Entertainment
Of trolls and ‘stifling’ showbiz: Soha Ali Khan on being ‘moderately famous’ (Book Review)
By Kishori Sud
Title: “The Perils of Being Moderately Famous”; Author: Soha Ali Khan; Publisher: Penguin Books: Pages: 210; Price: Rs 299
She comes from a family of heavyweights: Her father, the late cricketer Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi; her mother, veteran actress Sharmila Tagore; her brother, actor Saif Ali Khan; and Kareena Kapoor Khan is her sister-in-law. However, actress and former banker Soha Ali Khan, now married to actor Kunal Kemmu, has had her own fair share of adventures which she has shared in a crisp memoir.
The author of “The Perils of Being Moderately Famous” shows that she despite her lineage, she has striven for as “normal” a life as you and me.
In the introduction, Soha makes it clear that she offers no fodder for gossip from the lives of Kareena or Saif, let alone the couple’s one-year-old child Taimur.
The smooth read sheds light on a number of phases, aspects and facets of her life, including her life in Mumbai when she started living on her own away from the limelight of showbiz, faced a robber (not technically, as Kunal battled the intruder like a knight in shining armour), found her calling in a field she had not set out for initially — things common to commoners.
Soha gives an insight into her life before she signed up for “Dil Maange More” in 2004 and also recounts how she got trashed for her work by unforgiving movie critics and how her family helped her, shaped her and advised her on how to face the music and not lose heart.
People, especially from the the generation of the 1980s and 1990s, will easily relate to the funny, sad and happening episodes of her life as Soha too went through the phase when access to mobile phones was limited, fathers were men of few words when on the phone but had, and still have, proper conversations when present in person.
The book keeps you hooked as Soha recalls life when she was studying modern history at Oxford’s Balliol College and earned a master’s in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Belonging to the family tree of Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, Soha has a knack for writing and expressing herself in print.
If you love travelling, you will find a friend in Soha, who has travelled with a semi-stranger, trusted her guts and tasted freedom of the heart that backpackers seek all their lives. She suggests that it’s good to travel as it broadens your mind on a number of things and makes you see the bigger picture in life.
On her life in showbiz, Soha does not mince words in telling her readers that “life as an actor can be stifling”. There is a warning hidden between the lines as she says: “It is easy to feel validated or destroyed by other people’s opinions and living on the surface becomes a simpler, more appealing option.”
Soha has also addressed the recent phenomena where people misuse social media and troll individuals they have never met and know nothing about.
Citing an example, she recalled how she faced the nuisance herself when she was targeted on Twitter for having expressed regret over former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan announcing his exit in 2016, and then on another occasion when she had worn a sari.
With a crystal-clear insight on who she is and what she has gone through, Soha proves with the book that even “moderately famous” people are normal human beings.
(Kishori Sud can be contacted at kishori.s@ians.in)
–IANS
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International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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