Product Review: Samsung Star

A lot has been written about the Samsung Star and it won’t be premature to say that the Star has stirred up the ‘touch screen phone segment’ in India. Pegged at an affordable price of less than ten thousand INR, the Samsung Star is bound to influence the decision making of many mobile phone buyers in the country.

Tearing apart the marketing gimmicks and larger than life promotions, what I intend to offer here is a practical review of the Samsung Star for the everyday mobile user. A first look at the sleek phone will woo many potential buyers, with its slim lines and the black overall. So here we have a cell phone with movie star looks and a fully functional touch screen and ten thousand already seems cheap for this phone. However, the true litmus test of a good cell phone is far from over.

A cursory idea about the mobile phone trends will reveal that the only other touch screen phone within similar price range is the LG cookie. Both contenders are 100 meter runners, overtaking each other, only to end up panting at the finish line. My honest opinion is that there are no clear winners. The Samsung Star performs better in display and overall looks. And for unknown reasons the Indian consumers are yet to get accustomed seeing the LG logo jumping off from their TVs and refrigerators to their cell phones.

I initially used a demo phone with limited features for this review with an inbuilt stylus that fits inside the phone. However, the one up for sale comes with an external stylus dangling from a string. Samsung claims that the touch screen is significantly refined and the need for a stylus won’t be felt. The statement isn’t far from truth. However, make sure you carry the stylus if you are an SMS guy and would love to use the handwriting recognition feature in the phone.

The phone also boasts of a 3 mp camera without flash and makes for decent clicks under normal lighting conditions. Some features worth a mention include the scroll feature where, images from your gallery scroll at the tilt of your phone. A nicely tucked widget bar makes for wise shortcuts, like a genie under your command. The Samsung Star is a real touch phone minus the frills and is an absolute value for money.

NOTE1 TO SAMSUNG: this review is based on an actual phone that my friend bought and not the demo phone that Samsung had sent. The demo phone freezes with an error message, after every call & sms. And its not justified even if it greets its users with the message, “Demo phone. Keep expectations low.”

NOTE2: The image used is that of the Samsung Star Demo phone. The stylus is different in the actual product.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE: what does my underbelly say!

10 Oscar nominations and 2008 Audience Award in Austin Film Festival, amongst several others. Probably that’s one of the several ways of ‘looking’ at Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Though the movie was released as early as August 2008, in the U.S., it got released in India on 23rd Jan, 2009; a time by which, the Indian market was flooded by ‘DVD quality’ pirated DVDs and VCDs of the same.

Slumdog Millionaire has been everywhere for a while, Google, Newspapers, Billboards, SMSes and conversations, often rekindled with some interesting and some clichéd type of controversies; the earliest one raked by Amitabh Bacchan in his blog criticizing the labeling of commercial Bollywood movies as being escapist, while hailing Satyajit Ray as the portrayer of reality. Amitabh Bacchan went a step ahead, stating how even the most developed part of the world will still have an underbelly, much like the one portrayed in India.

Slumdog Millionaire being a Hollywood production and being directed by an Englishman, the celebration of Indians is perhaps a little exaggerated and a little introspection might leave you with just the ‘underbelly’ as truly Indian, as is projected in the movie. Of course not to forget the Golden Globe for ‘Jai Ho’ by A.R. Rahman.

While not negating the dent that the movie might have caused to the National Pride of many Indians, I am tempted to carve out a middle path, a way of viewing it in a very different light.

Understanding the fact that, its been adapted from Vikas Swaroop’s Q and A is as crucial as it is to constantly remind oneself that it’s a Hollywood production (as opposed to a Bollywood production).

Talking about its adaptation from a novel, it deals with the acknowledged problems of the transformation from one medium to another. While a novel can get away describing events running to several pages, the film often has to constrict itself into a ‘time frame’ and as such only a handful of directors manage to present reality of books in the widescreen without looking fantastic or stupid or bullshit. On that account, Danny Boyle certainly scores well and is something that rightfully belongs to him and the awards as well.

Coming to the second aspect, of the director’s nationality (underscoring that he is not an Indian, rather than pointing at his British nationality), Indians are a proud race, and there is perhaps no Bollywood production till date that doesn’t reflect this pride through the several possible channels. A case for instance, can be built around Madhur Bhandarkar’s, Traffic Signal. On a broad plane, both Slumdog M and Traffic Signal can be placed into what can be termed as, ‘slice-of-life’ kind of movies. However, the subtle distinction between the two can be found in their treatment of the subjects and the ‘sights’. While Bhandarkar would whitewash the street signals of India, making it more agreeable to the Indian viewers, Boyle makes his character scuba dive on a shit hole, earning points for its realistic nature and irking the Indian pride.

