I have been seeing/hearing songs on youtube every now and then, and an advertisement came up. Normally I wait for the 'skip ad' button and click it immediately and yet I watched through two ads. They're on Neil Gaiman, made by Blackberry (!). I've never read anything written by him. Now I have. I read a very well-written short story, thanks to somebody who told me to 'go read the story'. which will stay inside. Here it is.
...the ads are a quiet delight for what he says about reading and about books and the way they've been made. I don't even know what the whole idea is about behind "A Calendar of Tales" and haven't found out as yet.
...the ads are a quiet delight for what he says about reading and about books and the way they've been made. I don't even know what the whole idea is about behind "A Calendar of Tales" and haven't found out as yet.
It got me thinking again of whether it is true that the longer one lives the more life becomes a matter of memories, the quiet ability to see the patterns and emerging connections in life and the matter of one's life showing a pattern - and a determined pattern at that even though one can't see ahead. Almost like this is how it could have been given some of the choices that one made early enough in life and yet without the matter of complete "knowledge" at hand, and so one waits...
Not to get too absorbed in memories but the two ads reminded me with a low exclamation of a very odd bit about "missed careers" again. No regrets but it is somewhat amusing to think that by the time I was in high school I was fairly sure that I could work in the ad world unless I became, maybe, a psychologist... I was probably one of the few nuts who used to wait for commercials. This was long before the day of cable TV in India. I waited for good ads, made notes in my head about them and used to keep a track of them the way I used to make written notes about "movies to watch" or which had been watched when in school (with books I was more flexible - I tried to read whatever looked good and what came as recommendations). And then came cable TV a long time later. I think the ads of Shell (yep - the oil company with beautiful music playing in the background; I think it was Dire Straits' "Local Hero"), Nescafe and Titan watches (which made that piece by Mozart something that anybody could hum) came with cable TV. And yet there had been Gold Spot and Mazaa and Amul and also some ad on a soft drink with George Benson's song ("Nothing's gonna change my love for you"...Jesus, it's been a long time) playing in the background before the explosion of cable TV. I was hooked on to ads because they felt like mini movies with a story-line, conversations and/or music. I even kept a note of nasty and stupid ads, and as a child I had embarrassed a whole room of people, who were watching a movie and talking during the commercial breaks, by yelling out why the ad didn't tell us what the specific product was all about.
And then came college. And I was still sure that I could work in the ad world and make little movies. There was a TV program called "The Dream Merchants" and I watched it with as much enthusiasm as I watched docs on Discovery and "The X files" and "Picket Fences" and "Chicago Hope". I was studying Sociology on the side, of course, but thinking more about Sociology than actually studying it. And I can't remember any longer when the slow wave of realization hit: that normal and regular ads always sold a product. No, more than that. Ads sold a particular brand of a particular product. I didn't see that before. The purpose of ads and what they were designed to do. It felt most peculiar to realize that those sometimes lovely, charming, beautiful, breathless, naughty, mischievous, and even risqué little movies were actually all geared to make us into loyal consumers of a particular brand. And with brand names becoming some sort of a status symbol (it was the same way by the time I was in college but not quite as bad) and a very market-driven idea or at least a very gross and superficial idea of what matters in life and that happiness can be purchased at some price or with a product (no matter if it's a glorious ad like some of the ads that Coca-Cola came up with or funny ads that Pepsi came up with during the cricket season or the Visa ad) - I couldn't imagine that I had missed this central bit about advertisements earlier.
Quite some years ago, there was a qualitative sociologist who gave an open lecture in the university and quite a few of us had tramped over to hear him speak. There was free food too. The expert went into a long account of how sociologists could bring about happiness by working in the corporate world and with the media and in the advertising world too and how sociologists had the great power to bring about good and positive change. One of his examples rankled terribly: about a little child in India smiling after using a particular brand of toothpaste. I'm not kidding. I waited for him to finish his long lecture and there was the applause and then the usual "any questions". I shot out questions and gave him a sound drubbing. There were no follow-up questions. The then Head of the Sociology and Anthropology department later on admitted to me in private that somebody had to tell the guest speaker that he had gone-over-the-top and he was glad that it was me, and he asked me what my field was in anthropology. I had looked at him and grinned and said that I was in the Sociology department actually.
The story doesn't end there. Later on a friend and I got into an argument. She didn't think there was anything wrong about ads or that a sociologist or any social scientist was any better than somebody working in the ad world. Her piece was that education was the same as the world of advertisements. That teachers, educators, professors, researchers were "sellers" or at the best, were trying to sell whatever they wanted to and therefore were in the same league as advertisers; that teachers and professors were no better than admen and adwomen - not even in the ideal type. The ugly argument - and the first one with that particular friend - from so many years ago still stays. So much for that. Yes, of course, teaching and being a teacher in the ideal sense are just the same as being an advertiser selling some brand in the market and brainwashing people into believing that "things" and "brands" can buy happiness. Right. I wonder at odd intervals whether when she is teaching and researching and winning many academic accolades whether she remembers what she said that evening so many years ago or whether she even believed in what she had said or was simply arguing with an in-fashion cynicism or whether the fact that she herself had worked with the ad world and the corporate world for a few years made her see things without much discrimination or whether it is faintly possible that she was merely tired with the way average academicians are. Who knows. I never found out because the discussion became an argument that got out-of-hand. I knew I was right then and I know I was right all along: no teacher, worth his name, is an adman.
Anyhow, the two ads that I linked - and they did turn up as ads seem and sound to be ads with a difference, and I liked them.
P.S: Here's another ad I remembered - from a few years ago. It's one I used to show in class every semester once I chanced upon it from the worldchanging website, which I used to visit from Suvro da's blog.
P.S: Here's another ad I remembered - from a few years ago. It's one I used to show in class every semester once I chanced upon it from the worldchanging website, which I used to visit from Suvro da's blog.
