Categories
Tech

Sony launches Vaio Flip

Available in three screen sizes and with prices starting from Rs 94,990, this new device might just take your fancy.
by Manik Kakra

Sony today launched its hybrid Vaio Flip in India. Offered in 13-inch, 14-inch, and 15-inch screen sizes, this hybrid is being touted as a combination of the traditional notebook and tablet form factors. The USP of the Vaio Flip is its swivel screen, which has an additional hinge at the centre to rotate the screen at 180 degrees. So, you can use the device as a complete tablet, swivel the screen back to use as a notebook, or rotate the screen the other way to use it as a screen like a digital photo frame for your need.

Hardware: This Windows 8 device (upgradable to Windows 8.1) comes in various processor options. Its 15-inch model (F15N17) comes loaded with Intel’s fourth generation 1.8 GHz i7 processor, 2 GB nVidia graphics card, and 8 GB of RAM. Then there is one 15-inch and one 14-inch model that come with 1.6 GHz i5 processor and 4 GB of RAM, along with 1 GB nVidia graphics card and Intel 4400 graphics card, respectively.

13Fall_VAIO_Fit_13A_Flip_SAll these models have 1 TB of hybrid storage (SSD + HDD) disks, while the 13-inch (F13N) model, which the company is marketing more as a tablet than laptop, comes with 4 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD and is powered by 1.6 GHz i3 processor. All the models have got 1920 x 1080 HD screens, and have the Windows 8 Home button at the screen’s bottom. The 13-inch model also comes with a dedicated USB 3.0 port that can be used for charging your smartphones and tablets even when your Vaio Flip has been shut down.

Other features: Connectivity-wise, there is Bluetooth, WiFi, HDMI port, USB 3.0 ports. It has an 8 MP rear camera; and a 2 MP front-facing camera.

Price points: Sony is giving its MDR-XB-920 headphones free for every buyer till the end of March 2014, and you can also get an extended warranty for a discounted price for a limited time period.  The F13N1A has been priced at Rs 99,990, and comes in silver and black colours; F14N16 at Rs 94,990, and F15N12 at Rs 1,04,990, and F15N17 for Rs 1,19,990, and come in only silver colour.

Categories
Watch

Screening: French film ‘La Fille du 14 Juillet’

The French film will compete for ‘My French Film Festival’, the world’s first online film fest that is currently underway.
by Medha Kulkarni

Today, January 20, 2014, the Institut Français will present the film La Fille du 14 Juillet as part of the ‘My French Film Festival’.

My French Film Festival is the first online French film fest in the world, and is currently underway, having started on January 17, 2014. It will conclude on February 17, 2014. During this month, cinema lovers from the world over will be able to access online 10 feature films and 10 short films in 13 languages. On this occasion, Alliance Française de Bombay will present a film in competition.

La Fille du 14 Juillet is a 1988 film by Antonin Peretjatko. The films tells the story of Hector who encounters Truquette at the Louvre on July 14, he’s had only one thing in mind: to seduce this girl whom he’s mad about. The best way to do so is to take her to the seaside. His pal Pator agrees wholeheartedly, particularly if she comes along with her friend Charlotte…

The film is lighthearted and playful. The cinematography is beautiful, filled as it is with stunning vistas of France.

The film is subtitled in English and entry is free although seating is limited. Head to Alliance Française Auditorium, New Marine Lines today at 6.30 pm.

(Picture courtesy www.20minutes.fr)

Categories
Watch

Screening: Have You Seen The Arana?

Alliance Française Auditorium is screening 2012 documentary that examines the relationship between man and nature, today in partnership with Vikalp.

What happens when we finally manage to wipe out our natural resources, especially our farmlands? A 1973 documentary by Sunanda Bhat, Have You Seen The Arana? attempts to answer this question.

A traditional healer’s concern over the disappearance of medicinal plants from the forest, a farmer’s commitment to growing traditional varieties of rice organically and a cash crop cultivator’s struggle to survive amidst farmers’ suicides, offer fresh insights into shifting relations between people, their knowledge systems and the environment. As hills flatten, forests disappear and traditional knowledge systems are forgotten, the film reminds us that this diversity could disappear forever, to be replaced by monotonous and unsustainable alternatives.

Sunanda worked on the film for over six years, looking for ways to capture and represent the complexity of the people and place. Much of the film rests on the relationships she was able to build with the characters over this period.

