The author, Subodh Sunkar, sent this article to ibnlive.com. The views expressed in the article are his own.
New Delhi: Yes this one is about cricket. No it is not about dissecting who or where we went wrong in the field. It goes beyond the boundaries and beyond the players.
Ladega to Jeetega! Wonder where did that ad mysteriously disappear? Agreed the (beaten black &) blue billion (minus the shameless eleven) crowd is a cricket fanatic one but honestly this was taking it a bit too far. There is a fine line between optimism and jingoism and this I think was way over the line. Fortunately Pepsi had the foresight to use tigers - a proud, valiant, fearless animal but then - an endangered species on the verge of extinction. Pretty much sums up the team situation. I won't be surprised to see a serious revival of Save the tiger campaign. Trust Pepsi to be cautious and being politically correct - the operative word was "to" and never "aur". The caveats were in place just that we noticed them late.
As the tigers used to walk off (now on the run I presume) we had "ooh aah India" and a bunch of (extremely irritating) kids teasing the demigods with a Pepsi. Again smart work by Pepsi. The jingle alludes to the Moov (or was it Iodex?) ad cautioning you of the likely pain you will face. We ignored. Then came king of Bollywood (albeit for a brief couple of days) fighting an imaginary tug of war (hand) and almost losing it before the blue billion helps him. On the money again. The team indeed is fighting some imaginary devils, invents new ones where none exist. Like in the ad you need a bunch of new hands(guys) to arrest this rot. He made an ardent appeal to buy some Pepsi band as token of support for the team. Same model that Lance Armstrong adopted for cancer patients. A symbolic appeal highlighting the nature and the extent of the trouble the team is in. And finally there was "Pepsi Gold Cup Ko la" - inventive and interesting but completely non-committal. They did learn from their mistakes. The last cup we had a Pepsi blue that had an Indian connotation. No such blunder this time. I believe it is a limited edition. God knows what that is supposed to mean? Limited only for the players?
If that was not enough we had a Visa ad again with an equally jingoistic fervor. I am not sure what they were trying to say in the ad apart from a shoddy attempt to somehow be linked to the team and the cup. Probably they were building the case for including Srikanth and Amarnath in the team! Fortunately for us it was not aired that often.
In between the McDowell guy kept raising his finger. A very factual ad raising the Mera Number One as an when our wickets tumbled. I am sure at one point he must have said guys hold it I can't do so many bottoms up that fast. I think he really had to be back in a jiffy when Dhoni passed by the wicket on couple of occassions.
Coming to the mother of all ads - Sunkit (or Sunfeast?) - ab har ghar mein Sachin. I was not even sure if they were advertising their product or were endorsing Surf Excel with that string of Sachin T-Shirts on the clothesline. Going back to their punch line and assuming the ghar (home) is silent - It has such strong allusion to dho dala - tremendous foresight.
For me more than the game the ads hurt the most. Frankly you can at best sell a dream not Utopia!
Now that the myth is shattered let us have some good ads (and real cricket).
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