Diesel, Benz and Tata

I travelled to he burbs yesterday after a break and saw two new shops had opened on the Bandra - Juhu stretch, accompanied by dozens of placards marking the surrounding territory. Diesel at Juhu has gone the whole hog with its 'Stupid' campaign. The store itself has large letters stencilled on its glass front screaming 'In Stupid We Trust'. I don't blame them, only somebody stupid would buy that stuff at those prices.
Täshi is a new shoe store run by a wing of the Tata group. Täshi supposedly means 'auspicious' in Tibetan; or at least 'Tashi' means auspicious. Little did Reuben and Rose Mattus know, when they founded Häagen-Dazs in the Bronx, that they'd kick of a long and disturbing trend in faux-European umlauting.
I'm not going to explore Täshi anytime soon. My experience with DTH has put me off the Tata brand. Besides, their Nanos aren't doing too well either. Tata Motors has offered a free upgrade (which they insist is not a recall) because the cars have a bad habit of catching fire.


This might be Ratan Tata's shot at automotive history. Karl Benz developed the internal combustion engine for motor cars. Tata has, apparently, developed a spontaneous combustion engine.

Lavasa

The HCC Group, builders of Lavasa township, claim in an ad that they've turned the area greener. Click on the images and see them at higher resolution. You will notice that the settlement is built around a lake created by a dam. In the 2007 image, the lake level is low, and there's no water streaming in, or collected in the area beyond the dam. In the 2010 image, there's water everywhere. The 'before' picture appears to have been taken in high summer, and the 'after' one at the end of a very wet quarter.
The connection between extra greenery and the construction of hundreds of concrete tower blocks remains unproven.

Swisscom uses Gandhi

Spreading goodness has never been so easy, the ad for Blackberry on Swisscom reads.

The Sahara clone army game

Please click on the photograph to view an enlarged version. Then try and spot which figure is repeated most often. Is it the guy in the Che Guevara T-shirt? The chap wearing the cap wrong way round? Could it be the woman in the checked pink shirt? And will the Warriors be able to conquer the world with this clone army?

Emma Watson loses a leg

Burberry's latest campaign, shot by Mario Testino and featuring Emma Watson and her brother Alex, is in the news because Hermione's leg appears amputated in one image from the series.
Maybe the photoshopper was channeling Pablo Picasso, who did something similar in The Family of Saltimbanques, an early masterpiece painted in 1905 when he was 24 years old.

The painting, which hangs in Washington's National Gallery of Art, marked Picasso's transition from blue to rose period, and is unusually big for this phase of the artist's career, a time when he could barely afford to buy large canvases. He reworked the composition extensively, changing the postures and expressions of the group of circus performers, and eventually amputated the right leg of the jester, an act that may seem innocuous today, but was radical at the time. It inaugurated an attitude to realism that still resonates over a century later, as demonstrated by the Burberry campaign.

If life hands you lemons

Anybody watching the T20 series between India and Sri Lanka can't have missed commercials for a brand of mobile phones now being imported from China. The Chinese need to do some investigation before settling on English-language product names, no?

Jingo Bells

Since the terrorist attacks in Bombay, members of the public have been sending out mixed signals. During peace rallies held after the atrocity, quite a few angry citizens demanded the bombing of Pakistan. Percept Picture company seems to have hedged its bets with regard to audience mood. This ad for its new release Jumbo invites viewers to 'celebrate a non-violent Christmas' with loved ones.



A second ad for the same film sends a rather different message.

What better time than Christmas to 'say no to non-violence'?

Jilt of Seasons

In March and April each year, Indian travel companies blanket newspapers with advertisements for European holidays. In winter, their focus shifts to warm lands like Egypt and Thailand. This year, though, a few firms have decided to plug Europe in December. Two ads pitching France caught my attention this morning. Both play up the romantic reputation of the country. Cox and Kings does it using a historical example.




The Eiffel Tower was built as part of the World's Fair of 1889 which marked the centenary of the French revolution, but calling it a symbol of the country's bloody revolution is a stretch, isn't it? Kuoni's full-pager pretends France is in the middle of easeful summer.



It uses a stock photo provided by the French government tourist agency, of a pretty couple relaxing on the heather, the man wearing a T-shirt, the woman a singlet. The copy speaks of "vineyards with plump, purple grapes ripening under the benevolent sun." A quick check tells me the sun isn't being particularly benevolent to Paris at the moment. The next ten days will see temperatures rise to a maximum of 5 degrees centigrade in the afternoon and sink to a minimum of minus 3 degrees at night. I called Kuoni to ask about the validity period of the Family Fun travel deal, and was told I could travel any time before March 31, excluding the Christmas-New Year period. Which means the choice for punters runs all the way from uncomfortably cold to bloody freezing.
Indians who haven't travelled abroad extensively have a misconception about seasons in the rest of the northern hemisphere. They don't realise that summer begins in earnest only in mid-June and lasts till the end of August. That's because those are the wet months in much of the subcontinent. For us, the warm season kicks off in late March, April is the start of high summer, and by May it's time to head for the hills. Or Europe, if you can afford it.
During my first year in England as a student, I expected to start feeling the weight of the sun's rays on my arms by mid-April. Instead, all I felt was the weight of a thick jacket on my shoulders.