The film is presented in partnership with the Vikalp Film Archive. The screening of the film will be followed by an interaction with the filmmaker.

Head to Alliance Française Auditorium, New Marine Lines, today at 6.30 pm.

(Compiled by Medha Kulkarni. Picture courtesy dearcinema.com)

Categories
Read

Review: ‘The Diary Of A Reluctant Feminist’

This book is, without doubt, one of the most awful books to come out at the start of this year.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Not all books one reads are good reads. Most of them are average, even tedious reads. But then you come across a book that is so bad, so futile, that every other bad book you’ve read in your life actually shines brighter in comparison.

Bhavna Bhavna’s The Diary Of A Reluctant Feminist is one such book. A look at the synopsis promised several good things, which prompted me to start reading it in the first place. The excerpt on the back cover goes thus:

‘The problem in my struggle for a divorce was in the small print – as with everything in my life it read “subject to my mother’s permission.” And since my mother was never going to allow me to divorce I was relegated to being an armchair divorcee…So I decided, after two years of being separated, to stop waiting for my parents’ elusive permission, and to take the initial steps in the painful journey myself. In this process, I was also branded a “feminist”, which in their view was marginally worse than being a “terrorist”…’

So far, so good. The problem actually began when I started reading it.

The problem with the book is: the whole book.

What could have been a (as promised by the publishers) “profoundly funny chronicle of a young woman’s attempt to get divorced…” is anything but. If anything, it is a whiny, outrageously cliched, lacking-in-the-essentials kind of book, with extremely lazy storytelling. In fact, subject to a few revisions and rewrites, this book could have been a bit closer to what it actually aims to be.

So the author brings out the entire jing bang of a large Punjabi family – a domineering matriarch heading the household, her obedient sons and their wives and children, how the arranging of marriages is a competitive sport, how traditions and customs set by the family’s elders are unquestioningly followed even after the elders’ deaths, how individual wishes of girls and women are never important, but the men get to exercise their rights, and so on. Unfortunately, the story does not rise about these elements at all.

I’m not saying nobody will like this book, it may find its fair share of admirers. Why I am not one of those admirers is because when I read a book, I want to be told something I don’t already know. I don’t mean I should be told an entertaining account of the Higgs Boson, for instance, but when I pick up a book about a woman wanting to tell her overbearing Punjabi family that she wants to get a divorce, I want to be a told the story that makes me 1) Sympathise with the protagonist, 2) See the (promised) hilarity in the several (often banal) exchanges between the woman and her strict parents, 3) Feel the woman’s tension as she tries and fails to save her marriage before deciding to separate from her husband, and 4) Most importantly, find a non-cliched representation of a loveless relationship of the kind we see often in the till-death-do-us-part milieu of Indian marriages.

Instead, all the reader gets is a series of cliches thrown at him one after the other, in a rambling account of the protagonist’s increasingly failing marriage, how her opinion has never been solicited even on matters affecting her life, how her family and indeed, all of society, gangs up on her once her singleton status is established, and how nobody gives her a chance at doing good for herself. Well, boo hoo. What is even more annoying is the sweeping assumption that this is what all girls in large Punjabi families go through – I’m not saying these things don’t happen, but since they do happen fairly regularly, what is the point of telling us just that? And while we’re on the subject, when will be stop caricaturing Punjabi families in this fashion? Aren’t there good, wholesome, uncliched stories about Punjabis to be told at all?

In short, I do not recommend this book at all. If you still want to read it, knock yourselves out here.

Rating: 1.

Rating scale: 1 = Awful; 2 = Slightly rubbish; 3 = Tolerable read; 4 = Good; 5 = Paisa vasool

(Pictures courtesy www.flipkart.com, www.theatlantic.com)

Categories
Watch

Two films, photography, and Films Division

Head to Films Division this evening, January 11, for a screening of two landmark documentary films about photography in India.

As a lead-up to the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF), which will be held from February 3 to 9 at NCPA, Films Division is bringing audiences a series of films that have won awards at earlier editions of the festival. Today, Saturday, January 11, they’ve planned a special programme on photography that includes Sabeena Gadihoke’s landmark film Three Women and a Camera, which won the Golden Conch at MIFF 1998. The programme is curated and will be presented by cinematographer and film maker Ajay Noronha.

When the Kodak Brownie camera debuted in the early 20th century, few could have imagined how it would revolutionise photography. The photograph became a popular form to chronicle significant and historical events as well as everyday snapshots. Today, over a hundred years later, it is estimated that over 380 million photographs are uploaded just on Facebook every day!

