Su(r)e We Do!

There are many quick ways to make big money – but most of these usually involve high levels of chance (gambling, lottery), great risk to life and limb (adventure sports, crime), or being subject to intense humiliation and ridicule accompanied with an acceptance to be the laughing stock of the country (reality TV, politics). There is, however, a fourth and easier way to make big money that doesn’t involve any of the above – although it’s probably applicable only if you’re in the US. Every now and again, you read these amazing stories about customers suing corporations in America, winning the subsequent lawsuit and ensuring their financial security for the next seven generations or so. You know what I’m talking about, the ones that typically sound like this:

“Woman wins $3 million from McDonalds”

McDonalds was ordered by a federal court to pay $3 million in damages to Wilma Flintstone, a 35 year old native of Lincoln, Nebraska. Mrs. Flintstone sued McDonalds after getting burn marks on her forearms after spilling a McCoffee. Seeking compensation for the consequent series of cosmetic surgeries and considerable mental anguish, Mrs. Flintstone alleged that the steam emerging from the cup was insufficient evidence that the cup of McCoffee was hot, and insisted that McDonalds had not warned her that the cup of McCoffee could possibly have a high temperature and was unsuitable for application on her forearms.

In an unusual move, the judge announced his verdict by starting with the classic joke about a horse walking into a bar and being asked by the bartender “Why the long face?” The judge then proceeded with the verdict, explaining that he narrated the joke so that the courtroom could distinguish between the joke and the judgment.

“Man gets $5 million compensation for eating cardboard box”

A man who ate the cardboard box containing some pesticides he’d purchased sued the manufacturer Dow Chemicals Ltd for not having given sufficient warning as to the inedibility of the box. While the pesticide packet had a sufficient number of “Poison - Do not consume internally” warnings; the man claimed that there was no instruction whatsoever to stop him from eating the carton. Dow Chemicals, already feeling guilty about a number of past misdeeds, decided that it was best to settle out of court rather than face the potential negative publicity of a lawsuit, and agreed upon a settlement of $5 million in small, unmarked bills.

All this made me wonder – how come we don’t have any of this in India? If you look at most news channels or online forums, you’ll realize that Indians do get outraged – very easily and very frequently. In fact, if you look at someone like Arnab Goswami, he’d get outraged even if you told him that he’d just won a lottery, a genie would fulfill his top three wishes AND God had reserved a place for him in heaven. (“Mr. Finance Minister, the nation demands an answer. What sort of a country do we live in where one man can get everything he’d ever hoped for, yet more than half the country is living in abject poverty? Is this what we’ve been reduced to? If this is not a black spot on the nation’s credibility, I don’t know what is!”) So how come we don’t sue, the way the Americans do?

As someone who’s not an expert in law, psychology, anthropology, socio cultural phenomena or consumer affairs, I have no clue as to what the answer is. One possible explanation could be that Indians do sue, but we do it more out of a sense of community duty or for the ‘greater good’ as opposed to a profit motive. This would explain the large number of PILs. As a matter of fact I personally knew a guy who’d filed a PIL against Fashion TV complaining that their late-night content was inappropriate for family audiences. What on earth made him choose Fashion TV over a hundred other possible channels while watching TV with his family at midnight, one can only guess!

This is why the corresponding headlines that you’d come across on court cases in Indian newspapers would sound like these:

“Man files PIL against RCB Cheerleaders”

Activist BN Krishna has filed a PIL against the cheerleading squad of the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the IPL, alleging that the use of skimpy clothes and provocative gyrations was against Indian culture and tradition and would have a negative influence on millions of viewers across India, especially men.

“Man files PIL against Pune Warriors Cheerleaders”

Advocate PS Kirpal has filed a PIL against the Pune Warriors cheerleading squad, saying that dressing up and dancing traditionally for a Western activity like cheerleading was demeaning to Indian culture and portrayed it in negative light. He also added that Bharatnatyam, the dance used by the cheerleaders, was actually a Tamil dance form and not a Marathi one; and this was insulting to either the Tamilians or the Marathis, or maybe even both.

Basically, if an American didn’t like something, he’d sue, citing ‘mental trauma and duress’ and demand an insanely high level of compensation; whereas an Indian would file a PIL saying that it was against culture/religion/society and demand that it be discontinued.

Maybe advertising has something to do with this – the ‘Jaago Graahak Jaago’ ads do little to inspire confidence in the consumers. While the ads make it look like you, the consumer, has a lot of power, it feels like some fake sort of power. The sort of power where if the company does not mention the correct quantity present in the pack, you, as an empowered consumer, can go to the consumer court and fight a lengthy court case at the end of which the company would have to tell you that they were sorry. At the most, they would replace that pack for you, or if you’re really lucky, they’d give you an extra pack for your trouble. Now if the ads were changed to show some down-on-his-luck sort of fellow who happens to buy a product one fine day, sues the company and in the next scene is shown with a bevy of women by his side, wearing the finest designer suit and hopping into a stretch limo – that’s the sort of thing that would really awaken the consumer!

