05 May,2011 08:48 AM IST | | Suhit Kelkar
She said: "I love you; I say it with ease. Here's a present of detergent, premium quality."
He said: "Overwrought, I with a greeting card hereby solicit the freedom of your body."
She said: "Let us go to bed, for it is Sunday, pausing only to buy emulsion paint: it is water resistant, and the children we are about to make can scribble on it."
We are besieged by advertising as never before. Ads are called 'strategic breaks' by the master manipulators.
That day may dawn when we would be hard pressed to think without linking advertising to matters of human heart, for the majority of ads links products with love.
A chocolate is not merely a tasty food: it is a magical metaphor for sex, it is a look exchanged by a couple with sexual longings living with a family in the lack of privacy. Likewise, a 3G service is not just a progressive innovation in data streaming to mobile instruments; no, it is so well-suited to express your longing to your girl by inquiring if that til on her neck is still there. Oh, the vulnerable look on her face as she exposes her neck is ravishing... o, purchase some 3G goodness today itself!
Like the tv programme called 'The Magician's Secrets Finally Revealed' we deserve to see a tv programme that exposes the subtext of the ads that push our emotional buttons so very adroitly.
For the world of advertisements, love is the biggest button on the human heart, and we are supposed to regurgitate our money when ads push the button. But there are other buttons, like patriotism. Even salt can be viewed patriotically. How many ads do we watch every day? 30? 50? 60? I grow apprehensive that my emotional buttons will be worn out from so much probing.
Have you met ad people? I am wondering about their ambitions. Are they frustrated creators, do they enjoy using advertising to make people do or not do something?
When confronted with the reasoning, the ad-makers will point to the fact that we live in a money economy. Advertising? Indispensable. We only need to remember that poet Arun Kolatkar was an ad-man too. The best ad-work, like Richard Avedon's, which is art in itself, delights through sheer cleverness. And it does so without slyness.
As for art, it too pushes our emotional buttons, spurring our emotions at will. But theatre, the parent of TV advertising, has the sole motive of investigating the workings of the human heart through manifest action and dialogue ufffd not of manipulating the heart towards products. Good art does not have the kind of ulterior motive that most ads do.
