APPADI PODU ABHISHEK BACHAN...

It’s a sight as incongruous as a penguin in the Sahara – Abhishek Bachan twisting and gyrating to the beat of the hugely popular (if slightly old) Tamil number “Appadi Podu” from one of Vijay’s movies (I think it’s Gilli but I’m not sure since he has a similar item number in all his flicks). Now I’m the kind who hardly glances at the always on television, but the combination of Bachan Junior and a dappanguthu Tamil song was a strong magnet that glued my eyes to the TV against my will and made me watch the ad just so I could see what the producers were trying to convey by having the star contort himself into embarrassing positions.

This was hardly 24 hours ago, and now, I only remember that the ad was trying to endorse some Motorola phone – I don’t know which model, I don’t know what the connection was between the wild dancing, the Tamil song, and the phone; all my mind can think of is – why on earth would Abhishek Bachan do this senseless ad? But then, come to think of it, most ads are pretty senseless these days – how on earth do people get away with insinuating that a fair complexion is all that’s needed to breeze through an interview and secure a job? How do consumers fall for the ruse that eating food cooked with one brand of salt can make you a district collector a few years down the line?

It’s not that I have a grouse against all advertisements; in fact, there are some that are so tastefully done that you want to watch them again and again any time they’re broadcast – like the one for some gold ornament company where the daughter’s sad about leaving for her new home after the wedding and the father jogs her memory about a moment shared years ago when she, as a child, left for her first day at a new school. The ad was not directly about the gold, but about relationships that last forever, irrespective of time and distance.

But then again, is the ad serving its purpose when you can’t even remember the name of the product that was being endorsed in the first place? One brand that has managed to stamp its presence firmly and deeply in the advertising field is Virgin Mobile – I loved the tongue-in-cheek commercials that touched the fringes of hitherto un-chartered territory in the history of Indian television. Sure, there’s an element of disrespect in them if you delve too deeply, but you have to admit that the girl using reverse psychology to get her way was a brilliant stroke of genius, one that made me actually laugh out loud. The ad was subtle in that it flirted with the taboo issue of homosexuality, an attitude I find refreshingly honest and acceptable as opposed to the commercial where one whiff of a deodorant is apparently enough to get women blatantly falling all over or jumping into bed with a muscular hunk.

In a chauvinistic ad world that opens career and matrimony doors only to women with fair skin and portrays a convoluted relationship between casual sex and scent with absolutely no room for companionship and love, I guess Appadi Podu and Abishek Bachan are not so bad after all!