Free some underwear from those irksome dangling tags to get a pretty good product: Hanes Tagless Underwear. Then come up with some well-conceived copy to sell it: Because the world gives you enough tags. Add a tri-series of neat artwork. So far, so good, right? Now, add a dash of sensationalism, let a mindless handful of viewers get a peek, and there it suddenly is: the perfect recipe for a disaster. McCann India is the ad agency in question and their campaign - now withdrawn - had 3 print ads. The first showed a man bearing the burden of a vivid bunch of “gay” things, the second had a guy pulling at a similar collage of stereotypically “black” things, and the third depicted an assortment of “Pakistani” stuff - each with the same words at the bottom. Hanes Tagless Underwear. Because the world gives you enough tags.
People have been calling the campaign “anti-gay” and “racist”. How is it either of those things? The fact that it was seen as biased is odd; it’s anything but! (The only thing that does bother me about the campaign is that people who aren’t really aware of the stereotypes in question will indeed become so after seeing it.) Yes, the executions are hard-hitting for the times, but I also think that the basic brand idea borders on brilliant! And that is what McCann’s defense should have been - instead of the spineless apology they actually mustered up.
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Here is a thoughtful piece from the Times of India today. By Jay Bhattacharjee, a business and industrial analyst, it comes on the eve of Sarkozy’s visit to India. I thought it made a couple of very valid points - those that corporate India could be truly mindful of at this juncture.
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French President Nicolas Sarkozy may have recently received a lot of media attention for reasons that are not exactly flattering. However, one policy initiative of his seems to have aroused a lot of interest. The Elysee Palace has invited two Nobel laureates, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to advise the French government on a new methodology for calculating national income (NI) and gross domestic product (GDP) that would incorporate non-economic inputs like quality of life and other social indicators.
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This development is a reflection of the deep divide between continental European scholars and the Anglo-Saxon market economy proponents on what constitutes a nation’s well-being. In post-Thatcher Britain and post-Reagan America, the approach to the calculation of a country’s GDP and NI has been based on conventional economic indices. Even allowing for corrections to these figures on account of different price levels (purchasing power parity), the estimates of NI and GDP have not mirrored the approximate levels of national well-being.
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Economist Paul Krugman wrote an article in July 2005 on the relative performance of the French and American economies. He said that the big difference between the two “is in priorities, not performance”. He went on to emphasise that the issue was about “two highly productive societies that have made a different trade-off between work and family time”. He felt there is a lot to be said for the French choice.
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According to OECD data, French productivity, defined as GDP per hour worked, is manifestly higher than the US figure. While admitting that French GDP per capita is well below that of the US, Krugman attributes it to the additional time that French workers spend with their families. Without minimising the problem of higher unemployment in France, he notes that full-time French employees work shorter weeks and enjoy more paid vacations than their American counterparts.
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When we compare typical middle-class families in France and the US, it becomes evident that the French enjoy good schooling (at little cost) and an excellent healthcare system that are not available to American families. The Krugman analysis was taken a step further by an OECD study in 2006. It considered a number of alternative indicators of well-being or even “ill-being”, as it said tongue in cheek. It recognised that GDP, as currently calculated, has many shortcomings, since it does not take into account factors like leisure or the degradation of the environment, or income distribution.
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OECD analysts researched the impact of unconventional variables like these three, as well as other indices of wellbeing like social outcomes of policies and reported happiness. The authors admit that the new variables suffer from various drawbacks, including availability, measurement and crosscountry comparability problems. Nevertheless, they strongly recommend that conventional GDP calculation must be supplemented with other indicators, in order to give a more meaningful nuance to the concept of national welfare.
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Clearly, Sarkozy would like Sen and Stiglitz to carry this research further and possibly create a newer framework for measuring national well-being. During the run-up to his election last year, Sarkozy himself played the Anglo-Saxon card to denigrate his country’s record of creating and maintaining a high quality of life that the rest of the world admired. He was castigated by British commentators who pointed out that 2005 data portrayed the UK quite poorly when it came to critical social indices. While it had overtaken France in per capita GDP, it had approximately 17 per cent of its population living in poverty, compared to 7 per cent in France.
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Sarkozy now realises that he had picked the wrong ammunition during the election campaign. The French people would never buy the Anglo-Saxon model that his fund-raisers had been pushing for. His new advisers may help him to restore some balance in his policymaking.
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For his Indian hosts, will Sarkozy advocate a similar index?
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The Tata Nano is undoubtedly the world’s cheapest car, but consider the context in which it is embedded. The Chevy Aveo (~$11,000) is less than 1/4th of the US per capita income. Granted that India’s middle class is growing fast, but the Nano (~$2500) is priced at more than 3X India’s per capita income!
Now that says something.
