Sunday, February 18, 2001		Article

No escape from ads
By Mohinder Singh

SUNDAY seems special. As I open each paper — we take four Sunday papers — there flutter out a few leaflets; ads of sari sales or kitchenware. With the daily paper it’s all right; I crumple an offending bill into a ball and aim at the wastepaper basket some eight feet away from the bed. But handling more than a dozen leaflets on Sunday is different; perforce I’ve to get up and bring the wastepaper basket alongside.

And these days our paper often arrives with a bright-coloured bill stuck prominently on the front page — usually the ad of a beauty parlour opening in the colony. As I pull it off, part of the paper tears along with. Evidently they’re employing better glue than is commonly used on our envelopes. Another innovation seen lately is an advertisement affixed as a rubber stamp on a prominent part of the first stage — plainly the cheapest form of ads, if the newspaper boy is obliging.

And as I look out of the bedroom window, what do I see? Yards-long streamers of cloth strung between trees, proclaiming a "sale" or "auction". The lamp posts and electric poles stand plastered with ads like racing pros: ads carried on tin plates, cardboard, plain sheets, even directly painted on a pole itself. And then there are ads nailed to tree trunks, tied to roadside railing, and slapped on DVB fuse boxes.

Maybe our neighbourhood is particularly favoured for ads as we happen to live in the proximity of a big school. The bulk of the ads pertain to tutorial classes, computer courses, stationery items, fast foods and, of course, the ubiquitous Colas. Now at eye level we mostly encounter printed matter; once it was greenery.

The Supreme Court did well to get Delhi rid of those monstrous billboards on rooftops and busy intersections. The outdoor-advertisement heat is now turned on electric poles, railings, roadside trees, pavements, walls, and any other conceivable surface of high visibility that can take an ad with paint, paper, cloth, cardboard, or tinplate.

And it seems most of this work is carried out by hired blokes in the middle of night; I haven’t seen anyone doing it in daylight. Must be the surreptitious nature of the operations (you commandeer for free a high-profile space) that limits this activity to night hours. And some of these fellows must be going around armed with ladders; you see posters strung high on electric poles and streamers stretched across streets above bus level.

The someone not particularly enamoured of ads, the rising incidence of mail ads has added another irritant; it has taken away much of the excitement of the mailbox. As I hurry down two floors on seeing letters nestling in our glass-backed mailbox — a freelancer looking for editorial replies, where even a regret slip scores over a no response — I often find nothing but impressive-looking envelopes marked "urgent", informing of my "selection" for a gift holiday or some such enticing offer. Or ads about something "new", "improved", "free". It really hurts to throw away all those bulky folders unopened; their production spells the destruction of numberless trees.

I have got adjusted to reading papers and magazines without getting overtly distracted by ads. But what about TV serials with all those prolonged commercial breaks. The breaks, extra loud in pitch and repetitive in character, are particularly positioned as action reaches a climax. Admittedly ads are the price we pay for our television programmes, but at times it feels as if the price paid in loss of watching pleasure was on the high side.