Month: May 2012

Book review: Bantaism

BantaismI have a friend who used to text me (and other friends in our local friends group) Sardar jokes. He took great pleasure in sending those texts and we enjoyed reading them. When we met, he always had a few sardar jokes to share. He enjoyed telling each of these sardar jokes and if not us, he had always laughed out aloud on those jokes himself. Rest of us even began to carefully choose other topics to talk about, so we can save ourselves from the sardar jokes. 🙂 But Sardar jokes are just too good to skip. I think what makes them popular is that it has certain amount of innocence to it. Or furthermore, it has a bit of us or our daily life in it. Something that we can relate to. It is this side of Sardar jokes that Niranjan Ramakrishnan is exploring with his book titled, “Bantaism: Philosophy of sardar jokes“.

The book is a collection of sardar jokes with comments from the author on every single joke. Apart from the interesting and funny titles for each story (which are coined by the author himself), I found most of the ‘philosophical’ comments uninteresting and sometimes boring. The reason is obvious. You wouldn’t look for philosophy in time-pass jokes such as sardar jokes. But not all comments are boring and a couple of them does give you some philosophical insights. For example, look at the joke where one sardar in a lion’s costume meets another sardar in a tiger costume. The author draws a parallel to the BPO, call center jobs with this story which makes a lot of sense. Or the lesson on irreversibility with the story of ‘chicken vending machine’. And another one about the sardar who throws himself off the balcony thinking that his wife cheated on him. But considering the whole book, these are very few. Still, you could read the jokes alone if you wanted to skip the comments. If you are fond of sardar jokes and wanted to collect some in printed format, this one is just for you.

In a way, sardar jokes have reflected badly on Sikh community. The jokes have made us, the rest of the Indians, believe that all sardars are idiots or it is easy to trick sardars. But it also sheds some positive light that (though as a variant of idiocy) sardars are pure-hearted, innocent people. Our movies, especially Hindi movies, have always featured them on a positive light. The righteous, happy, pure and open group of people. The author in his introduction to the book treads on the same lines. Little does he mention (perhaps he didn’t want to ruin the mood-setting for the book) about the ‘other’ side of ‘sardarsphere’ that is totally in contrast to the image created by sardar jokes and Hindi movies. Prevalent practices of bonded labour, caste-ism etc in Punjab that Annie Zaidi had explored in her book, Known Turf.

One of the biggest advantage of sardar jokes is that it is crowd-sourced humor. You can tout one of your personal jokes as a sardar joke, just that you would change the main character to a sardar. The scope of sardar jokes is thus limitless. Most recent example of this would be Tintu Mon jokes from Kerala (the difference is that Tintu Mon makes fun of others whereas a sardar is made fool of himself).

Final word is that if you like sardar jokes, you would like this one because it has many popular sardar jokes in collection. But if you were curious to see what philosophy sardar jokes have to offer, well.. there isn’t much. Just enjoy the jokes and keep the book closed.

 

Title: Bantaism: The Philosophy Of Sardar Jokes
Author: Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Price: Rs. 129

Things that pop on your face

Last week the social media was abuzz with the allegations of an advertisement video being racist. The advertisement is of Popchips snack that has Ashton Kutcher in four different get-ups. One of them has an Indian identity called Raj and he is a Bollywood producer. This has called for a racist allegation by an American of Indian origin Anil Dash and it ended up cooking up a controversy and the company finally pulled off the ad.

The whole drama has so much what-the-fuck-ness to it. I mean, advertisements always project stereotypes to sell the product and we do not always have a problem with it. Stereotypes are everywhere in the pop culture; be it commercials, cinema or music. Only when it goes over the top than usual that people notice and voice against it.

Anil Dash accused the video of being racist because the Indian character Raj is brownfaced and has a thick Indian accent(!). First of all, you would not take an advertisement such as this seriously. There are worse advertisements than this which project stereotypes in the worst manner. Second, there are other people being parodied in the ad, like a British youth or a Southern American hippie or a French fashionista. Southern Americans would have a better reason to complain because in American pop culture and Hollywood, they are always featured as homeless gypsies with a hippie lifestyle who live in mobile home parks. Or even Darl, the man with a fake French(?) accent have a good reason to complain because that is also a highly stereotyped version of men working in the fashion industry. Third, it is not wrong to feature an Indian brownfaced (a color which is generally associated with Asians) and with an Indian accent. So why would a techie like Anil Dash cook up such a controversy over such an ad? This guy is no dumb for sure, so what exactly could have happened?

Just after the launch of this ad series, the CEO of Popchips seems to have said “As a social brand, we’ve had a lot of social engagement. Now, it’s time to take it to the next level with an ad campaign that would provide more reach. [via]” Clearly, like with every commercial, they were looking for more reach. Shortly thereafter, Anil Dash popped up with his allegation that had supportive voices from an Indian origian rap group. Let us look at what Mr. Dash said about the company and it’s people.

“The people behind this ad are not racist. They just made a racist ad.” If that is not enough W-T-F-ness, there is more. Mr. Dash spoke to the CEO whom he calls “sincere and contrite”. He also made a generous gesture that the comapny doesn’t have to pull down the ad but give an explanation of how the process failed. But Mr. Dash who lets the company go scotfree doesn’t forgive the person who acted in it. He said Ashton Kutcher should “personally apologise”.

So what does this drama tell us? The company wanted to get people talking about them and it seems that some people like Anil Dash helped them ahieve the goal of getting enough publicity. That is how people down here in India also got to know about Popchips. Without spending a penny on advertisements outside the U.S., Popchips is now a known name. They can launch any time in India now. Thanks to the social media.

By the way, before alleging the foreigners of being racist, Indians should have a look at their own racist/regional/casteist attitude.

And even more, by the way, why is Ashton’s video is called racist and Shahrukh Khan’s is not?

Adapting to the Indulekha model

Indulekha is a brand that has been churning out so many TVCs recently for their product range. The first series of their advertisements featured popular mini and big screen actors, which was followed up by another series that had ‘reality TV’ sort of feel to it. Their latest series even has a theme and name – uLkkarutthu – and contrary to the direct selling strategy, they have adopted a model that is ‘seemingly’ progressive and feminist in the outset but is pushing certain politics which seems to be the trick of new age marketers and advertising gurus to keep them in business. More on this advt in Kafila and Nalamidam. And do watch the first video of their series here before you read further.

I was thinking what would happen if other businesses have started adopting the Indulekha model. Imagine a barber who cannot afford to have men who do not cut their hair. This will certainly threaten his regular business. So what he really needs to ask for is business but in the new age, he cannot be too direct with it so he has to push certain politics to market his service. And here is what happens when he adopts the Indulekha model.