How has this changed the way we look at ourselves and the world around us? This week Films Division celebrates the act of ‘seeing’ with two passionately-made films about image making and the image-maker. Set 25 years apart, these two filmmakers present two very different narratives on photography in India.

YES, IT’S ON

12mins/1972 /Films Division

Director: SNS Sastry | Photography: B Khosla | Editing: MN Chaubal, NS Patole | Sound: SD Patil

SNS Sastry in his inimitably playful manner captures the nation and its people, especially its women, post independence. He invites us into a dialogue between the one looking and the one being looked at. The untiring camera gaze is underscored by ingenious juxtaposition of advertising jingles and popular film dialogues and songs. The film reassures us that along with the nation, the camera is still rolling.

THREE WOMEN AND A CAMERA
56mins / 1998 / Doordarshan

Director: Sabeena Gadihoke | Writer: Shohini Ghosh | Editor: Vinod Kaul | Sound: Harikumar Pillai

Sabeena Gaihoke’s award-winning film is a quiet meditation on photography seen through the eyes of three celebrated women photographers. The film debates the major shifts in the concerns of photographer Homai Vyarawalla, whose work celebrates the euphoria and optimism of the birth of the India nation, while Sheba Chhachhi and Dayanita Singh attempt to grapple with the various complexities and undelivered promises of the post independence era. This film debates the major shifts in their concerns regarding representation, subject-camera relationships and the limits and possibilities of still photography in India today.

Head to RR Theatre, 10th floor, Films Division, 24, Peddar Road. Entry is free and open to all.

 (Picture courtesy Films Division, Mumbai)

Categories
Event

Two-day theatre conference starts in Mumbai today

Look forward to book releases, postcards, performances, panels and much more at this two-day do from January 10 to 11.
by Sophia Institute of Social Communications Media, Mumbai

Jhelum Paranjape met a pickpocket in jail and tried to explain Animal Farm to her. Dolly Thakore’s son Quasar Padamsee’s baby sitters included Shabana Azmi and Javed Siddiqui. PG Wodehouse helped Shanta Gokhale fight cancer. Nadira Babbar swore that she would never get into theatre.

At the inauguration of a two-day conference on theatre in Mumbai titled ‘Many Cities, Many Masks’ at 9 am on Friday, January 10, the first book of a proposed series, Lives Of The Women edited by the award winning author Jerry Pinto will be released. Titled On Stage/ Off Stagethis book features four in-depth essays on the professional lives of  eminent women from Mumbai’s stage such as Shanta Gokhale, Dolly Thakore, Nadira Babbar and Jhelum Paranjape.  The post-graduate students of SCMSophia have researched and written this book.

The conference being organised collaboratively by the Sophia College for Women and SCMSophia (Sophia Institute of Social Communications Media) on Friday and Saturday, January 10 and 11, 2014. This forms part of a series of Mumbai seminars organised at Sophia College for the last five years. The conference will feature academic papers and presentations by practitioners and panel discussions.

Vandana GupteAdditionally, a commemorative postcard set ‘Green Room: Mumbai’s Theatre Makers‘ featuring photos  taken by SCMSophia students of  personalities from English, Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati  theatre in Mumbai including Anahita Uberoi, Shernaz Patel, Rita Rose, Annapurna Shukla, Aditi Desai, Vandana Gupte (in pic on left) , Kavita Lad Medhekar, Rasika Dugal, Shanta Gokhale, Nadira Babbar and Dolly Thakore will be released.

The postcards also feature insights in the form of quotes from all these personalities. “After the third bell the cast waits in the wings.  At this time, you realise more than ever how crucial you are to each other.   In the silence you acknowledge each others talent, strengths and weaknesses and together step into the collective performance zone… to create the collective illusion that we call theatre,” says Anahita Uberoi.” The theatre is a space where I submit to the will of my audience,to the vision of the director and to my own vanity,” admits Rasika Dugal candidly.

This conference will also see the release of Mumbai—Socio-Cultural Perspectives: The Contribution of Ethnic Groups and Communities, a collection of papers presented at a previous conference at Sophia College. Students of SCMSophia and Sophia College will also be presenting short performances during the breaks adding to the festive atmosphere.  These include a street play on Freud, bhavai (on Marx), lavni (on Galileo) and qawwali (on Darwin) during the breaks.

Exit mobile version