut and perhaps will end up together. Orkut is still young and time will only tell how many such online contact will lead to long term relationships.
Amit has more on the integration
by Sharique on October 9, 2006
I love this piece of news.
A Bachelor of Management Studies (BMS) student of Thane was arrested on Thursday for creating a classmate’s profile and uploading her picture with offensive messages on an online community site without her permission.
Abhishek, 19, a BMS student, first denied committing any such crime but soon confessed. “I don’t understand what happened to me. I just did it,� said Abhishek, who knew Sushama as her classmate in junior college.
And the police did bring in their technological skills into use.
Police Inspector Shekhar Tore of TCC who investigated the matter said, “The orkut server is located in Sweden and therefore it was difficult for us to get information about the person who created the profile. We traced the fake yahoo email ID created on Sushma’s name and then got information about its log-in details. The IP address details of this yahoo account led to Sumer Castle apartment in Thane’s Kolbad area and another cyber café nearby.
I wonder that trifle things like a profile on Orkut can send someone to jail. I am usually amazed by the importance of Internet in people’s lives these days. I remember someone threatened my friend Yusuf and he lodged with the police in Texas and to my surprise police took that seriously. He was assured of protection from online casino
