Sunday, December 10, 2006

Cheesy government ads

Recently there was a series of newspaper ads run by the central government for raising public awareness about preserving our monuments. The theme was to depict some unthinking persons littering/vandalising/spitting inside a heritage building, and a group of goody two-shoes kids pointing at them and saying something disdainful.

All the ads -- four, if I remember correctly -- were incredibly cheesy, but the last one in the series took the gold medal: a man spitting on a monument wall. I guess they erred on the side of making their point, rather than going for realism. Here's a clue: when somebody spits paan on a wall, he doesn't disgorge something like half a litre in one shot, unless said person is also so far gone that he's vomiting blood (I'd have liked to scan the ad and post it, but my scanner isn't playing ball).

Speaking of gold medals, I was about to post something about North Korea getting more golds than us at the Asian Games, but mercifully we have overtaken them. Rhetorical question of the day: how is a country that is ravaged by international isolation, famine, lack of development, and rule by an eccentric dictator able to do better than (or at least as well as) us?