The recent mercedes ad has got me thinking (not that usually i need any instigation at all!) it is so very true...humans love making lists....and humans are obssesed about numbers...any way they can put order into the surrounding chaos....
666 is the devil's number....
7 the promises you make when you get married
7 (also) the number of dayz taken to create this world
3 the steps in which it can be measured
so on and so forth....the people who read much more and have better memories can give much better statistics
I am just amazed at how the implications of these numbers change
there was a time when being numbered was the greatest threat to a man's individuality...the newly-released-from-the clutches-of-colonialism individuality
People like Orwell based some very influential works like 1984 based on this very fear....it was ofcourse also about the commercial threat to America from the socialist ideals of Russia.....both claimed the same emancipation from man....
Atleast that is what an utterly ignorant by-stander like me fathoms....
Russia(by implication communism) sought to save the man from becoming machinized in the capitalist race and America( by implication capitalism) sought to emancipate man from the same face-lessness at the hands of the great equalizer-communism....we all know who won that race....
Russia is Russia no more...
The recent ad of IDEA is also similarly thought provoking.....to me atleast....
the whole village is turned into nothing but numbers.......the great equalizer.....the exception is ofcourse the sirji....anyone who's read 1984 will understand the hint....."THE BIG BRITHER IS WATCHING YOU"
It is smhow alrite once again to be confronted with a solution which once sparked off the like of james bond( noticed how most of the villians who get beaten up are Russians?? or even how simply the Englishman has the "right to kill") and the killer who never missed-Jackal!
the mass media can exploit public opinion very very strongly and can similarly create cultural as swell as global stereotypes of who is the saviour ; who is in the right and who is a sinner; who has the license to save the world....white or black...the passport alwayz tells you...it is the American who can fight either the Russuan or the Alien and save the sanctity of the world.
As Walter Banjamin said......"the works of art are recieved and valued on two different palnes" ,
here both of them have undergone a tremendous change in less than half a century.....hardly a speck as a period in history......
If the same ad would have been aired in america in the time of the cold war......welll god knows what would have happened....
The important thing is......this is not america and cold war is a thing of history books....whatever putin might suggest.
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