Beware the Meme

The fundamental difference between economics and marketing is that while economics assumes that all individuals are rational, marketing assumes that all individuals are stupid. This explains 90% of the advertising that you see today. This is quite acceptable, given that 90% of movies, TV shows, music and most other forms of popular entertainment today are not much better. But what’s more dangerous is the sort of thing that Coca-Cola has been trying to achieve with its new “Brrrrr” ad campaign. As an ordinary lay person, you might wonder how an ad campaign that makes no sense and sounds like an overworked electric motor could possibly be dangerous for you. After all, as an ordinary lay person, I would’ve wondered the same.

However, as a person with some level of exposure to how advertising agencies work, I can guess, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, what the jhola-clad ad agency fellows had in mind when pitching this whole idea of “Brrrrr” to the business suit-clad marketing fellows at Coca Cola. “Brrrr” was not just another nonsensical ad campaign that would take the cola wars to a new level of inanity. “Brrrr” would’ve been pitched as a “meme”. According to the official definition, a meme is a unit of social information for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. In English, this means that a meme is a fad.

In advertising, this means a lot of money. I can imagine how the ad agency chaps would’ve gone on for two hours, explaining over a dozen slides the phenomena of ‘memes’. They would’ve quoted Richard Dawkins (the British biologist who coined the term) to sound intelligent and highbrow, and quoted their five-year old offspring’s latest school fad to sound “street” and “with it”. They would’ve droned about phenomena like the rituals accompanying tequila shots and the latest email forward to emphasize the power of memes. And then they would’ve landed the killer blow about how the emergence of social networks and new media has meant that memes, when exploited well, can just take off on their own and all the company would need to do would be to sit back, laugh maniacally and watch as the world went mad and purchased Coca Cola everywhere.

“Brrrr” would, therefore, not be another in a series of forgotten ad campaigns. Instead, “Brrrr” would take the shape of a social movement, a fad that is picked up by ‘new media’ and regurgitated endlessly until everyone from upscale Manhattan bars to roadside Dar es Salaam stalls are shaking their bodies in odd ways for no apparent reason. “Brrrr” would be tweeted and re-tweeted countless times on twitter; “Brrrr” would be the new Facebook phenomena that would cause uproar in the social networking world; “Brrrr” would be played by DJs at nightclubs to get the crowd at its feet; “Brrrr” would receive 200,000 hits a day on YouTube and you would be praying for the day when space travel is economical enough to help you get the hell away from all this.

Now, a lot of you might think that I’m making this sound far more sinister than it actually is; that I’ve painted a greatly exaggerated picture; that ad agency mandarins cannot possibly be THAT diabolical and that the crisis would never take on such drastic proportions. Well, I have one word for you - Macarena! I still shudder/wake up in a cold sweat/feel a shiver down my spine/pray for economical space travel when I think of the days when you couldn’t switch on the TV or the radio without listening to the Macarena, when you couldn’t go to a party without being subjected to those ludicrous dance steps that looked like everyone was touching various body parts to check if anything was missing. And this was before the era of social networking and new media, so you can imagine how apocalyptic things can get now.

The good news though is that Coca Cola seems to have wholeheartedly bought the idea and decided to sink millions into ensuring its success. This usually means that it will not succeed. While fads may be stupid, annoying and give you genocidal thoughts, the one good thing about them is that they cannot be controlled. Despite a lot of people spending years researching the phenomena of fads and countless books being written about fads and how you can cash in on them, the truth is that you cannot. Fads are still gloriously unpredictable and the harder you try to control them, the less likely you are to succeed.

And right now Coca Cola, to my great relief, is trying desperately hard to make this whole “Brrrr” thing succeed. Whenever I switch on the TV, every second ad seems to be “Brrrr”. When I browse the net or log on to Facebook, a Coca Cola ad/pop-up asks me to post my “Brrrr” video and share it with the world. While it’s annoying temporarily, I can put up with it safe in the knowledge that it wouldn’t really take off beyond the world of advertising; that people wouldn’t forward me links to their “Brrrr” videos, set “Brrrr” as their status update or start dancing to “Brrrr” at parties. In fact, if I were to be all Navjot Singh Sidhu over this whole affair, what I’d say is “My dear friend, you might need a tank of gasoline to set a cottage on fire, but all it takes to start a forest fire is a matchstick! So how could Coca Cola succeed when they’ve used up an entire offshore oil rig?”

