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There were a grand total of fifty-five licensed television sets when Nehru died in 1964,
about
In a strange way, Indian men seemed to have a great fascination with the bull, from the seals of Mohenjo-Daro to the full-page obituary put out by a farmer on the demise of his favorite bull in the Karimnagar edition of the Telugu daily Eenadu.
Bombay Dyeing used Ardhendu Bose, grandnephew of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, and created a series of James Bond-like films with elaborate car chases, helicopter crashes, stool pigeons, snakes, dangerous ladies and
She quotes a study by Satyam Viswanathan, to note that Indian masculinity is being pulled in three different directions, by the weight of traditional expectations, the pull of modern ways and the growing wave of emergent Indian feminism
Complan took it to another level in the early ’80s when it featured a boy and a girl in its ad. Played by kid models who would become future film stars, Shahid Kapoor and Ayesha Takia, the ad had them singing ‘I am a Complan girl, I am a Complan boy … and we love our Complan mummy’. In a sense, it was the first of its kind where the girl child was the centre of the story line. She plays basketball, she helps her mother. But the brand could
Played by Ankitha Jhaveri, the Rasna girl created by Mudra Communications went on to capture the imagination of millions of Indians, old and young and made Rasna a huge success. In one of their early ads, Ankita is waiting for her dad to come home from work. The doorbell rings and she says to herself, ‘Pappa aa gaye’ (Dad has come). Her mother offers him coffee. But her father says no. She offers
Close Up was developed as the world’s first gel toothpaste by Unilever in 1967. It
The advertisement shot in winter, live under a waterfall in South India, featured Karen Lunel who went on to become the heartthrob of millions. The film set to pulsating music played in movie halls around the country
To their credit, the first ever screen appearance of Aishwarya Rai was in a Pepsi commercial which also featured Mahima Chaudhary and Aamir Khan. An Indianized version of the Michael J Fox Diet Pepsi commercial
was told by a senior manager at ITC that at one time Wills Filter made more profits for the company than all other brands and divisions put together.
This is why in the United Kingdom, where obesity rates are closing in on those of Americans’, the British government recently passed a law mandating secondary-school students to attend cooking classes
inveterate
Till then, the belief in advertising agencies, and in client organizations, was that women used cosmetics to look good and attract men. Well that was partly true, but women said that they also used cosmetics to feel good. This translated into a wonderful line for Lakme – the brand that had just moved to the agency – ‘Looking good and feeling great with Lakme’. Cosmetic brands the world over have realized this truth and today
The headline said, ‘Towels so good you want to wear them’. The model was Maneka (Anand) Gandhi. Veteran journalist Vinod Mehta has observed that this was possibly Meneka Gandhi’s first brush with fame: As an aspiring model, she had signed up with DCM to model for their entire campaign of towels that were launched in 1973. But her success on the modelling scene was short-lived. When she became engaged to Sanjay, MCM was summarily commanded to withdraw the campaign and clam up all possible remaining records of it5. The ad
but HUL finally sold the brand to the American agri and food major, Bunge, in 2003 for reportedly ₹100 crores, says Business Standard, 5 March 20151. In an article in the Financial Express, 9 June 2015, SL Rao, former Director-General NCAER, writes about the problems being faced by Maggi in mid-2015 and recounts that Dalda had many worse battles to face; Prakash Tandon, the first Indian Chairman of Hindustan Lever had mentioned to Dr Rao that Harijan, a paper founded by Mahatma Gandhi, had even written that you could go blind by eating
One well-documented fact is how Dr Kurien got his dairy technologists to try and make milk powder from buffalo milk, which global experts had said was not possible. Today a large portion of milk consumed by Indians, both powder and liquid is really derived from buffalo milk.
FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY: Shooting food calls for a lot of careful planning and execution. More importantly, food looks tasty when it is shot in extreme slow motion. As against twenty-four or twenty-five frames per second, food is often shot at 1000 frames per second. Add to this the extreme close-up shot and you will feel like licking the television screen.
The famous ‘Mile sur mera tumhara’ song had been unveiled on Independence day, 1988. The
The single biggest event in the Indian auto sector was probably the rolling out of the first Maruti 800 on 14 December 1983, which would have been the thirty-seventh birthday of Sanjay Gandhi – Indira Gandhi’s son who died in a plane crash before his dream of the ‘people’s car’ was realized – from the Gurgaon factory.
damsel
lone voice from the back said Chandra Gupta, rather timidly. But remember, the Gupta dynasty ruled more than 2000 years ago and Sher Shah Suri almost 500 years ago. It was only in the year 2001 that the Indian government proclaimed the need to link the nation through wide roads.
