Sunil Gupta
Blog

AD Nauseam: Part - XVII

And what, no doubt you're asking, is my good self's view on all the excitement of the scam ads at Goafest(er)?!

To your wide-eyed, innocent query about the very ethics of doing scam ads, my only response is a sorrowful smile and a "tch tch", dear children. While there are humans, there will be scams. It is a fact of life, like poxes and pestilences and Navjot Sidhu. If there can be a scam a day in public life, then why should the most public of all professions in terms of output be any different? Protesting against scam ads is like protesting against us Indians littering the streets: futile.

So the real issue, to my mind, is not that they were entering scam ads, or that X got the boot instead of Y, but that the agency and the client thought them good enough to be entered for awards.

That, children, is the real tragedy of this episode. No boot’s big (or hard) enough for this lot, say I.

Onwards.

My mental jury’s out on the latest Godrej oeuvre. Firstly, the “family” bit’s being done already by the Voltas gang (Murthy and Meenakshi with broad southie accents), so having to suffer the Godrej family (Whatzit and Whatzername with convent yuppie accents) is moue time. However.

One part of me says that it’s an interesting way to get across all the benefits of a wide range of stuff and the wife’s so twitteringly sweet that you think she’ll be warbling even when she’s on the potty (what? Godrej don’t do potties? No matter, it’s only a matter of time), and she does her act well, as does the husband, that the other part wonders why they needed to have Aamir as the cross-dresser at all. Needless to begin with, and difficult to keep the stories coming in any coherent and logical way. So now you see Aamir as Aamir, and you also see non-Aamir, along with cross-dressed-Aamir.

Why go through all this rigmarole? Unless someone likes cross-dressing. Hmmm. Though Aamir’s a class act (or class ‘ect’ as Rameez Raja would say).

So I shall be ambivalently ambivalent on this one.

I’ve been watching the Tata Safari and M&M ads with some interest, just to find out if I can make out who’s which and who’s despoiling the environment more than the other in their quest to go where no other SUV has gone. Can’t really make out re the former, but full marks to both for accomplishing the latter with gusto.

So as they crush pristine, fragile mountains and churn up lush valleys and fields, I make up my version of the M&M (or is it Tata Safari?) jingle: “We are young, we are free, we love b****ring up the scenery”.

And what do you make of the Micromax Canvas one in which the ‘prisoners’ are lined up in front of a firing squad? One word from me: grossly distasteful (OK, two words). Is there nothing too low that marketers and their agencies will not stoop to? And it’s not even funny. If one has to labour a point so much, then all I can say is put the creators in front of that firing squad and see what happens to their undies.

On second thoughts, no. Just shoot the lot.

I’ve often wondered what celebrity endorsers think of the ads they do (and sometimes the brands they endorse, but that’s a Red Oil question and shall remain so). I suppose Shri AB can and will add his 2-minute bit, but what about chaps like the avuncular Harsha Bhogle? OK, they’re not in the “I think you should say “hirsutely challenged” instead of “balding” league, but surely they’d have some thoughts about the sanity of the script or plot of the ad to which they’re about to lend their hirsute presences to?

Take the recent Ibibo.com TVC’s, which sprang up like toadstools and thankfully were as swiftly removed. But the damage has been done, at least to my fragile and innocent mind, beguiled for so many years by the dialectics of cricketism that he so eruditely purveyed. To be seen anywhere near the excrescences that those TVC’s were (you will remember, with a shudder, I hope, the quasi end-of-match award ceremonies, where Harsha is a presenter and you have Ishant Sharma and an Aussie punning in the worst possible way with the word “dal” which is pronounced as “doll” by our westerner friends; so you have, in the middle of the award ceremony this Aussie coming up to Ishant and asking if he “liked the doll last night” and Ishane getting his locks into a tizz because of it…and if you haven’t seen it, then say a silent prayer of thanks but I’m sure you get the double entendre). There was another in this series too but I shall let that pass because this is an article meant for those with finer sensibilities.

They are so bad as to beggar belief that anyone, but anyone, and I include our Figo-Digos could possibly have conceived them and more than that, spent the money to produce them, and further, air them.

But back to my original query: surely Harsha knew that the stuff was worse than last week’s leftovers in a landfill. Why didn’t he walk back to the pavilion, holding his head high saying “it’s not cricket”? Or has filthy lucre got the better of our Peter Pan?

Even the Figo’s boot would gag and throw up this stuff.

And now for some whimsy, such as:

1) Have you noticed that as many as 4 IPL teams have monarchist tendencies? Rajasthan Royals, Kings XI Punjab, Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers (and five if you count the jolly old Knight Riders who methinks have mistaken ‘knight’ for ‘night’ and have duly ridden off into the gloaming leaving not a wrack - but maybe a wreck? - behind). If this doesn’t say something about the feudal state of mind we still possess in dear old Bhindia, then I’m Henry the Ninth. So there. It’s your call.

2) Have you noticed how many people/sects/OBC’s/OMC’s (!)/SC’s/ST’s/various people of various religious persuasions/ethnic groups etc have started to get ‘hard feelings’ or ‘have their sentiments hurt’ by any manner of things? Sikhs get mad at surdy jokes and at Mandira Bedi for having a tattoo, Tamils get mad at tam-bram jokes and anyone asking if MK really needs to sport shades indoors, Bengalis get mad at Bong jokes and those who sing the song ‘Didi’, seeing in it a heinous attempt at a conspiracy against Didi, Indians get mad at anyone who says that Indians are the dirtiest, crassest, most inconsiderate, indisciplined, corrupt and sanctimonious beings on this planet (nonsense, say I, you can find a few who aren’t any of these things if you look hard enough for a few years) and so on and so forth. So I’m wondering why our dear old

veggie friends haven’t leapt into the ‘hurt’ locker by protesting at Jantar Mantar, filing PIL’s and holding candlelight vigils against all the cookery shows that display juicy chunks and hunks of meat including (haw!) beef and show the immense joy of many of the presenters in sinking their teeth into all manner of God’s beings? Wait for this one at the other side of the break.

3) Lastly, have you noticed how that wonderful show “The Week That Wasn’t” gets away with the full-blooded murder of our posturing, pedantic and ponderous powers-that-be every week? Hats and all other things off in my metaphorical salute to those brave men and women who spoof the pants off all our political figures and their machinations. I rarely applaud while watching a TV show, but I find myself doing it every time I catch Cyrus Broacha, Kunal Vijaykar et al enacting the most hysterical satires I have ever seen anywhere, especially in India. The Brits are known for cocking a snook at authority and their sense of humour allows this almost en passant. But to attempt and then perform this sort of stuff with aplomb, panache and élan in India is unbelievable. I suggest you set a reminder for Sunday evenings for this one…I kid you not.

Have news to share? Write to us atnewsteam@afaqs.com