Death of a Villain

While this isn’t a very nice thing to say, sad news is something that one comes across daily in the newspapers. Some of it, like the Japan earthquake, you react to and think about – while others, like the release of a new Lady Gaga album, you tend to file away under the ‘indifferent’ section of your mind. So a few days ago when I read that Bollywood actor Bob Christo had passed away, I didn’t cast the headline a second glance and had begun the mental process of filing it away…until my eyes fell upon the accompanying picture:

And immediately, it set off some sort of alarm bell in my head. This was the face of pure Bollywood evil! Granted, we’ve had far greater and more legendary villains like Amrish Puri, Danny and Amjad Khan – but if I were to think of one villain that evoked pure, unadulterated hatred the second you saw him on screen, it was Bob. And I didn’t even know that it was Bob, as the first time I heard his name was when I read about his death!

I speak with very limited experience, of course. Apparently Bob has done over 200 films in Bollywood, of which I would’ve seen less than a dozen. But the point is, he’s always been one of those “as evil as can possibly be” kind of villains, without any shade of grey. Ever! Granted, Bollywood villains were anyway usually pure evil – but once in a while there could be mitigating circumstances as to why the villain was evil – he could be a victim of circumstances. Or the villain would be ‘humanized’ in some way by having a brother or wife or kid. Or he would have a cat that he genuinely felt affection for. Or even the odd movie where the villain would turn nice/see the evil of his ways.

But with Bob Christo, it seemed that he was out and out evil, and his character would never be fleshed out in any way that could possibly evoke sympathy from the viewer. Unlike other villains, Bob was never allowed to portray a character – he was pure evil the second he appeared on screen, and stayed that way until he got brutally killed. He would rape, kill, smuggle, do drugs, loot, plunder, castrate, set on fire, torture – often in the same film. And that was all he did. For example, if Manoj Bajpai was to play an evil, corrupt cop, they’d still show him going back home to his wife and kid; or how he ended up turning evil due to the system being corrupt or a family member dying of an expensive, critical illness. But if Bob Christo was shown as an evil cop, he’d only be shown in scenes where he brutally tortures the hero – they won’t show him going back home to a family or even a pet. Hell, even if they showed him doing something nonchalant like smoking, it would probably be accompanied with evil background music and wicked glint in the eye / with lots of alcohol around to connote decadent lifestyle / mujraa-type dance happening to denote complete lack of morals. The movie would not have a single scene depicting Bob doing something humane – I’m not talking about something saintly like rescuing an injured kitten from the traffic and bandaging its paws, but even something mundane like giving his kid some pocket money.

All this recollection of Bob and the sort of movies he was in (a lot of the smuggling-type ones, I think) did make me realize one thing, though – villains today just don’t inspire that sort of terror anymore. This is not specific to Bob – just think of the villains from the 70s and 80s Bollywood movies. The evil ‘thakur’ who would ruthlessly oppress the simple villagers, the demonic ‘daaku’ that would wantonly terrorize simple villagers just for the fun of it, or the devious smuggler that would ruin countless lives (and the nation’s economy) with his misdeeds. The sort of roles essayed by the likes of Danny, Amrish Puri and Amjad Khan with such conviction that I’ve come across a few people who actually believe they’re evil in real life! Even well into the 90s, Bollywood was churning out movies where Amrish Puri would still be a thakur/zamindar, with his henchmen merrily chopping to pieces any villager that had the temerity to disobey his orders.

Compare this with the villains of today’s Bollywood movies. Half the movies don’t even have a villain, and even if they do, he’d be a watered-down ‘anti-hero’ or a ‘negative role with shades of grey’. He would probably be coordinating a kidnapping or serial blasts over his cell phone while being out shopping with his wife – something that Bob would’ve completely frowned upon. While I do believe that this subtlety has helped improve the overall standard of Bollywood films with lots of experimental films seeing the light of day and the emergence of character actors, I think that as a kid, I would’ve preferred the sort of rubbish movies that Bob was part of. The subtle stuff of today would have seemed slow and boring – and there’d be no fun without characters like Gabbar and Mogambo, who are part of cinematic folklore today.

Bob’s death reminded me of a simpler time when heroes were good, villains were bad and there was nothing in between.

Uzbekistan Calling!

About a week ago, I received an email from a travel company. Ordinarily, an occurrence such as this would elicit little reaction on my part, apart from looking for the delete button. However, this was not your standard-issue “Give up your life savings and shop like mad in Dubai!”; “Sell your first-born and go on a trip to London!!”; “Take off your clothes and go wild in Thailand” kind of mail. This particular travel company wanted to pack me off to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. This obviously made me wonder – why on earth would someone want to do that to me? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for travel destinations that are off the beaten track – but Uzbekistan? That’s a bit like asking someone who’s expressed a fondness for food to eat that nasty chilli that can burn the inside of your stomach.