And its a fact those that levy accusations at Ratan Tata - for furthur choking up India’s roads with bizarrely affordable cars - should consider. When you add to it the fact that European safety and emission standards are met by the Nano, then outright naysayers begin to look just a little silly.
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Sunday’s cartoon responds to the generally respectful tone accorded Mike Huckabee, who does not believe in evolution and is therefore, by definition, a lunatic.
- Ted Rall
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Okay, so I seem to be whining exclusively about women today. But how can I help it! See I heard Archana Puran Singh on the radio. She is a sassy actress and comedienne who delivers - in her upbeat Hinglish sort of style - Indian celebrity news. And as she does so, she classifies actors and their acts, whether on stage or off, as “HS”, “LS”, or “MS”. If it has you scratching your head, that’s high society, low society, and you got it, middle society.
Believe it or not, her audience laps it up! India has historically been a country of much hierarchy - from the caste system, to the imperialism imbibed from the British, to the recent-haves and always-hads created by the more recent economic boom. Which is precisely why I find Archana’s system of stratifying Bollywood gossip to be irresponsible. I’m very tempted to label her deejaying as deeply LS, but I’ll settle instead for HI. As in, highly ignorant.
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I had the honour and pleasure of meeting Santosh Desai recently. He is one of India’s foremost account planners and a weekly columnist (typically in the role of a commentator on popular culture) for the Times of India. Chatting with him was uplifting for he is eloquent, down-to-earth, and has integrity. It gives me great hope that people like him (those with a holistic bent of mind) have a voice in advertising and media in India.
Here is one of his columns from the TOI. I think it nicely demonstrates how his unique brand of acute observation, unapologetic introspection, and nuanced articulation might generate deep insights in to why we feel and do the things we feel and do. (How this sort of thinking might be relevant to understanding consumer behavior is perhaps easy to see, but more on it later.)
THE FEAR OF GIVING
Old ladies begging in winter nights get me. I am always shaken, disturbed and moved in a way that goes beyond sympathy or pity. It seems colossally unfair that one should be so vulnerable, so shrivelled by penury at this stage of one’s life. Of course the sight of poverty always induces guilt pangs, the homeless make one uncomfortable, the idea of street children failing to find avenues to channelise their obvious energies is difficult to live with but, for some reason, the idea of old ladies in winter wearing smudged glasses held up by strings has the most powerful emotional impact on me. And yet, for all the trauma this sight induces in me, I find it impossible to actually reach into my pocket and give her anything.
I think about it with increasing desperation and then the light turns green and I am free to go. I dream of making a grand gesture, of emptying out my pockets on an impulse or going round the city distributing blankets but of course I do nothing. And I don’t think I am alone in this. While a large part of our attitude towards the economically underprivileged is made up of indifference, there is a small but significant part that is unable to take the step from concern to giving. What explains this inability, this paralysis that stymies good intentions?
And I am not talking about the rational arguments against giving charity to people who beg on the streets. There are those argue that begging is a nuisance and giving only encourages dependence. You frequently hear accounts of how when meaningful work was offered to the people who were begging, it was almost always turned down. Without getting into the argument for or against encouraging begging, let us focus instead on those situations when we have no conceptual problems with giving something but find ourselves unable to bring ourselves to do so.
Perhaps, what prevents us from giving is that it appears to be a cheap way to buy absolution. It seems too easy, to rid oneself of guilt by offloading some money into an outstretched hand. Are we merely purchasing a cheap ticket to heaven, finding a way to postpone facing up to some deep sense of guilt at our relative good fortune?
The other possible reason is that the problem seems too vast for one small gesture to make any real difference. The sense of “so what will it really change’’ might stop us from taking that small step.
The enormity of the problem mocks at the futility of our gesture and makes it appear to be an act of indulgence aimed at making us, rather than the person begging, feel better. The feeling that there is no symbolic way of shouldering responsibility, that once we cross the threshold and take any action then we somehow become responsible for the problem in its entirety. And if we are not ready for that, then it is perhaps better to do nothing at all.
In some deep-rooted way, we are afraid of playing God with other people’s destinies. The act of giving seems laden with arrogance; we attribute superiority to ourselves based on material comfort and somehow this feels wrong. It feels wrong that one should be in a position to make such a difference to someone else’s life.
The transaction is too naked, the difference too palpable for comfort. Also, there is this other problem with playing God—we need to be completely fair and impartial.
Who is to say who needs our charity the most—is it the shrivelled old woman or the urchin without a leg? Do we give on the basis of an internal pathos-meter that measures the relative direness of the need? Do we then end up summing up human beings by the size of their afflictions?
And hence the irony of doing nothing for those in need not out of callousness, but out of some form of respect for them as people.
