"Buy this, or else.....

Every year the period from March to july (sometimes till august) is the best revenue period for Newspapers. This is the period when most of the competitive exams results will be out and the colleges will start giving ads in various newpapers to show "their" achievements.

Recently, i was attending a training. The trainer there made one excellent comment on the business tactics that the various industries survive upon. Not tactics, its just one single "Tactic" that they make use of. And what is that?"To sell something to a customer, prove to the customer that he is going to be a loser without that".

Take one simple example - fair and lovely ad. Always the company makes one (several aspiring models) to believe that they cant survive in fashion and related industries (media, news, entertainment channels, sport etc) if they are dark complexioned. If we go by their view, Kajol should not have entered bollywood. People who dont trust their own natural abilities and talents, fall prey to such misleading ad campaigns and start loosing their self confidence. The ad, if not anything else, makes one to think about a newly created problem (not being fair skinned) and the talented person drains his/her energy completely on that useless, stupid problem, instead of planning to move ahead towards the goal.

That was an example of how unfairly this fair n lovely co has been promoting their products (beware - recent studies has shown that these fairness products contain harmful chemicals like Mercury!! Please be very careful with such kind of shady cosmetics which claims to improve the shade of your skin). I fail to understand why people are so obsessed with changing somethings as skin color, nose shape, etc, which are god given and our personal identification characteristics.  ultimately, one fine day we all have to leave this body here and go back to pavillion from where we came. We will not carry this body nor whatever we have earned here. Why this obsession? Why cant we live in peace with what we have got naturally by the grace of god? Are we afraid of being a subject of gossip - "look at that curly haired guy..... see see, that girl thinks she is kajol or something......... look at that bulgy nosed girl..."? It is this fear that the cosmetic companies, the beauty parlours etc are using as their "tactics" to survive upon.

Lets get back to the point which i mentioned in first paragraph. Recently, while in mysore, i was reading a local newspaper. There was hardly any news in that except pages n pages of ads of various high school toppers in SSLC and PU toppers, put up by their respective schools and colleges. I failed to notice any difference between these institutions and the insurance companies ads that are coming these days. Both try to drive home the one single point - "Plan for future". While the insurance co shows how badly the situation gets at the time of any accidents or other health problems, if we dont have the insurance (a genuine way actually, but show some sensitiveness also), the educational institutions try to fool the parents and students that  if they are not studying in their institutions, they dont stand to get a chance to win the rat race - potential cause of worry in future. The child - even though talented and having god gifted iq, gets carried away by the ad and starts losing his/her confidence. Same goes with parents too.

Two movies made me to realise how vulnerable we are in the hands of this news channels - Rann (hindi), Aarakshan. Both Amitabh bachan movies. The former movie shows how the news channels, in their bid to be the top channel, twists and tweaks the truths and present it to viewers.  its this mad race for gaining the TRP's that the news channels are fogetting the ethics of the journalism profession and doing whatever it takes to be at the top.

Aarakshan shows how the coaching classes are thriving these days, due to the highly competitive entrance tests existing in our educational system today. As the ads show the photos of succesfull candidates in IIT, IAS exams etc. Parents start to panic - what if my child fails to make a place for itself in this space? Or to put it other way, and the most probable reason that haunts the most of the parents is - what if our neighbor's/relative's/colleague's child makes it to the top institute and my child fails to do the same? Fear drives out the confidence from the minds of both the parents and the students. Unless a student gets enrolled himself in Bansal coaching classes in Kota, he will not have a remote chances of making it into any of the 7 IITs. This self created fear consumes the most of the energy in the victims mind, making it to loose confidence in themselves ( A human mind has a something called as energy which drives one to achieve what it wants - to reach to a goal, to complete a work, to do something in general. It heavily depends on how a individual directs this energy to achieve the goal. This was explained in our traditional books as well as scientifically proved recently.  if required,  we can google and check more info on this).

Lets take a look at 80's and 90's - a period when the fourth estate - the news industry was not muddied by too many players. There was one DD1 on which we were dependent for the news and a Indian express newspaper (or a regional language newspaper) - which though expensive to afford, was the commonly used news paper. With the cost of ads at peak (due to non-availability of too many choices like today), these shady educational instis and coaching classes were not having a option to create a fear in the minds of students and parents. The result was that more number of self-confident, naturally talented, self-coached students were making it to the top institutes in their respective fields. So what has happened today? Ofcourse i'm not telling that the students those days used to think that it is dead easy to crack IIT-JEE or UPSC or AIIMS medical test. But atleast, they(the naturally talented folks) were not wrongly lead to believe these are the only career options to survive and so you have to join coaching, read our materials, and what not, to be able to crack it.

I strongly wish that we - the society stops getting fooled by the ads. Be the owner of our choices. Dont give away that freedom to some companies. Lets be genuine in our choices. Lets not loose our self confidence. Lets start doing what we love, what we have envisaged as our goals, what we know as our natural talents, what we think will help us to live in peace with ourselves and with the society.

Let me end this blog with two interesting facts - in US, in last 1 decade alone, more than 50% of news papers have closed down as the citizens there have realised how foolish they are to read those stupid news. In Kerala - a lady who was a nurse by profession, cracked the UPSC exam twice. Once she scored 560th rank which she felt was not good enough and hence took it for 2nd time and got 50th rank!