Finger Tricks

1 8216;We8217;re not meant to be together8217;8212;Malaysian football player Hasmawi Hassan sent this simple, melancholy message to his ...

1 8216;We8217;re not meant to be together8217;8212;Malaysian football player Hasmawi Hassan sent this simple, melancholy message to his fianceacute;e hours before their nuptial rites. The lady, 23-year-old Norlida Abdul Rahman, and her family were then forced to sit through the wedding feast despite the conspicuous absence of a groom. Rahman8217;s miffed enough to be suing Hassan for damages.

2 Earlier this year, a Delhi-based Muslim woman became the first Indian to be divorced via SMS after her husband sent a triple talaq message. In 2003, the line 8216;If you don8217;t leave your parents8217; house, you will be divorced8217;, sent from a Malaysian husband to his wife of 18 months, was considered capacious enough to begin formal annulment proceedings.

3 Last month, 35-year-old Antonio Casalle sat in a Lauda Austrian Airlines flight in Sydney and decided to play a joke. He sent an SMS to his wife telling her the plane had been hijacked. The distraught woman informed the Italian cops, who contacted the Italian embassy in Canberra, who called up the Aussie cops.

4 Forget 8220;UR4ME8221; and 8220;ILU8221;, try SMS poetry instead. Hutch and the Mumbai bookstore Crossword will hold an SMS poetry competition this month, as part of the city8217;s Kala Ghoda film festival. The organisers, in an effort to democratise poetry, are inviting 30-character rhymed works on any subject of choice.

5 Time was when Diwali was the busiest SMS day of the year. But since the advent of Sony8217;s Indian Idol, the weekly voting grosses easily overtakes messages sent during the festival. On November 26, for instance, more than 5,00,000 viewers messaged their choices.

6 Haj 2005 is going to be a hi-tech affair. Haj pilgrims arriving at Mecca will be sent a welcoming message and then a series of the Prophet8217;s sayings. Also, detailed instructions about various Haj programs will be sent via SMS to the pilgrims.

7 8220;I would like to teach you, not to love me, my love, but to tell me you do8221;, wrote a tourist on the walls of a tiny balcony in the northern Italian city of Verona, where the lovelorn Juliet is believed to have pined for Romeo. But now the city8217;s authorities are asking visitors to send their love missives via SMS instead of gumming them onto the walls of the 13th century edifice. The messages will be projected on a large screen set up near the tourist spot.

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8 The Swiss New Seven Wonders group is on a worldwide drive to decide on the 8216;new8217; seven list. Our own Taj Mahal leads with more than 17 million SMS votes, ahead of the Great Wall of China. On December 1, that other wonderous Indian creation, Aishwarya Rai, made an impassioned plea to Indians at home and elsewhere, to make sure they cast their vote in favour of our greatest architectural achievement.

9 Australian telephone company Telstra sent urgent messages to subscribers advising them to ignore a hoax SMS promising them a AU200 credit if they forwarded the hoax to 10 people each.

10 The world8217;s largest, yet least messy snowball fight is being waged, even as you read this. SnowBall-Wars.com has instigated a virtual fight that allows players to send SMS text or animated MMS 8220;snowballs8221; at friends and family. So far, more than 1,00,000 SMS and MMS snowballs have been slung8212;twice the amount in the largest 8216;real8217; snowball fight recorded by the Guiness book of World Records two years ago in Switzerland..