Train-quiliser

I'm a copywriter by day and a copywriter by night, but I only suffer from foot-in-mouth every alternate Sunday. So while I'm mentally preparing a list of future apologies for gems that will leave my tongue during the course of the following week, I indulge in one of my favorite activities noticing the fliers and ads pasted on the compartment walls of the trains in the city.
Yeah trains!, it's a real treat to read those ads, If you don't catch me eavesdropping on someone else's conversation, struggling to read the newspaper in the hands of the person sitting next to me, pretending to send an sms on my cell, or wondering which of the women in the compartment need a facial hair intervention, you'll find me looking heaven words to the ceiling of the compartment. Yes I do get the stares for doing that, but then my flaming red naxalite jhola(bag) catches their eye and diverts the attention.

These wonderfully worded and illustrated ads are proof that Indians are entrepreneurs like no others. If there is a problem there will be a dozen odd clinics to fix it. And we are not talking about the mundane Gout, or the embarrassing hernia, we're talking real problems here. Dr. Mane's (no I'm not making this up) clinic will help you grow taller, so that you can stop blaming your parents and move on with your life.

Of course there are those who've been around since I was considered a half ticket, like the Kaya Sex clinic, there used to be this one sketched ad where a man who wore a black underwear could not fight gravity. I wonder why no mahila mandal samiti ever objected to that ad considering it was right in your face when you were pressed against the compartment wall during rush hour.

Leaving those aside you have Tortoise mosquito repellent, advertising faithfully over the years, maybe they should start putting one under the seat to prove the effectiveness of their product.

Then are those ads that try and lure job seekers and college kids, Earn Rs. 10,000 a month call Rahul at 98something number. somebody ought to tell Rahul that if you can pay your employees 10k a month maybe you can increase your ad-spend and graduate from a hand written photo- copied flier ??? I mean is that to much to ask!

But the truly classic ads, the ones which should force Cannes festival to start a separate category of awards for ingenuity - the English training institutes. It's no secret that we suffer from the colonial hangover and love the Queen's language, there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to speak the language fluently. It's just that these institutes with their wonderful ads leave me in splits. So while travelling on the harbor line you will comes across a florescent flier that screams "learn British spoken English, learn hi-fi English within a month, or full payback, highly qualified teachers (who I'm praying did not proof read this ad) But you've got to give them credit, at least there were no spelling mistakes.

Before you accuse me of being an Anglicized racist, until there are LCD television sets installed in each compartment that show NDTV imagine's Mahabharat 24X7 I will continue to look heavenwards and spot the not……

(Article and Pictures Courtesy: KR, Edited by Bombay Diva)