Vicks: Exploiting Sensitivity

I'm almost sure that some of you might have heard the word " triaminic" earlier and only if you'd have the audacity to recollect, it is somewhat etched in the faintest of your childhood memories. Triaminic is an analgesic( decongestant) meant to relieve children of common cold and cough. I'm assuming, you're already getting bored, well , so am I , and that is exactly why I'm writing this post.

The advertising industry, in general, has always been ruthless enough to capitalize on the most dormant of human emotions and resurrect corporate benefit. The strategies promulgated are somewhat symbolic of human nature yet, hollow to the core in their meaning. Let me begin with a native example. I'm sure you're pretty aware of the architypical Vicks ad, the one which portrays a lady ( who looks rather too young to play a mother) who tries to comfort her son ( who looks old enough to apply Vicks all by himself) by rubbing his stand-out red coloured nose with Vicks and within the span of that 15 second advertisement, not only the boy's cured off his nosily notions, but there's a conspicuous depiction of motherly love showered all over him, as if the so called motherly love is resurrected only in catastrophic times of nose blockages.And what follows is some idiotically silly tagline, the so called icing on the cake. You may wonder why I seem to have a grudge at this.Perhaps , you'll get a hunch in what follows. Upfront, as and when I saw this advertisement for the very first time, it placed in my thinking an inconceivable correlation between mothers and analgesics, which technically is non-existent. So much was the profundity of this advertisement, that , I, then a boy aged 8 years, had embibed an unshakeable belief that perhaps, the effect of analgesics and the so called motherly affection , were variables that always went hand-in-hand, not to forget here the non-sensical belief, that analgesics may prove effective if-and-only-if they're applied by moms. These very notions were thwarted one night, when my white blood cells almost gave up, and I had to succumb ,quite inevitably, to the most irritating diseases of all in-humanity: Common Cold. Coincidently, mother wasn't at home that night.With mummy having night duties, twice a week, dad had to be my only company. I remember myself being the sole victim of his cooking dexterity which somehow always ended up in unpalatable disasters, and then, by the virtues of a unanimous consensus on the ramifications of gulping those unpalatable disasters , we ended up dining at the nearby restaurant. That night, dad being the only help at home , had to make up for mom.The best he could do then was to threaten me to take the analgesic, while I backfired and threatened him of telling mom, that my common cold, was a possible consequence of his forcing me to try "kulfi" , which according to him is by far the best thing one can buy with money, but of course this was only one side of the "forced Kulfi" story, and I better not reveal the other half. As skeptic I was to let dad do the honour of applying the ever iconic Vicks, I was as much confident of its irrelevance, for the preconceived notion of having mom around in common cold catastrophes had haunted my mind ever since I had watched the advertisement. What happened , wasn't much less than a revelation. I actually felt better and there I stood wondering at the audacity of these capitalist giants to try and fool eight year olds in believing the unbelievable. What more can an eight year old feel other than his own "silly"ness of assuming with folded eyes all that is told to him , while others hear his opinion and laugh at it.

Such is the misery of capitalism, which hasn't obscured from exploiting the power of human emotions, Human Sensitivity , so to say.

The White Bear Phenomenon

It is most ironic that when you try and restrict yourself from thinking about something, you inevitably tend to think about it , majority of the times much more intriguingly . Why does this happen ? Well, it is hard to say. The human mind has had this innate capability to learn via contradiction, which more or less summarises the very tendency if humans of being argumentative. Somewhere beneath these grey cells, lies a perspiring ego , almost impregnably waiting to be challenged more so contradicted. It is perhaps this invisible trap of ego that abstracts the whole thought process in a direction one is trying to obscure from.

To make things a trifle more interesting, lets say you commit yourself that from now on , you will never even embrace the thought of the girl towards whom you have a predilection. The level of certainty is such that you try to obscure from even the thought of her and then you tell yourself that this would be it, I would erase her like she was a memory etched with a pencil in my mind. Less has one realised, that it would be then that the very thought of her would become so prominent , that what seemed earlier to be an ingenuous predilection turns out to be an unanticipated affinity, an inclination so staunch that you tend reminisce her fragrance more conceivably than your own odour . The very thought of her, that you intended to consider animosity eventually becomes a indetachable part of your thinking. To sum it all up,as much as you would try to not to think of her, you will keep moving deeper into an endless dark pit, one which has nothing but her memories, leaving you in nothing but a helpless delusion. It is then that one truly gets the taste of what is so pervasively called The White Bear Phenomenon. Personally , the white bear hasn't struck me as yet. Being lazy helps here :P

Try this and be honest : Don't think about the boy who wrote this article for 10 seconds, just don't even let his picture enter your mind. The idea is to contain yourself in such a way that the boy who wrote this article doesn't appear even in the realms of your thinking. Whatever he may be, you will not let him dominate your cerebrum for the minusculest of moments. Basically, you don't have to think about Nitin Garg , 732/IT/07 for 10 full seconds, as easy as that.


And the time starts now : 1 , 2 , 3, 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ,9 , 10 .

Gotcha!

Fantasasia !

Has it ever happened to you that you're in the middle of a utopian dream , and then you literally talk yourself out of it , for the perfection of it all tends to disturb you more than it could have sufficed you. "It was too good to be true", you say to yourself.

