Lovely Commercials

My God! These commercials! I love them especially those tobacco commercials. If you have ever noticed, they start with something ethereal about tobacco, something that transcends, something that elevates, that make you feel like a king; I don’t know but in a naïve manner I put—to make you feel fearless. To chew tobacco is to be fearless; at the same time it is a source of divine pleasure. This is how the commercial start and this is what they convey until a short warning –indecipherable, incoherent with the overall advertisement, usually spoken too fast to be heard so as not to tamper with the pleasant environment which the actual advertisement creates –appears.  In fact, warnings of all sorts share this feature.

“Chewing tobacco causes cancer.”

“Smoking is injurious to health.”

This is what they say, making their honest and good intentions clear in a clumsy way. While majority of advertisement deals with fearlessness, it ends making us fear for our lives. Two totally different emotions fused in one.  Good for none but a laugh. Optimism and pessimism mixed in one. If not for anything else, it is good to tell ourselves how pathetic our condition is. I mean we tell a lie and then a truth and this is not the important thing. What is important is we are forced to do it. Forced not to tell lie only; forced not to tell truth only; if it had been any one of lie or truth, the condition is much better. But we are forced to tell both at the same time. I think this is horrendous. I feel this whole thing like Obscene is sold, at the same time the seller urges you not to buy the Obscene because it’s obscene. What a humanly gesture!

There is another commercial which fascinates me. When I say fascinates me, it genuinely means fascinates me. Please allow me to present to you—‘killer jeans’. Let us be murderously correct –not just ‘killer jeans’ but ‘killer water saver jeans’. That’s what their product is about. At least they say it so. Killer and saver, both at the same time! Killer jeans that saves water! To be politically and environmentally correct, they even put a protesting audience—some sort of young bare chest students caring for our environment and all that—against police with water cannons. You see, these advertisements are fabulous. They do not disappoint anyone. There is something for everyone to feel associated with the product in some sort of transcendental way. Now we have an easy solution for water shortage. Wear killer-saver jeans and be environmentally correct, in other words be environmentally guilt free, be on the right side of the history. Even an atheist, who considers himself free from guilt, can’t resist it. He too wants to be on the right side—redeemed environmentally. Christianity, Islam and whatever religion you take, I think the principles of guilt are best implemented by the advertising world, even better than those religions themselves. Water shortage started because we didn't wear the ‘killer-saver jeans’ at the right time in our long history. To correct our mistake we must instantly indulge in this endeavour obsessively. Who knows, maybe we could measure the precise amount of water we save by buying killer jeans. ‘Oh! You have only three jeans, I have ten of those. I save ten litres of water.’ Now, simple mathematics can even predict how much water people around the world save. Those poor devils who could not afford these jeans are even wasting water, undoubtedly even causing the water shortage in the first place. Imagine an extreme situation—there is shortage in arid regions of Africa and we have our benevolent Western nations sending over hundred thousand ‘killer water saver jeans’ as an aid. Killer jeans dropped from airplanes not to kill as the name suggests, but to save.

The last commercial which has not escaped my memory and still deserves a laugh whenever I watch it is the one about the milk supplements.  Alexander, Akbar and Jhansi ki Rani didn't like the taste of milk; we need milk supplements in various flavours to make our kid drink it. But that is not the point of laughter. One advertisement in the same line of milk supplements, of Bournvita if I remember correctly, claims that to absorb the calcium in milk by human body we need its supplement to be mixed along with milk. Mother who gives Bournvita to her child is knowledgeable while who don’t is ignorant of the obvious, self-evident fact. Nevertheless the point such advertisements make is that man has been drinking plain milk from thousands of years only in vain, technically as good as water, deficient of any extra benefits. I don’t take it as an insult to our ancestors but actually a groundbreaking research of our technologically advanced and intelligent folks, who obviously have strongest of bones than most of our bravest fighters of history.