Its8217;s a soap, but where8217;s the lather?

When brands become banalities, icons become ordinary people like us. It happens when people forget to draw the line. Like Shekhar Kapur. ...

When brands become banalities, icons become ordinary people like us. It happens when people forget to draw the line. Like Shekhar Kapur. When he berated us about Bandit Queen, we listened politely and murmured in sympathy. Really, we said, shaking our heads at the Central Board of Film Certification CBFC, they weren8217;t interested in harsh reality, having been fed on so many decades of candyfloss fantasy. But now, fresh from the success of Hollywood 8212; if dressing up in an achkan and getting two minutes of airtime before being shoved out of the way for Steven Spielberg at the Oscars can be called that 8212; Kapur8217;s lectures on the three cuts in Elizabeth are wearing thin.

Don8217;t get us wrong. Elizabeth is a fine film. And it8217;s a pity that the people of India will be denied three whole minutes of it because the CBFC thinks they need to be protected from the sight of bare bums. The trouble is, will the people of India want to see the film even if it is shown in its entirety? Or would they just prefer AishwaryaRai8217;s peekaboo belly button.

That8217;s the problem with marketing. Once you choose an image, a positioning, you have to make sure you fit the measurements. It8217;s a bit like Arundhati Roy. Our Lady of Italics felt she was turning into a silver statue with her Booker Prize money for The God of Small Things. What better way to assuage her guilt than to Rally for the Valley? Once you achieve iconic status as an iconoclast 8212; courtesy her Kapur-bashing 8212; it8217;s difficult to become part of the spaghetti-strap set.

Which is the dilemma Sachin Tendulkar is faced with. Witness the not-so-gentle knocks he8217;s receiving at the hands of his favourite constituency 8212; no, not the cricket-loving audience of India, but television advertisers. Whether it is Britannia8217;s Zip Sip which laughs at his Pepsi-drinking or Onida8217;s KY series which mocks at his voice, the star of the cricket-pitch-via-live-TV is in danger of becoming a parody.

It happens in part because of overkill. Kargil turns from being a victory of the armedforces to an election issue to a cottage industry that keeps socialites busy and column inches occupied. Profound thoughts on blood shed by our boys exchanged over glasses of French wine at ticketed events where fashion designers rub shoulders with retired generals make Kargil an empty cut-out.

Which is the danger in marketing politics. There are few things that are still sacrosanct in India 8212; even religion, 13 years after TV8217;s Ramayana is not one of them. Politics, in its earthy name-calling and door-to-door hustling, still is. So when you8217;re told by the BJP to put your money on Tried. Tested. Trusted.8217; and don8217;t miss the dots you have to pause. The Surf of last year has become the Surf Excel of today. Yesterday it washed white, today it washes whitest. The Able Leader has grown into an Able Label.

In this headlong rush of sloganeering, even history becomes a punching bag. How else can one explain the ripping off of Mahatma Gandhi8217;s Quit India slogan in a full page newspaper advertisement thatnot-so-subtly asks Sonia Gandhi to leave India? Yesterday8217;s patriotic rallying cry becomes today8217;s cheap shot. It8217;s the same with the Dynasty. What was the meeting ground of the best of Western liberal thinking and the most earnest of Indian nationalism 8212; Allahabad8217;s Anand Bhavan 8212; is now just a backdrop to the start of a TV campaign.

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Can a Vipassana meditation course and a Colombian girlfriend fit into the Family Firm theory? From being a tight fit, the brand can become a straight jacket. Which is a lesson the BJP8217;s media managers ought to learn from the party they most love to emulate. Kargil cannot sell forever, Atlantique intrusions regardless.

And why look further than the man everybody thinks is the star of the millennium, just because the BBC says he is. Till he was just the Angry Young Man, he was an icon. Once he parleyed his name into a corporation, which then hitched on to many others, he became a badly-scripted comedy. And then they wonder why there is no such thing as a modern-day myth.