I had one such experience where I almost compelled myself ( in the dream ) to believe that it was surely a dream, my life just couldn't be that benign, till I woke up and realised that it really was a dream. The previous state , termed Fantasasia by my limited perceptions, can be defined as a state of "all that I wanted to but could never be", the supremely coveted state that is. And yeah , there are dreams where you get to date the likes of Rachel Weisz , Jennifer Lopez, Anne Hathway .... I generally obscure from talking myself out of these dreams at least, and then there are dreams in which by the time you get to do something substantially pernicious , you're disgracefully woken up with a tap on the head. Nevertheless, the best one could do then , is to buy a few more minutes of sleep and hope against hope that you'll be reinstated in those tempting opportunistic circumstances as if the dream were a movie rolling in your head. However,there is yet another category of dreams, of which you could remember nothing by the time you wake up and then you try and try harder to recollect but you just can't. Nightmares, for that matter are easier to cope, for you're inevitably forced to believe that it couldn't get worse and then you think that may be I was better off earlier(the circumstances before the nightmare), even though I wasn't that happy, but it sort of did it for me, I mean it would have at least been better than the nightmare and then the nightmare has a nightmarish ending , and you're brought back to your senses .
In retrospection, I recall falling from Kutub Minar in one of my dreams . The experience I must say was enthrilling, I'll tell you why. In those 20 seconds of free fall, you get to get a glimpse of all that you had done in life , good ,may be bad like a fast forward of sorts and then just when you're about to fall flat , you feel as if something has entered you. It is precisely simultaneous. You touch the ground with a "thump" and you feel as if your soul is back inside you, and then in the suddenness of it all you wake up and tell yourself , " Phew ! that was some dream ! ". If at all I had to give an analogy, it would like experiencing a 20,000 watt electric shock for the minutest of moments, giving you something more than just a tickle and far less than a real free fall.

For my uncalled for critics , who've had the nerve to denounce me a Universal Pessimist, there's (quite unanticipatedly) a much more benign ending to this post. I may be wrong , even though I hope not, but I'm sure there always comes a day when you think you're in a utopianly perfect dream and by the virtues of innate pessimism , you keep convincing yourself that this is just too good to be true, and wait for somebody to wake you up until you realise that there IS no waking up , it's real and happening , not a dream anymore and then you finally get to say the proverbial Indian epithet of satisfaction : Abe Jhakaass!

The Nose (part-I)

Well its not a very cliche choice for a title. But I guess a tormenting cold has forced me to introspect and take this part of my body much more seriously. There will always be men who'll hail their respective libidos to be the best part of their body, just to remind them, you aren't the best judge of that you see, it's not an organ meant to suffice you, so you'd hardly have a hunch how it stands out! More so, what makes men like these so insecure of their manhood in the first place bowls me over completely . Not to get too vulgar here, after all this is supposed to be a family blog :P

The nose, for that matter, is an organ that interests me , just for the sake of its "symbolism" , not solely in Indian sense but globally. For starters it's meant to signify your Self-Respect , as the famous Indian phrase goes " naak katwa di" . This phenomenon of the nose being cut ( not literally though) has been plagiarized by the scene in Ramayana ,when Surpanakha, Ravana's sister fails at her attempts to seduce Sir Ram and in lieu of her heart wrenching efforts , her " nose" is torn to pieces quite heartlessly by H/O Mrs. Sita. Now that perhaps, was not a battle of seduction that Ram had to face, it was an attack on his Self Respect and he reacted in the way described above. I'm just wondering why the "Nose" ? why not a hand or a leg for that matter, why not a plain little scar on the forehead.

It was in the Oxford Book Store in C.P. once when I heard a pretty lady with eyes glazing with fire say " your right ends where my nose starts" to a young gentlemen giving an impression that if there was anything that he needed most at that instant , then it was a room to lock himself up . At the suddenness of it all , I came to believe that perhaps the fine looking gentlemen had tried to tickle the nose of the young lady for unknown reasons of course, but it was only when I tried to imagine the whole incident that I realised that " the nose " was simply a symbolic personification, in actuality it stood for something else . What it means to reflect, is not particularly clear to me, but it is an inevitable reflection of one's personality.

Curses of Complexity

I write this not as a prenuptial exercise for my unforeseeable future, but because of a sudden yet unprecedented stance of vindication by fellow humans. I'm assuming people are finally letting go of themselves and dwelling in deeper retrospection, a retrospection so dense that it is just too hard to decipher. Having had the opportunity of hearing only a minute strand of a labyrinth of complex emotions, I'm expelled to this atmosphere of sudden sullenness. The bone of contention stands to be " Do humans really need to be that complex and deceiving? " for if they do " Why at all? ".

I might digress off tangentially , but I guess this is an issue which cannot be tackled without an abstraction , much less a thought. Sometimes, humans seem so helpless, and I'm not referring to Haiti ( God rest their souls), but the fact that Defeat, more or less is a part of the game. Life encompasses this emptiness unless and until one is left to succumb to the so called " trysts of destiny " and how does it make a difference. Personally, it makes a man out of a boy, a man too strong to be perturbed by the worldly parody of complex histrionics. Might there be a need to surrender oneself to this one way ,dark ,hollow tunnel , it is a disaster in the waiting, and hence disastrous indeed. It might be hard to gauge what I'm trying to say here, but the only justification should be sufficed by the fact that I'm as much bound not to speak about it as thrilled to elaborate it . The elaboration perhaps would come at a cost, certainly too grave for me to handle at this stage, given I'm already in too much debt in lieu of my recently developed not so pleasant habits, but I guess that too is a part of the game. Imagine the situation , had I succumbed to these habits when I'd be earning a pocket full of moolah,as a consequence, that too in plausible probability, I could have killed myself !

Given I still have a score to settle with fate , I don't think I'm leaving the party any sooner than you guys, for it might be my intuition but my song's just on the way and I'm getting ready to shake a leg. :P ( not literally though ).