If you mistakenly – due to blurry vision or fat fingers – click on any of the million ads bordering your computer screen, they jump out at you like long-lost friends, waving and talking over everyone else. Apart from the fact that after Covid all good articles have gone beyond a paywall, it is galling to have anyone peeping over your shoulder witness all you ever ordered on the net like an unauthorised biography.
Up pops a vegetable basket, tie and dye T shirts, gardening soil in packs of three… revealing themselves like personal secrets coming to light. While you wish only dictionaries and foreign magazines dotted the screen sedately, proclaiming your intellectual status to the world, these mundane objects of infinite dullness you ordered online whistle and wink at you obscenely with their exaggerated over-the-top promises.
They stalk you, these internet sellers, with offers and sales and discount vouchers. Buy this for Father’s Day (when you do not have a dad), buy this for Raksha Bandhan (when last year’s rakhi can be recycled), buy this for Christmas (all the things you wish others would buy for you)… The list is endless and constantly multiplying.
Sellers obviously pore over calendars and passionately circle dates that can be halfway special enough to harass us on text and mail. There is Valentine’s Day coffee, Earth Day tea and even Denim Day jeans! From drawstrings to foreign holidays, we are urgently told how much we need these right here right now.
This being Diwali time, the ad crowd during brand meetings are saying these words to themselves: diya, dhamaka, fireworks, festival, ayudha puja, Navaratri, lamp, lights… Everyone has the same words at their disposal and has to come up with a never-before unique reference to Diwali by mixing and matching them. What they really want to say is: if you have money to burn, we have the lighter. Sometimes, in their eagerness to ‘sell, sell, sell’, companies end up burning their own fingers. Saying the wrong thing can overwrite that painfully cultivated caring vibe they are trying to project.
While Fabindia says their real Diwali collection is still to be launched, and will be called ‘Jhilmil si Diwali’, there are those who are still protesting against the ‘Jashn-e-Riwaaz’ tagline as an ‘homage to Indian culture’. A Tanishq ad on inter-faith marriages had offended earlier. Ditto with Manyavar’s kanyadaan visual. A little boy – standing in what looked like domestic servitude – had been airbrushed out of an aristocratic ad once.
Read more: Storyboard | How brands can control narratives and fight cancel culture
Wokery and cancel culture apart, it is not always easy to know exactly what to say to suit the occasion. In a funeral scene in a film, when the person who has come condoling is thanked by the bereaved, the former gushes, ‘Thank you!’ An ‘I love you’ cannot be met with ‘Really?’ or ‘so sweet’ just like ‘how are you?’ should never be taken literally. No one wants to know the state of your intestines in such intimate detail while waiting for a bus.
Read more: Healing Space | Who are we cancelling today?
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