Whatever Slumdog M portrays about Indian life, is Boyle’s creative right to showcase. And one cannot deny that such slums do exist in India and to quote Amitabh Bacchan, anywhere else in the world. Or to disagree that Indian police do violate human rights would be ridiculous. Or to say that several of the slum kids do not follow the portrayed trajectory to the street signals or the gangs, would be utterly false. To throw a one liner, in an attempt to condense my viewpoint, I’d say, that Slumdog M hasn’t been sanitized for Indian viewer ship.

I personally feel Slumdog M, with the amount of criticism & controversies that it kicked up in India and the unending trail of awards and critical acclamations, it received worldwide, it should be taken as a wake up call for Indian viewers to mature and to accept that there can be truth(s)…


NOTE 1: While going through an excerpt from Danny Boyle’s interview with some channel, I came across this interesting trivia, which I could not manage to insert in the article above and which I was too excited about to have not shared. I quote the excerpt with due references.

“Cinematical: Talk about working with the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire people. I heard they're pretty tough on intellectual property; was it difficult getting them involved for a concept that implies the show was rigged?

Danny Boyle: Well it was really interesting, because what happened was the guys who invented the show years ago in Britain, they were a company called Celador. What they did was a couple of years ago they sold the show for a staggering amount of money, and what they did with the money was they set up a film company called Celador, who were the producers of this film. What happened was a lawyer -- presumably a very smart lawyer -- in that deal in which they sold it, put a clause in saying that if there was ever a feature film featuring the show, that Celador would have the right to use the music, the right to use the stage design, the right to use the copyright of the show, blah blah. So we were okay. And we didn't even have to pay for it! It was amazing to be able to use it, and they were a little concerned with how we would portray the show ... but I guess we were just very, very lucky with how we were able to get around it, I suppose.”

NOTE 2: I couldn't come to terms with the fact that A.R. Rahman was awarded the Golden Globe for his track 'Jai Ho'. There are several better (much better) compositions by the legendary Rahman. I know you would agree.

NOTE 3: (its the final note!) The controversy simply refuses to dispell (atleast in India). The front page of today's Delhi edition of The Hindustan Times, came up with the following news:

White Tiger & Stray Thoughts

The Man Booker winner needs no introduction. So on a sudden impulse, catalyzed by a longish weekend ahead (Monday being 26th January), I bought a copy of The White Tiger, - with a circular sticker that says “Winner of the man Booker Prize, 2008”. Being an arguably faithful book lover –of good books, I looked forward to the weekend, while trying to dissuade the ‘anally compulsive’ editor within me. The excitement got the better of me, and on Friday night I reached page number 300 (total pages being 324?) before snoring off with Adiga’s child squashed between my face and the pillow. I consider it important to make an important revelation about my reading habit. I took a month to finish Naipaul’s House for Mr. Biswas, and an unbelievable ‘several months’ for each of Shakespeare’s Classics. And as I type with the smell of the burning tire from the high speed reading, I can hear the screaming protests from Khaled Hossein’s Kite Runner, now languishing for a year with bookmarks, like plastered limbs that were never taken off.
A lot has been written about Adiga’s first novel, and none catches the beauty of the book better than the panel of judges that awarded it the Man Booker. They found it as something that shook them off their feet. Well being an Indian, it probably didn’t shake me as vigorously with its depiction of the ‘underbelly’ of one of the fastest growing economies & world’s largest Democracy or with its excoriating and stripping of the veneer of “India Rising” (Neel Mukherjee, The Sunday Telegraph). However, it brings into so many instruments of good writing together, that I couldn’t and probably didn’t want to shake myself off from its spell. Magic Realism, humour and most importantly it talks about contemporary lives in way that it stands away from the crowd of campus writings. The hallucinations that overcome the protagonist before and after the murder of Mr. Ashok find a parallel with Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Certain phrases and metaphors were vividly true and will certainly reverberate for a while or forever; one of them being the image of the Rooster Coop and how the narrator/protagonist goes on to claim amidst the jeering ‘circle of monkeys’ (the drivers), how the servant class of this nation is bound from within, than from outside. The second instance is when the protagonist pays the cop a hefty bribe, and he exclaims how he still complained about the cops. Yet, he was complaining like the rich and not like the poor. I haven’t yet found the time to read Adiga’s next ‘so so’ novel and will hopefully lay my hands on them (well that’s the kind of business, the siblings of good books get, irrespective of their own merits, or what Adiga might call ‘getting to dip the beak’).


