Selling Happiness since 1920

Several Post apocalyptic movies have depicted in great detail what could happen in a world where humans might be tormented by machines. Terminator, The Matrix, and there are couple more not worth mentioning. In these movies humans are shown to be proud of being capable of having emotions. To have hope. to experience Pain, love and happiness. To be able to cry. Well I gotta tell ya folks, it looks overrated to me. Its as if Bill Gates is being mocked by a beggar that he can’t sleep on streets or can’t Savour being hungry for days and being winced by cold winter. Nevertheless, there is one thing I am sure humans would be proud of in such a world, where robots and machines will prevail. That is, use of Emoticons in chat and emotions in Advertisements [Pun intended].

Point in case: Utterly and butterly delicious “Happiness” being used in advertisements now-a-days. I guess nobody is selling products, since they are so busy selling happiness cloacked with consumerism. You go to grocery store to buy cholesterol free oil, guess what, happiness comes along free with it. Wanna buy a coke to quench your thirst? Don’t open the friggin’ coke, you gotta open the happiness first. Are you buying a dairymilk chocolate for your girlfriend, well no sir, first you have to make sure its the right occassion to say “Kuchh Meetha ho jaaye”. Are you Fuckin’ kidding me?

None of this is as big a crap as Big B selling you boroplus in the name of “Sardi ki Nazar na lage”. IT’S A FRIGGING COLD CREAM TO PREVENT YOUR SKIN FROM BEING DRY. GET IT?

Have you seen the Tata Nano ad? It’s as if they want us to make fun of them. Khushiyon ki chaabi, my foot. I am gonna kill you with that same key if you give me a Khushiyon ki chaabi for 1 Lac Rupees instead of the actual car keys. Happiness I can manage. I want a car key from you, dumbass.

I absolutely get it that our Indian society is emotionally driven. Everybody here is either laughing or crying. Every sentence here ends with an emoticon, rofl and lol (more about that later) Every facebook photo is a portrait of how happy the chap is to be somewhere. Every status about being home is demanding a declaration of how happy the poor guy is to be at home.

I mean what’s up with all this declaration stuff. Who do you want to prove that you are enjoying? How ridiculous does it even sound to go visit some place and instead of living the moment there, you are busy capturing the whole thing on camera so that you could *INSTANTLY* share it to show people you are ENJOYING. This particular feeling of happiness is what drives the companies to create whole Ad campaigns targetting Human Emotions.

And in the end, he said to me “How hard it is to be happy, yeah?”