Sunday, October 17, 2010

Gossip news

In the Indian media context, or may be to a large extent world media too, the gossip news nowadays has become a child’s play. I guess there was a time when gossip columnists had to work hard to find some gossip. They went to great extent with paparazzi stuff and we all know what drastic consequences it had. However, now it has become very easy to create reports with the information obtained from celebrity twitter accounts. I find twitter reporting against journalism best practices, but my “Bade Bhaiya” has said it is perfectly valid and I take it for granted whatever he says without arguing. But this also means that I can generate some news as well. Here are a few:

===================================================
Aamaar Kolkata not aamchi Mumbai for Bipasha this year

After the fiasco in the Mumbai Durga puja pandal last year, Bipasha is not taking any chances and going to her own Kolkata for this year’s Durga puja. It so happens that the occasion coincides with her Birthday. Like a happy bird, she tweets:

“Landed in kolkatta! Yay! Nia. N my sisters came to pick me up! Time to surprise mom!”


She also wishes her fans Happy Durga Puja and Dushera.

Her joy is visible in the words. After all, home is where heart is.

=====================================================
Sonia’s Dilemma

Soniaji has solved many big issues both for the country and for herself but there are seemingly two affairs that Soniaji may be confused about

1. Wedding of the nephew: Ofcourse, the families are not very friendly on public platforms (being from different parties) but not to go to the wedding of nephew Varun and Yamini might be a tough decision for even the biggest decision maker of the country herself.
2. The national awards ceremony: This year’s National awards ceremony will be something to look forward to. With both the Bachchan boys surely to be there, to collect the best actor, and best movie prizes, we wonder if Mrs Gandhi will be conspicuous by her absence.

===================================================
Tit for tat

Recently RGV came up with digs on his friendly enemy Karan Johar on the context of his new movie Rakta Charitra with comments like this:

“Rc has no loving families..it only has warring families.so all those who liked kabhi khushi kabhi gum better stay away from Rakta charitra”.


What else will you expect from a man whose forte is anything but subtlety.
“Apparently Rakhtcharitra is not for people who liked K3G!! Didn't know planet pluto had multiplexes!! Aliens can't wait to see it!!”


We were waiting for the war of words to continue but alas, RGV liked the joke and put an end to it :(

“@kjohar25 ha ha ha ha that's a super one karan”


We say, really RGV, you thought that was a good one? You can do better.

Monday, October 04, 2010

Missing the Orkut days



One social networking website has taken over the other one. I still have my orkut account, but due to lack of response from other people, it has gradually faded away even from my daily routine. However, this weekend I became quite emotional after browsing the old things in Orkut for a bit.

I really missed my proud 12000 scraps on Orkut. Now it has started reducing because the site deletes all the scraps of people who have left Orkut and there are quite a few of them.

Also, suddenly I got reminded of what I used to call OFOD at that point (Orkut fortune of the day). It was plain fortunes, nothing too earth shattering, and most of the time just like fortune cookies, they were just statements and not really any predictions. There was also another funny aspect where I would exchange my OFOD’s with my friends. It so happened that Advay and I probably got assigned the same random number seed and hence our fortunes were always the same. This gave me a 11.5 hours head-start over my other US friends about my fortune. How I bragged over this little inconsequential thing.

For a while there was a limit of photos that you can upload on Orkut and it was generally a tricky thing to decide which 12 they should be. We were younger those days and the kind of photos we put was surely very suspect at times. While browsing through photos of my friends, I found one or two of my photos which I would have obviously objected to, if uploaded now.

Scraps were public and there was a lot of Jasoosi that could be done. I had spent hours doing Jasoosi with friends on other ones. This public scrapping was bad too and I realized it first time when CNN IBN actually went through all the scraps of the Indian girl dead in the Virginia Tech Shootout and passed judgments on her possible boyfriends based on scraps.

And of course there were the communities. We created the K.V. Ambajhari community and till the time Orkut was alive, we went up to 600+ members from a mere 10 of my own batchmates to start with. I had created only one community ever and that was of Shamu the Killer whale but it did not kick off. There were only 100 odd members worldwide.

Becoming a fan and counting number of fans was also a big deal. I learnt the trick of increasing fan count, which is by becoming fans of other people. Soon they introduced the concept of Cool and Handsome too. I remember how I had shamelessly requested people to rank me so that my rating bump up.

And finally, testimonials. How can I forget those? They are such big morale boosters. I love this one the most:

Sandipan stands true to the saying "Good Things Come in Small Packages". I would like to say that sometimes the best of things come in small packages.


Orkut is and was definitely more loaded than the Facebook. I guess simplicity is were Facebook wins over orkut and ofcourse I think the fact that Facebook is “American” while orkut was never also played a part in it's success. I still vote for Orkut anyday.