Perhaps this too is only a way to rationalise indifference. Perhaps this whole debate is too self-indulgent in the first place. And it certainly changes nothing.
The next time an old lady raps on my car window, I will still be a deer in her headlights, trapped between my fear of arrogance and a need to do something.
Read more from him here. (Search for ‘Santosh Desai’ or ‘City City Bang Bang’ on this link.)
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Sachin Tendulkar was recently issued a notice to appear in court. Activists have accused him of defacing the Indian flag by cutting a cake bearing the tricolors in public.
It’s bewildering that it would get any kind of buzz going, leave alone outrage. What about a flag cake is offensive? The cutting? It’s just cake! Cake meant to celebrate India, not denigrate it. And that was probably Tendulkar’s state of mind when he did what he did. He simply didn’t (and most wouldn’t) know the warped minds of these “patriots” enough to anticipate their reaction.
But you know what’s worse than the (over)reaction is the defense! The president of the Board of Control of Cricket in India played right in to the hands of the fanatics who went to court. He stated, “Tendulkar has spoken to me. He says that the function was organised by the India High Commission, and with so many people around, he did not realise the colour of the cake when he was suddenly asked to cut it.” Right!
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There’s a fat blanket of smog hanging over rapidly industrializing India, absorbing sunlight that would otherwise filter on to the subcontinent. This is according to a study recently published in the New Scientist and it’s not surprising.
“It turns out that smog produced by US and Europe until about 1980 had resulted in similar dimming across the world. But when the West cleaned up its act in the 1980s and 1990s - just as India and China were starting to spew - clearer skies returned across much of the world.“
Clearly, it’s important for India to learn from the cycles that more developed parts of the world have gone through already.
But think of the blind acceptance of Western consumerism that we are seeing in India today. An ad for Zeiss opticals - now available in India - shows a girl in an office expressing condescension towards a coworker for wearing glasses with no brand name. The tagline is “Brand nahi to style/naam nahi” or something like it. Basically, it signals that without brands to show off with, a person can make no impact. How tasteless and how untrue!
India, beware. The unthinking brand of capitalism the West embraces just isn’t cutting it anymore and the sociopolitical state of America is good evidence. We don’t have to go stir crazy on brands in India to realize that rampant consumerism - just like the grey smog that now envelops us - is damaging. Indians need to be wary of the retail therapy trap.
(Of course brands - and the businesses they represent - need to start being more responsible with their messaging too but that’s a story from another day.)
A recent article by Francois Gautier captures well some of my sentiment. I’m not sure that spirituality is the answer to India’s problems. But sitting up and taking a look at the West more objectively is certainly in order.
“Today, there is a sense of deep satisfaction, of gloating even, in India. The economy is booming, there are more and more cars on the roads, shares are soaring, a plane is taking off every six seconds, hotels are full, shops do roaring business… But if one looks closer at what is happening here… India is veering blindly, without restraint, towards total globalisation and Westernisation… Yes, there are great values in the Western world: Freedom, democracy, equality (not always though), respect for the environment, less corruption. And India must, and has already borrowed from these qualities. But… it seems the Indian political and intellectual mind is pushing these qualities to an illogical extreme, as if it wants to prove to the West that ‘we are as democratic, as liberal, as free as you are’… India must achieve its liberalisation and industrialisation, by taking the best of the West, but preserving what is good, pure, wise in her own culture.”
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Millions are celebrating the Festival of Lights in India, Nepal, and Thailand this week. It is traditionally called Deepavali which - roughly translated - means the lighting of a row of lamps. It symbolizes the victory of enlightenment over ignorance and is meant to be an auspicious start to the Hindu new year.
People light up their homes with lamps and lanterns, light up the skies with firecrackers, create colorful rangolis like the one above, eat traditional sweets, visit friends and relatives, gamble on card games, and dress up in bright new clothes. Festivities extraordinaire! I’m not religous, but it’s uplifting that the festival I was named after be the one that marks my return to India. It’s been so many years, yet everything feels familiar. It is hot and crowded, yes, but the food, cricket, music (most Bollywood stuff excluded!), and warmth of the people make up for it.
Granted I haven’t had to start working (or drive by a slum) yet, but the only thing that’s been bothering me so far is the fact that there are still so many stray dogs on the streets. I worry constantly that they will get badly hurt by cars driving by and then be left to die alone and slowly, ugh. I so wish we would all be a bit more (well) enlightened in our attitude towards them…
But for now, I am loving it here. What has surprised me beyond belief is how “green” some of India now is. My parents and all their neighbors use solar energy and they compost - like it’s no big deal, which is very cool. I was concerned that moving back to India from the US would be tougher, and it might well become so in the days to come. Today, it truly feels like a homecoming. And on that note, here’s wishing everyone a very happy holiday!
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