Garam Khabar I

In: Fiction

I love the Onion. This is my attempt at creating a planted story. Ofcourse this story is a piece of fiction and the names of people and places used in the following is made up. Any resemblance to actual living people/places is just a coincidence.

Stupid Hijackers get Caught

By Khabrilal/Garam Khabar

1st April, 2005/Mumbai:Four terrorists trying to hijack an Indian Airways flight IL2005 flying from Baroda to Ahmedabad were caught under what can only be considered to be funny circumstances. The flight turned out to be a drill for Air Marshalls serving various private airlines across the country. The drill was being conducted by the Indian Air Marshall's Academy (IAMA), a semi-private institution aimed at creating a steady flow of competent Air Marshalls for India's growing Airlines industry. Normally none of the Air Marshalls know the identity of the others. Nor do they know the person/persons who will be acting the role of the hijacker. In fact more than half of the passengers are paid volunteers. They too are not informed about how the scene will unfold. They are just told that what will follow is just a training/evaluation drill and no one will be injured in the end. The purpose of the drill is to provide a real-life like situation that will test the training of practising Air Marshall. Ever since the Kandahar hijacking episode, the security at all the airports across the country had been beefed up. This dramatically reduced the occurances of hijackings. Hence the need for such drills to keep up the competance levels of the Air Marshalls.

According to Siddharth Kanda, one of the Air Marshalls practicing in the drill, the whole drama began thirty minutes into the flight when one of the participants in the drill who was supposed to act like hijackers tried to use the restroom for an enactment of preparing his weapon. But as it turns out the toilets was already occupied. When the real hijacker came out of the toilet, the fake one recognized the gun as not one of theirs and immediately raised an alarm. Before any of the other hijackers could react, the air marshalls (the real ones) had taken the hijacker's weapon and overpowered him. The other hijackers were forced to give themselves up. Mr. Kanda told us "we are trained for exactly this type of real-life situations. So we knew how to react." But even Mr. Kanda couldn't help finding some humour in the entire episode "Ironically, although I have been an Air Marshall for the last six years, my first encounter with hijacking occured in a drill".

The CBI who later took these four hijackers into custody told us that they were members of one of the satellite factions of the Ramgarh Freedom Fighters, a group fighting for independent Ramgarh, a mid-sized village just on the outskirts of Jharkhand. On duty, CBI Officer H. Kalia informed us that this was the group's first attempt at violence. Hence the amateurish behaviour of the group. "Professional terrorists plan hijacks months in advance and monitor flight occupancy to make sure there are enough hostages. Also they try to target flights that have less security. They (the hijackers that were caught) clearly didn't do their homework. Luckily for us." The point that is still bewildering the police and the CBI are that how did these hijackers get entry into the flights. The CBI is already looking into possible loop-holes in the management of this drill.

Creating a Friends Network using Del.icio.us: Part 2

Looks like I had totally missed the idea behind Del.icio.us all this time. I had not realised the benefits of social tagging. But I think I have understood it a little better now. As they say "better late then never". Hence as I write this (waiting for my net connection to be up again), I am renaming my Del.icio.us tags. As I have mentioned in my earlier posts of how I had added a categories feature to my blog at Blogger and more recently about adding a friends network, I had made heavy use of del.icio.us's tags to do this. But in doing so I had chosen tags that (I hoped) would be unique and distinct and in a sense would identify me. But what I forgot doing this what I'm also doing is that I'm creating an island in this social network. Those uniqueness of those tags increase the chance that some person exploring del.icio.us tags will come across my post. While I know that many might find the last statement to be a selfish thought, it is also true that blogging is a social behaviour. And if I did indeed want to keep my blog posts private and hidden, then I would not post them at all. But getting back to the main point, blogging about a post and labeling it with specific tags is very much a two way street. On the one hand the tags categorize the content of my post and help in giving the users a summary of the content before they even read through it. On the other hand, my posts add a different perspective to the tags themselves. Readers who might come across my blog posts through the del.icio.us way (as opposed to from my blog), may get another way at looking at the tag. This might be analogous to the way in which every example of a statement in which a word appears helps in further understanging the meaning of the word and its eventual use. Of course this is assuming that I'm not tag-spamming and that I chose my tags in a sensible manner. Also this in the long run will help search engines who look at these tags in retrieving results, like Yahoo is currently doing for its My Web2.0 users, to find more contextual content.

So in factorising my weblog categories I have removed the prefix 'sharidas/' from tags and just kept the rest of the tag. And I have made them all in lowercase to make it more common place. One of the targets for this renaming operation was the 'sharidas/Friends' tag. I have renamed it to simply 'friends'. This is the result of search this morning about how many people have used the tag 'friends' for their Del.icio.us bookmarks, I was amazed by the number. I was more amazed at what possibilities it opens up. Knowingly or unknowingly, Del.icio.us may have just ended up creating a social friend service along the lines of 'Classmates' - the site to find classmates you have lost touch with. For instance if two different people say 'A' and 'B' who had once been classmates (but are now not so much in touch) who know a third classmate 'C' (who lets say has a blog) and have tagged his/her (C's) blog with the friends tag may end up each other if they explore other tags for C's URL. Of course many have forseen this effect of Del.icio.us or of social networks in general before. Livejournal acheived similar effects through their 'Friends' feature. In fact I found the contact of a friend from my college years Peeyush through this network. Hence my effort at trying to recreate it for Blogger. Using Del.icio.us and the 'friends' tag, it will be possible not only to create a list of people (with blogs/websites) who are my friends but also to create a list of people who conside me as a friend. While the former can be done using the list in /usrname/friends tag on Del.icio.us site, the latter can be done by searching for a list of people (Del.icio.us usernames) who have bookmarked my site with the tag 'friends' on Del.icio.us. The point that I've been trying to make in the last couple of posts is that is possible through the use of Del.icio.us tags is only limited by one's imagaination. In the coming posts I would like to describe some of these ideas. So keep checking. :-)

Creating a 'My Friends' page for my blog

Livejournal has a nice feature called 'Friends' that you can create a community around. Using this feature whenever a Livejournal user refers to one of his friends (from that community) in his blog, Livejournal will use a special icon to inform the reader that that person is known by the author of the blog. Now what if I wanted to do something similar with my blog. The only problem is that I don't use Livejournal. I use Blogger, which (to my knowledge) doesn't yet offer this feature. So I thought I would create this feature for myself? And I could use del.icio.us for this. I had used Del.icio.us before to add another feature that Blogger didn't provide - categories. I created tags with the general pattern 'usr/category' and then everytime I added a new post to my blog, I would bookmark the permanent link to that post on del.icio.us with the all the 'usr/category' tags that I felt that post belonged to. And in the sidebar of my blog template, I added a section that lists all these categories with links that take the user directly to the del.icio.us site with that tag, thus listing all my posts with that category. Now back to the original subject of the post, 'Friends'. I can create tags on del.icio.us with the tag 'usr/Friends'. And I add a similar section in my sidebar. With a bit of Javascript and CSS magic, I could add a icon before the link everytime I add a mention to my friends. For a work-in-progress example of what I'm talking about check this page for a listing of people I know/read. I have created a separate page for this and called it "My Friend Network". In the coming days I would like to discuss this further.

Listening to: Mother (Pentagram)