When I was three, there was no cable television; there was just Doordarshan (for those who don't know or can't remember or simply don't switch channels when the cable dies - that's this ancient TV channel where every show was preceded by a sad soundtrack and a montage of the Doordarshan logo being formed like dosa batter being poured onto the tawa (every show, except the news, which had a surprisingly upbeat and sinister soundtrack!)). While my parents watched the shows in the evening, like the rest of country, in an era with no Twitter, I sat with them for the adverts! I loved them, and I loved everything about them! The jingles were way catchier than anything I had heard so far (I had not yet been told that Jack and Jill fell off a hill and died). Which is why one day when my mom's closest buddies said, "Sing for us, beta," this happened: Mala-D Mala-D lalallalalallalala.
I can only imagine how mortified my mother might have been in front of her friends! As much-needed damage control, my mother taught me nursery rhymes, and the jingle from a lozenge ad (might have been Vicks). So like, every other Indian kid ever, I sang those to entertain my mother's friends (unpaid child labor, I tell you!)
Anyway, so apart from displaying my (now-failing) amazing memory to you, I have also shown you how much I love and observe ads. A bad ad always gets to me, even today (I mean, seriously, WTF is a "washing machine scientist"!). Don't even get me started on IIN, cos technically, more than the ads, it's the idea that's bad (woah, that pun was totally unintended, I swear!)
Funnily enough, a bad ad gets talked about way more than a good one. Once, while we were in school and learning about Gandhiji's Dandi march and all that, this beautiful brand decided to give us shit with a pinch of salt. There was a new salt brand in the market and they decided to show us their entire salt-ing process in their advert.
This was, hold your breath: DANDI NAMAK!
They had an ad so long that it seemed to last for eternity while time stood still and you forgot to breathe because oxygen supply seemed so limited cos the atmosphere is just so filled with pollutants and other microorganisms that you -
Yeah, kinda like that.
Seriously, they just rambled, and showed us a lot of machines and... and I don't know why the hell I still remember this, but like I said - bad is always more talked about than good. For days, this ad is all we talked about - at school, amongst cousins... I think my grandmother even made a bedtime story out of it (which was still shorter than the ad)!
I tried to search for ad on YouTube, but you guys are just lucky; I could not find it. I even searched for "Dandi Namak bloody long advert"; no luck. But imagine this ad playing before the video you actually want to watch on YouTube, and imagine there's no Skip Ad button. Yeah, that was life before YouTube. We belong to a generation where we don't spend 30 seconds on an ad on YouTube, and the 5 seconds before the Skip Ad button appears are excruciatingly long. When the Dandi Namak ad aired, we were that generation - in-the-making.
The ad made some comment about drinking less tea and paying for dandi namak instead (again - why do I remember these painful details!) I agree, namak is important. A gravy without namak is so bad that even the lovers of continental food wouldn't look twice at it. But do you know what all recipes say about salt? Add Salt - To taste.
This ad turned out way too salty.
PS: I don't remember this correctly, but I think this ad had Aman Verma in it. He later went on
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