Entertainment
John Madden wants to explore India as tourist
Mumbai: English director John Madden, who is smitten by the revelry and exuberance of big fat Indian weddings and its idiomatic representation in Bollywood, says he plans to return to the country to explore its treasures as a tourist.
So far, Madden has mostly spent his time in Rajasthan, where he shot “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and its recently released sequel “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”.
Both his films are extensively shot in Jaipur and Udaipur. But the 65-year-old, who has also made films like “The Debt” and “Proof”, has missed opportunities to explore the country as a “tourist”.
“I will see more of it (India) as I have been here twice. I haven’t seen India, except the tiny portion of Rajasthan. Now, I will come back as a tourist,” Madden told .
Madden has captured the magic of Indian weddings as an important part of his India-set Hollywood film “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”. He feels shooting a marriage sequence in the country helped him get closer to the film culture.
“The tiny little toe in the water in this film (‘The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’) of Bollywood is the overlap that you get between the wedding and Bollywood culture. That made me realise that most of important Indian weddings are appropriate Bollywood idioms.”
“The choreography and music was irresistible to me and started a kind of acquaintance with Bollywood culture,” Madden said.
Madden opened a chapter around a hotel in Rajasthan, where a bunch of Britons visit and decide to stay back to find a new meaning to their life post-retirement. The sequel or as Madden likes to call “companion piece”, takes cinema-goers a step ahead in their life.
The second part of the film franchise, which was released in India last month by Fox Star Studios, has a stellar cast including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Richard Gere, Dev Patel, Lillete Dubey and Tina Desai. In the film, there is an elaborate sequence of marriage of Dev and Tina.
The director, whose film “Shakespeare in Love” won an Academy Award, says the exuberance of Hindi filmdom, which churns out about 1,000 films per year, dazzles him.
“I’m not an expert of Bollywood, but I love it. Every time I see them (films), I think they are so interesting with different conventions. I love the kind of exuberance and filmmaking that I see in them. I’m also impressed by the massive film industry here,” he said.
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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