Maybe there is something to see in Tashkent, but all I could remember about Tashkent was that Lal Bahadur Shastri went there and he died. Tashkent sounded like just the sort of place where you’d go and never be heard from again. It’s the sort of place where one moment you’re walking down the by-lanes of a busy market and the next moment an unmarked car screeches to a halt by your side, the door is flung open and you’re knocked out cold and dragged inside. The next thing you know you’re right in the middle of an international arms-and-drugs smuggling racket run by an ex-Soviet army colonel. It’s the sort of place that would be teeming with shadowy terrorist groups affiliated with big-ticket terrorist groups, smuggling arms into Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and other strife-torn, unstable countries. It’s the sort of place that before you go, you’d be advised to leave behind some nice photographs of yours with your family, so that when news like “Argha went to Uzbekistan and was never heard from again…” appears, the accompanying article would talk about what a regular, happy-go-lucky fellow you were and have a smiling picture of you posing at a party with a drink in hand.

And then it struck me that I’ve never EVER read anything about Uzbekistan, leave alone go there or watch a TV show about the country – yet I had so many pre-conceived notions about the country. What if I was wrong? What if, after the dissolution of the USSR, Uzbekistan actually embarked upon a liberal economic policy that encouraged businesses to flourish, and was today a thriving, bustling economy striding progressively forward in the new millennium? What if Uzbekistan is not run by a despotic, tyrannical, egotistical dictator but instead has a free press and parliamentary democracy? What if Uzbekistan is not the sort of place your car got stolen the second you parked it? In short, what if Uzbekistan is not the sort of rubbish hellhole I imagine it to be? Just to see how right or wrong I was, I decided to list down my pre-conceived notions about Uzbekistan and then do a reality check on the internet to compare the results.

Pre-conceived notions about Uzbekistan (or any other Central Asian country with name that ends with -stan):

1. It is ruled by a tyrannical, ruthless dictator. Although he’s not THAT evil or ruthless or crazed that he’s made it to the news like Kim-Jong-Il of North Korea, but a relatively brutal dictator nonetheless, who’s been around since the Soviet dissolution.

2. It’s grey. I mean, like most Soviet/ex-Soviet countries I can think of, Uzbekistan seems very grey to me – grey skies, grey buildings, people dressed in grey or black, etc.

3. It has mountains. Not the pretty, alpine, tourist-y ones that people visit, but grim, ominous-looking mountains where only wolves go.

4. It’s lawless. It’s probably part of some nefarious network of international arms and drugs smugglers that start from Pakistan/Afghanistan, go across Central Asia, Middle East and then on to Eastern Europe; involving a rag-tag group of junkies, jihadis, ex-Soviet army men, al-Qaeda operatives and ex-ISI agents.

5. It’s barren. The geographical landscape of the country would be pretty barren – not much is grown there and there isn’t much of greenery.

6. Any important building/tourist attraction would be made of domes and minarets.

7. The economy survives on oil or natural gas – the sort of country India would try to hammer out a gas pipeline deal with that would subsequently be nixed by Pakistan.

Facts about Uzbekistan (as against pre-conceived notions, after some very basic Google work):

1. According to Wikipedia, Uzbekistan is ostensibly a democracy. In simple words, this means that Uzbekistan is not a democracy. Since its creation, Uzbekistan has been particularly clever about trying to appear like a democracy. Apparently there is a parliament but NO opposition. This is because political parties are allowed to be formed as long as they DON’T take part in the elections (go figure!). And a guy called Islam Karimov has been its first president since 1995 with his five-year term being extended each time it’s approaching the end of its tenure. So I was partially right about the first point.

2. From the images I came across, it isn’t particularly grey as a Romania or a Bulgaria might be, so I was wrong on that.

3. It has mountains – some ugly, desert-type mountains, others that look picturesque yet forbidding. So again, I’d say I’m partially right on this one!

4. Law & Order: Most countries have issued travel warnings to their citizens traveling to Uzbekistan, although lawless would be too extreme a word. But yes, terrorist presence is very much there and on the rise, and there’s a huge black market as well. Partially right again, I would think.

5. It’s barren – ABSOLUTELY so. The whole country is just mountains or desert, or both!

6. Spot on – any building of consequence in Uzbekistan follows the domes-and-minarets style of architecture (although I’m sure there’s a better, more official-sounding, architectural term for that).

7. While the biggest and most strategic resource for Uzbekistan is gold, energy comes second. This is because Uzbekistan is amongst the world’s largest producers of natural gas. However, agriculture, particularly cotton, also has a big role to play in the economy, so it would be wrong to say that it depends on oil and natural gas.

So there it is – out of seven pre-conceived notions, two are correct, three are partially correct, and two are wrong – that’s not too shabby now, is it? Perhaps pre-conceived notions are not such a bad thing after all, and I could pass off as an authority on Uzbekistan without having read much about the country, sort of like an MBA might do. However, all this relatively-extensive reading on Uzbekistan only deepens the original mystery – why on earth did that travel company want to send me there?