Boycott Voltas

India’s largest manufacturer of air conditioners, Voltas – a TATA company – is airing another anti-national television commercial that should cause all Indians who value national unity and integration to boycott its products.

As with its first anti-national commercial, the new one targets Tamils. The pidgin English/Hindi has been dropped but the broad accent remains, and in case you have trouble identifying it, the main character is addressed as Murthy.

Why do I think this is anti-national?

It has to do with the use of accents by the British to divide and control Indians during the colonial era, and more widely, as an instrument of elite governance in Britain and abroad.

To explain that, I have to refer briefly to British history.

The people of Britain represent successive waves of tribal invasions from Europe over thousands of years, each violently dispossessing its immediate predecessor. The defeated tribes became the lower classes and the minority groups of the Welsh, Scots and Irish.

Presiding over that layered social order is a small elite group that arrived in the 11th Century.

Once raw violence was no longer necessary for control, the elite maintained its dominance through an impenetrably nuanced system of social mores. Standards of dress, education, and speech patterns, the use of cutlery and club memberships, old school ties and a range of other insufferable snobberies distinguished the “in crowd.” Outsiders who tried to navigate the system and failed were the subject of open ridicule.

The correct “accent” was an important hoop that outsiders had to jump through to be accepted. (George Bernard Shaw made that the theme of one of his most popular satires.)

The Scots, Irish and Welsh, as well as the “lower classes” generally, were the first victims of this system of governance, and it expanded throughout the British Empire.

Wherever the British ruled, they ridiculed the local accent, and everywhere, local proxies joined in the mind fuck.

In India, every region had its caricatured accent, and the toadies who slurped up to the Brits dined out on imitations. It was a very effective way of creating disunity among Indians

In the decades since independence, the malignant divisive British impact on Indian society has virtually disappeared, but in the last few years, Shah Rukh Khan's films and a number of television commercials (for Voltas and the energy drink Red Bull), have tried to revive it.

Tamils have been particular targets.

I doubt if this has happened spontaneously.

SRK's public persona is that of someone who will do anything for money, and Voltas has its bread very thickly buttered by the British: it had the air-conditioning contracts for the ocean liner Queen Mary 2, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

With that kind of business coming its way, the company is unlikely to suffer at all from a boycott call by a lowly blogger, but perhaps it will raise the political awareness of the corporate biggies at Voltas and TATA.

I urge readers to circulate this post and seriously consider a boycott. The time of colonial toadies is over.

Also, please email this blog to the Ethics Counsellor at Voltas: ethics@voltas.com.

Nitwit Commercials

Do corporate bigwigs in India pay any attention at all to what their ad men are putting out?

On the basis of the idiocy of commercials selling major brands, I would say they're quite oblivious.

Consider the assortment of animals (goldfish, dog, parakeet, monkey and tiger) starring in the commercial for a new Hyundai model.

Did anyone at the car company ask about the commercial's intended target audience? Are there enough five-year-old car buyers to warrant the pitch? 

If Tata had asked such questions before the launch of the NANO perhaps they could have avoided the major marketing disaster that followed commercials presenting the car as a step-up from the scooter for the lower middle class. 

Think how different the NANO image would be if the launch campaign had shown it as fun wheels for 20-something foursomes.

Or consider the mindless Nerolac commercial now playing that shows Keralites unfurling giant umbrellas over their houses while a mocking Shah Rukh Khan offers them a paint-job instead.

Did anyone at the company question the wisdom of reprising the South Indian bashing theme of SRK's recent films?

With the Indian Formula 1 struggling to establish an audience, has anyone done a postmortem of the advertising so far?

The people who planned and executed that campaign were evidently trying to sell the idea that the sport is sexy: their commercials showed Indian girls ecstatic over some weedy white men in driver suits.

Perhaps someone should have sat them down and explained the reason why the sport is sexy.

It's the fast powerful cars.

Boys like them. Girls like boys.

If you cut out the cars, the whole thing loses energy.

Also, showing teenage Indian girls starry-eyed over some White guys who appear to be decidedly over the hill might go over big in Europe; here, it's pathetic.

“Cultural Terrorism” or Media Madness?

The news agency IANS carried an anonymous article on 31 January with the headline “Cultural terrorism: Idea of India threatened.”

“Shah Rukh Khan one day and Kamal Haasan the next" it began. "Is it mere coincidence or a sign of an increasingly knee-jerk, reactionary India that two of its most loved film icons are forced to go public to painstakingly reassert their secular identity and insist, in case the message is lost, that they are proud Indians?”

The next paragraph noted the predicaments of Ashis Nandy and Salman Rushdie and declared the query in the lead merely rhetorical.

In print and television, our “elite” English media commentators have been on a similar binge of shrill and confused hysteria, tarring with the same brush cases that have nothing in common.

Consider the facts:

Salman Rushdie is a Brown Sahib resident in Britain who for four decades has vilified his two putative homelands and ancestral faith. He is now engaged in promoting a low watt film version of Midnight's Children, the comprehensive dump on independent India that first brought him fame.

Television channels have been carrying endless replays of his indignation at the "cultural terrorism" that has kept him from attending the Calcutta Book Fair to which, he claimed, he had been invited.

Media have given little play to the statement by organizers of that event denying they ever invited him and that he is lying in claiming they paid for his plane ticket.

Quite clearly, Rushdie merely lost his nerve after learning that some Muslims were still outraged at his dump on the Prophet of Islam in Satanic Verses. His false claims repeated a pattern set last year when he was a no-show at the Jaipur Literary Festival.

Ashis Nandy is a sociologist in his dotage who said something really stupid as a panelist at the Jaipur Literary Festival: that the lowest castes were responsible for most of the corruption in India.

When someone outraged by that calumny initiated legal action under a law meant to maintain social order, Nandy backed away from his untenable proposition saying he was misunderstood and misquoted. What he actually meant was that the lower castes were caught in their corruptions more often. That too is arrant nonsense, but no one in the media dwelt on it.

Shah Rukh “it’s lonely at the top” Khan is an actor with an outsize ego who seems to believe his own media hype. He had a badly ghostwritten piece in a special “global issues” edition of Outlook magazine about his post 9/11 travails in America.

Airport authorities in the United States have detained him on several occasions for hours at a time, ostensibly because they mistook him for a terrorist.

A dimwit minister in Pakistan thought the article was about the star’s difficulties in India, and called on the Indian government to provide him greater protection. That led the actor to make a televised statement telling the Pakistani to mind his own business and declaring that he was quite safe and happy in India.

Kamal Hasaan is an actor/film maker whose movie Viswaroopam was banned in his home state of Tamil Nadu, supposedly because some Muslims were offended by its depiction of terrorists motivated by their religion.

As the film is innocuous and has a Muslim hero, it is likely that it offended Chief Minister Jayalalitha and not a fringe group of Muslims. She has reason to find offense in the film’s derogatory references to Brahmin women (of which she is a powerful example, particularly so at the head of a political party rooted in the anti-Brahmin movement let loose under British auspices).

In his initial hurt response at the ban, Hasaan told reporters that Tamil Nadu authorities wanted him out of the state, and perhaps he would have to flee the country to a more secular one.

In less emotional statements since then he has tried hard to downplay that response, dismissing one interviewer’s concerns about his artistic freedom by declaring, “my country comes first.”

Quite obviously, the four cases have nothing in common.

If the hysteria they have generated underlines a common theme, it is that “elite” Indian media have become so politically obtuse as to pose a clear and present danger to the country.