So India (Indians) celebrated another republic day, amidst suffocating security blanket and the unfurling of the tricolor! Years ago, during my M.A. days a stray thought passed like a lightning across my thought plate. Those were the days, when thinking was taken as a right, until I started working, neatly demarcating my working hours from thinkable hours. So this thought about the tableaus passed through me; tableaus from across the nation - India’s Republic days and Independence days is perhaps slightly more than the tableaus, extended to barakhanas in Defence establishments. So this thought flashed to me, how the state tableaus have frozen in time and with each passing year as the tableaus rehearse, their idea of perfection is to push back in time as much as they can. So, when amidst the cheering crowd, when a member of the tableau from Jammu & Kashmir pours tea from elaborate silver ware, wearing junk jewellery, I wonder do they really exist! Before I can bundle up my stray thoughts, the tableau from Mizoram crawls by me, a member wearing traditional dress and playing a harp kind of instrument, sitting on a rock in an artificial moving forest. So, this thought occurred to me, how they try to showcase an ‘ideal & rustic’ India through such tableaus, and how they have labeled states for certain traits. So it doesn’t escape my fascination when the dancers from Assam dance on their tableau, as women pluck tea leaves, year after year as thousands die in separatist movements, and for that matter the forest in the Mizoram tabloid gets greener with each passing year, as deforestation continues year after year, and even as Mizoram became one of the most literate state in the country, the book never finds a space alongside the harp in the forest!
No sooner, the sound of the harp was overtaken by the sound of Sukhoi jets, as armored vehicles displayed shining missiles, with uniformed soldiers saluting in full grandeur. How the tableaus stand in contrast, to the State tableaus; while one is pushed back in time, another wants to surpass the timeline. If it’s a visible, protruding part of the state policy of deterring, anti-national forces from messing with India, or considering it as a ‘Soft Nation’, it could have been well taken. However, the ceaseless cycle of violence, mocks at the shining missiles and the Nukes. As indrajit Hazra rightly says; how soft we are depends on how comfortable are we in bending traffic rules – the more comfortable we are, the softer we are as a Nation.
Coming back to Adiga’s novel, a small flaw didn’t escape my helplessly compulsive eyes. Although what I see, is not a grammatical or a structural formal issue. I quote from the book, (page. 226)
…”Good, I thought, just as he was turning off the lights. He’ll never suspect that I’m planning anything.
An instant later, my grin faded.
What was I planning?
I began to sweat. I stared at the anonymous palm prints that had been pressed into the white plaster of the wall.”…
Now, looking at the palm prints on the wall, after the lights have been turned off, seems a bit tedious to me. However, that’s all, just an instance of how anally compulsive editors can be, more than any other thing and least about Adiga’s writing prowess. On the contrary, its his writing and narrative intensity that made me try to sleep on the same cot as that of the narrator/letter writer/driver and watch the palm prints through the cockroach infested mosquito net.

mumbai meri jaan

Just got over watching Mumbai Meri Jaan. Liked the movie and surprisingly enough I put in the category of movies like Crash of Oscar fame and some more (forgive my memory lapse and do get used to it). Interestingly enough, it goes on to show that a movie of social concern can effectively drive home the message without having to indulge in P3P glitter and skin show that enables me to place it a notch above the sizzlers from the Bhandarkar assembly lines.

Off late several factors have curtailed my indulgence into newspapers save for the editorial pages and off late the sports section; for which the appetite like most other Indians is already over. And it doesn’t take a polished brain to understand that it was all about the hype around the Bindrold (Bindra’s gold) and the two bronzes and a missed one making the medal tally an impressive ‘almost four’ in the Beijing Olympics.


Movie reviews are one thing that I have part knowingly and part due to time constraints, stopped reading altogether. Creativity and Criticism are two things that are way too subjective and at the most a movie review can do, is give you a possible perspective of the scores of possibilities. For once I am glad I dint read the reviews and kept considering it a brethren of Black Friday that essentially revolves around the story of the Bombay blasts (the hearing became India’s largest criminal case) and the way the people involved were brought to justice.

This prejudice probably explains a part of the appreciation for Mumbai Meri Jaan, as it restrains from exploiting the visual agony that comes from showing excessive blood and burnt and loose limbs. The ‘two minute’ condolence was moving and was a shot in the arm of humanity and goes on to show the possibility of humanity to co exist with the pace of life.

I am no film critic, lashing out theories on cinematography and camera skills. However, I do feel that Mumbai Meri Jaan sends out a message without being didactic, that violence, terrorism and violations against human rights, all form a circle together, where one paves way for the other, making it a never ending circle. As Paresh Rawal points out, if a Muslim pushes a Hindu, there will be two more Hindus beside the Hindu and there will be three more Muslims standing beside the Muslim and the pushing and bullying continues without end.
As Black Friday sums it up through Mahatma Gandhi’s words, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.