Waking up to Tata Tea

As elections begin appearing on the horizon, two socially relevant advertisements are being aired on television. Both are sponsored by Tata Tea and are a good blend of brand promotion and social content. In one of them, a candidate seeking votes approaches a home in the typical loud and boisterous style. He is asked by the young man in the house to explain his qualifications, area of competence and work experience. The politician guffaws loudly walks out asking if he was being interviewed for a job as in the background, the young man counters that indeed he was foe the politician was in the running for the biggest job of them all… the job of wanting to run a whole nation.

There is another one. In this, it is election day and a bunch of young people are hanging around making plans; no not about elections or voting or any thing like that. They are planning some thing else. They are planning to go to a movie; making the most of the public holiday that election day is. When a bunch of activists go up to them and ask them to have some tea and wake up, one of the girls perks up to say “I am not sleeping, OK? The deftly delivered punch line is “election ke din, agar aap vote nahin de rahein hain, to aap so rahein hain”.

Tata Tea’s partnership with the group Jaago Re is worth recounting. As indeed is the extremely noteworthy mission of registering and motivating one billion people or the whole of India’s adult population to vote and helping them to do so with practical tips and help. The creatively produced film is so refreshing because it makes social advertising so different from the normal patronizing messages from celebrities that we are so used to – remember Shahrukh Khan or Amitabh hectoring reluctant parents to take their kids to the immunization booth for their polio drops as the UNICEF logo hovers in the background?

The reputation and production levels of government sponsored (mostly) social messages and advertisements was such that in the days, when they were aired before the commencement of movies in cinema halls (in the pre television era mostly), people would try and time their entry into the halls after they were over. Dull and dowdy and extremely preachy in tone, they would talk down at the audience in an extremely patronizing and moralizing tone and probably put off even those inclined to listen.

By establishing and building on the link between waking up to one’s social responsibilities and waking up in the morning to a cup of Tea – (Tata Tea of course !), the commercial brand is introduced unobtrusively into the message without it ever appearing to be forced or artificial. In fact, in the film, those who are found to be oblivious of their social responsibilities as citizens of the country are deemed to be sleeping and in dire need of a cup of tea so that they can wake up and begin shouldering their duties as citizens, in the first instance by exercising their right and duty to vote! Tata Tea incidentally has produced other films with a similar mix – notably one dealing with poor road construction and another dealing with the meance of pan stains in public buildings and offices. Watch them and enjoy with a sip of Tata Tea !

Miley Sur...... Mera Tumhara

I still remember the public service advertisement that Doordarshan once aired (miley sur mera tumhara…) kind. Such advertisements still air of course except that I like many millions don’t want watch Doordarshan any more or listen to All India Radio any more. Most of these advertisements were rather staid and dowdy and there was not much to commend them. Except of course the message itself. In those innocent days, we used to laugh at them and try to take a break when they came on. But I miss them now and miss them horribly. Growing up sneering at those famous “unity in diversity” advertisements and social studies lessons, any time and every time I came across them, I realize what a purpose they served and perhaps silently and unobtrusively, even in the midst of seeming derision, these messages served to knit the heart of the country together.

Perhaps those who listened and imbibed those messages inspite of every thing had managed to keep the country around and united all these years. Those advertisements came to mind again after I heard of Harbhajan Singh being censured by first the Sikhs and then the Hindus for his act of “glorifying” Ravana through his actions on a television dance show recently. It made me stop and think as to how thin the walls of tolerance are in our country today. Of course the morality brigade on Valentine’s day has always been there but preoccupied these days by our following the increasing intolerance towards Muslims and Christians, we have forgotten the chilling fact, that these days it is not enough any more to be a Hindu alone in this supposedly tolerant of other Hindu beliefs, Hindu majority secular country. No – indeed you have to be a particular kind of Hindu.

This is no defense for Harbhajan Singh and Mona Singh and their conduct. Personally I would say that shows like Ek Khiladi Ek Hasina suck any way and ought to be condemned to death for their crassness any how, whether or not the duo purported to be Ravana and Sita jamming on stage. But, Ravana has been glorified before – by Periyar Ramasway of the Dravida Kazakham in anti brahminical protests and who saw Ram as a literary and religious symbol of bigoted racism and saw the tragedy of Ravana and Sita as symbolic of the plight of the millions of Dravidians in India who were stripped off their Dravidian (Tamil) language and victimised by the caste system as Shudras (lower castes) and Panchamas (outcast - untouchables).

Even concluding that Periyar was an unconventional man and an iconoclast, it speaks of the tolerance of the times that he was able to speak and talk and write thus. Besides Periyar, even in the main stream of Hindu thought Ravana was and is eulogized in places and even this year he was honoured and praised in Allahabad as a learned Brahmin following a tradition that reports say go back at last 500 years.

For that matter, you have to be a particular kind of Muslim too to count as one. Zia Ur Rehman, one of the terrorists nabbed from Jamia Nagar and interviewed by India Today. Zia spits at hi father’s conventional piety and says that he (his father) does not know Jihad for Allah and that he would happily plant a bomb in the market where his mother buys her daily provisions because she would get a fast track to jannat that way. Peering into the mind of the young jihadists caught in Delhi is a scary thing, for what you get there is not only a particular brand of religion that they practice but also a brand that refuses to acknowledge that there is any place in the sun for any thing that is not just like them and their way of life. Scary isn’t it?

Miley Sur, Mera Tumhara the advertisement or even the song might be passé, but I guess that the relevancy of the song is probably more today then when it was first composed and sung. For even as I write and you read, almost every thing around us is all set to divide, fragment and fracture that reclusive “unity in diversity” that we once so much took for granted.