The number of cars sold in the country has risen from 32,000 a year in the 1970s to over 2.5 million in
Finally, there are the ‘Laggards’. The empirical research to prove this theory was done by Professor Everett Rogers with farmers in the US mid-west on their adoption of Monsanto’s hybrid seeds4.
The growth of mobile phones in rural India has opened up a great new medium, as proven by the Hindustan Unilever’s ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’ campaign. This campaign created a new way of engaging with rural consumers; they were asked to make a missed call to a number to receive some free entertainment call on their phones. The free entertainment could be jokes, songs or anything else. The entertainment module also included a few ads for HUL brands. This campaign, running in primarily media-dark north Indian markets, is reported to have generated over 12 million users with over 50,000 missed calls a
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Prof. Venkat Ramaswamy of University of Michigan coined the term ‘Productization of Services and Servicization of Products’.
Sanjeev Aga, former CEO of Idea Cellular, observes that just as the famous inventor Michael Faraday quipped, ‘What is the use of a newborn baby?’ when asked, ‘What is the possible use of the new electric motor?’, the power of telephony has just been unleashed in India and he believes that telephony is merely the first newborn application of an underlying technology which is far deeper and even more game-changing
This was yet another hit ad produced by Everest Advertising, Delhi, for their Kanpur-based client Pan Parag. This particular ad aired in 1982 and it is reported that during the period 1983 to 1987, Pan Parag was the single biggest brand on Indian television. Those were the days when pan masalas were allowed to be advertised on government-owned television channels.
They hit pay dirt when they started showing Santa Claus enjoying a Coke after a long day of delivering gifts. They also showed Santa dressed in a ‘Coke red’ outfit, which was the first time Santa was shown in a red dress. And as they say, the rest is history
This desire is true across the world and President Barack Obama has written about a research done by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi, which says that the primary reason a woman takes up employment, even in the USA, is to fund the education of her children
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The managing director of the company then, Xerxes Desai, was a western classical music aficionado. The story goes that he picked a musical interlude from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G minor. The company did not question the logic of using a musical piece that was over two hundred years old to help sell a modern quartz watch.
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All popular Indian art forms have a liberal dose of music. All Indian films till date have had songs; National Film awards are given not just for the film with the best music, but also for the best song, best male singer, best female singer etc. In his book Hindi Film Geet Kosh, Harminder Singh Hamraaz has indicated that JJ Madan’s Indra Sabha (1932) had sixty-nine songs, the maximum for any Hindi movie; pointing this out, TJS George offers the musical crown to the Tamil movie Lava Kusa, which reportedly had seventy-two songs7.
The first Indian male film star to have featured in a Lux advertisement is SRK. In 2005, to celebrate a special anniversary, Lux made an ad that had SRK in a bathtub surrounded by the former and current endorsers of the brand: Hema Malini, Sridevi, Juhi Chawla
Kareena Kapoor. In fact, till then, the only other male star to have featured in a Lux ad was the indomitable Paul Newman. While female
Archives tell us that in 1955, Kishore Kumar appeared in a print advertisement of Brylcreem, a product that was alien to the Indian male haircare regimen. There was even a Dilip Kumar-branded range of table tasties with products such as Royal Chutney, Mango Pickle and Lime Pickle from a company called Mother India Products. Brands like Bagpiper soda and Charminar cigarettes too used film stars in the ’70s. Shatrughan Sinha featuring in a Bagpiper soda print advertisement says, ‘Khoob jamega rang jab mil baithenge teen yaar – aap, hum aur Bagpiper Club Soda’ (The party will flow when we three
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Dilip Kumar rarely featured in an ad – the pickle ad was an exception that proved the rule – neither
did Raj Kapoor nor Dev Anand. In the south, NT Rama Rao, Shivaji Ganesan, MG Ramachandran, Raj Kumar or Prem Nazir never did advertisements. I suppose they felt that their fans would see them as pure ‘commercial
Hindi films in the early years, pre-post-independence, have a strong dose of Urdu to the extent that poet Sahir Ludhianvi once caused controversy by asking why Hindi films were not certified as Urdu films as all of them were in Urdu anyway, observed Professor Harish Trivedi, who has looked at how the Hindi language has evolved in Hindi cimema1
fortuitous
Ashok Kurien recalls how the case dragged on and the judges kept changing and in one such hearing, when the judge asked, ‘Who has seen these two people during the photography session and can say that they did not indulge in any sexual activity?’, a voice from the back shouted, ‘The python’.
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