The Mumbai Dabbawallah and the Bollywood Badshah
This is from a column I used to write for a now-defunct magazine published by the Mid-day group.
The magazine was an advertising and marketing rag that was neither before its time, nor in tune with the times – it was simply out of time!
It’s long gone. And most of the columns I wrote for it were pure hackwork, intended to bring in a few bucks to pay the bills and my kids’ school fees.
And if I say that about my own work, you can imagine in what high esteem I held the magazine itself.
But I found this one the other day, and it seemed to say something halfway worthwhile.
Judge for yourself.
It’s pretty dated, because it was written when Bharat Shah, Bollywood financier and producer, was first caught in the police net over the now-notorious scandal over his (allegedly) hiring hitmen to bump off the then-police commissioner.
But I think the point it makes is still valid.
That Bollywood’s badshahs – and even the good ‘shahs’ for that matter – are far lesser human beings than even the simple dabbawallahs who ply their daily trade (and carry out daily bread) on the train lines of Mumbai city.
It’s a view that I’d still stand by today. Because I don’t think Bollywood has acquired anything that even remotely resembles a heart or a soul even now. Let alone a conscience.
Though of course, they’re all currently rallying around an issue that is almost as important as solving the country’s poverty problem, AIDS, and saving the environment.
The issue in question being, of course, the recent ban on smoking in Indian films.
Now, that’s a really important issue, isn’t it? After all, it’s about freedom of expression.
Never mind that none of these same Bollywood badshahs spoke a word when award-winning documentaries like Anand Patwardhan’s War & Peace were refused a censor certificate.
Because after all, why should they care about a documentary that shows the darker side of Indian communal politics – and attempts to portray the dichotomy of religious belief and fanaticism? After all, the censor board that banned the film was comprised largely of film professionals, wasn’t it?
These are trivialities compared to the (tan-tar-a! music up) constituitional right to depict characters smoking in films.
As Shah Rukh Khan put it so eloquently, ‘Now we can’t make a film about Winston Churchill because he smoked like a chimney.’
Ahem, Shah Rukh, it also means we can’t make a film about Shah Rukh Khan, for the same reason.
So Bollywood continues to maintain its double, and even triple and quadruple standards.
Step out and raise a unified voice of protest against anything that threatens the right to freedom – freedom to earn higher profits, that is.
But to hell with showing the same loyalty to a friend, colleague, employer, and financier when he’s in trouble.
Because vultures and sharks always attack their own when he’s dying.
And it would be unfair to human beings to call Bollywood’s denizens people.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule.
And I’m quite willing to list them, the moment I meet one.
Still searching…
Still searching…
Still…
Meanwhile, salaam dabbawalahs. And salaam Mumbai.
BRAND BAAJA
Ashok Banker
What It Feels Like For A Brand
One day last month, a large number of Bombay’s dabbawallahs failed to turn up for work. It didn’t make any headlines, and no celebrity columnist chose to write about it. But there was an article on that day in a local afternoon paper about Bharat Shah and his plight.
Now what the dickens does diamond merchant turned film financier Bharat Shah have to do with dabbawallahs, you wonder? And what do either of these two strange bedfellows have to do with the world of advertising and the media?
The answer is: What it feels like for a brand. A human brand.
Bharat Shah may not have been an ‘endorsement brand’ the way Shah Rukh or Hrithik are, but he was just as high-profile a human brand in his own right. To the consumer masses, people like Bharat Shah *are* Bollywood. Every time their picture or name appears in print, they’re advertising their films, the industry as a whole. They’re peddling product just as energetically as Govinda in an ‘andar ki baat hai’ TV spot.
Bharatbhai’s brand equity dropped in a flash. The moment he was implicated in that nasty Bollywood-underworld embroglio, he went from “shooting star” to a “milked-out cow” brand status. Nobody’s going to dance at his acquital, even if he gets one, not even Shah Rukh Khan for Rs 25 lakhs!
Now, remember those dabbawallahs? Why did they bunk work that day? After all, as an article in Forbes pointed out last year, Mumbai’s tiffinwallahs are an international model of efficiency, economy and profitability. The scene at my children’s school was chaotic: Mothers trusted those dabbawallahs so completely, they had made no arrangement for a back-up.
But they had a damn good reason: A fellow dabbawallah had died. A young boy in fact. And they had all gone to attend his funeral.
These simple men, earning a few dozen rupees a day for ferrying their heavy loads halfway across the city and back, pressed for time, battling against weather, traffic, delayed trains, all the everyday problems of urban living. Effective enough to impress the not-easily-impressed editors at Forbes magazine and an American management survey team who called them “amazing”. Yet loyal enough to stick by their own in times of need.
That may not seem like good brand behaviour. But it was good human behaviour.
And then there’s Bharat Shah.
The big brand, in advertising terms. And yet, when the brand image was sullied, everyone shied away from it. Like Sunjay Dutt. Like Hollywood director Elia Kazan after the McCarthy trials in the 1950′s. Like Amitabh Bachchan until his KBC turnaround. Like Sachin Tendulkar when he was captain and performing badly. Like Sourav Ganguly who’s in a worse boat, with his personal/Naghma problems added to the cricket ones. Like the whole cricket industry after the matchfixing scam.
Like any number of human brands who have fallen on difficult days.
What happened to Bharat Shah could easily happen any one of the celebs or stars who are shunning him today. The odds are for rather than against. A packaged consumer brand can be homogenized over a long period. A human brand is destined to go through pits and troughs. Bharat Shah may not be a poster boy in actual ‘endorsement’ terms. But he’s a lesson to all who rely on human brands: What if the same thing had happened to say, Hrithik Roshan? Imagine the chaos then.
On the other hand, think of those dabbawallahs, in their hundreds, simple men in ragged kurtas and pajamas, carrying that small body to the crematorium, taking the time to be human, forget the brand bit. They’re one of many examples of genuine human brands who fulfil the criteria of aspirational advertising. Okay, so not in the glamour sense. I can’t imagine a dabbawalla going “Black, I definitely feel black today, ‘chaila.”
But they’ll be out there, doing their job as efficiently long after the Bharat Shahs and Sachins and ABs and other cardboard cutouts have come and gone. Because they’re human, not brands. And the better for it.
And that’s what it’s all about for any successful, high-profile person who transcends his own profession to rise to a “shooting star” status in brand marketing terms. He may seem like a brand in every marketable sense. But all said and done, he’s just a human being, subject to all the vagaries of human destiny. You can cancel his endorsement contract, the way sponsors cancelled Monica Seles’s contracts after she was stabbed by that stalker. Or you can use the brand’s brief notoriety like in the case of J. Lo’s present ‘sex tape’ scandal to rub off on your own product’s ‘sexy’ image.
But in the long run, like the man says in ‘Fight Club’, they’re human beings, not soap. Subject to all the ups and downs and ins and outs (a lot of outs) of our troubled inconsistent species. And how the hell do you market that?
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 30th, 2005 at 7:06 pm. It is filed under Ashok.
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