The Melancholic Message of Modern Advertising

There are few cultures that celebrate happiness like ours does. 

We are a people known for our ‘riot of colours’. Our music is a celebration of happy sounds, traditionally. Our highest form of spiritual evolution is not sad and grim, it is lively and happy.

While cultures of West — where I refer to the west of India, which includes West Asia — pursue rejection of Art and music as a way to liberation, our way to spiritual liberation is the endless happiness of our being. 

Recently however, there has been a spate of sad, morose and melancholic expressions staring us from advertorial graphics. 

Often, the public response to such mainstreaming of melancholy has been outrage. 

To me, it is less of a religious and more of a civilisational issue. While Indian temples have been full of paintings and carvings depicting people deeply and intensely happy, the West has been pursuing pathos as an epitome of highest art. 

With more and more Indians, particularly those following creative arts like painting and sketching, drama and dance, now moving to the West to pursue their education, the Western influence is more and more visible in the way art is created. 

It is less about the models not having a Bindi on their foreheads and more about an obvious assault on our civilisational ethos. 

Why advertisers should try to become public pedagogues is a deeper question, which those who run such outfits need to ask themselves. 

The prominence of pathos may be rationalised in poetry, in literature, but in advertising, having morose, sad pictures around when one’s intention is to draw more people to the product, is confounding if not downright stupid. 

The advertisement in question here is one by a noted Indian fashion brand of great repute, Sabyasachi, with models carrying a depressed demeanour. 

It is an advertisement for clothes, and those clothes, in all probability, are to be worn on happy occasions. 

I am told by some people who are as confounded as I am, struggling to find the rationale behind this new trend, that this could have been done with a view of keeping the focus on the products. This means that it is being done to prevent the models from distracting the attention of the audience from the product. 

If that is the objective, it is getting defeated because people here are being distracting and in a negative sense. 

The expressions on the faces of the models almost makes the ad convey the unhappiness which their product is designed to bring. Would it tempt people to buy products to become depressed and morose? I cannot say. 

I cannot also say if this is reflective of a Western tendency to appear disinterested in all that is around, a sense of isolation and alienation from the world around us. 

It could have something to do with the new thought that happiness is a very lazy thing to do and achievers need to be disconnected, distant and often, depressed in their public appearances. 

I may be wrong, but in the new, Westernised world, laughs are getting less, and happiness is getting replaced not by sadness of emotions but by dearth of emotions. 

This is where the problem is, I think. 

The models are not even sad, their faces lack any expressions. It is this lack of emotions flowing into the society, silently, which is worrying. 

Sadness as a part of art is not an issue. Tragedies and comedies both find place in Bharat Muni’s Natya Shastra. 

The point is that irrespective of whether a play or story is comedy or tragedy, Bharat Muni says, it should start and end with Mangal. 

When I read this, I was immediately reminded about the end of The Great Gatsby. When we read about how like Gatsby, our youthful dreams of future, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us, still, Fitzgerald adds- ‘It eluded us then, but that’s no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms further, and one fine morning..’ 

The sad end of a hopeless love story still ends with a message of hope and optimism, what Bharat Muni would call Mangal or goodness. 

There was a time when America represented hope, optimism and it reflected in American literature and art. This melancholy in art seems more to be a modern-day malaise. Did not Audrey Hepburn once famously say — Happy girls are the prettiest? 

A beautiful Essay by Charles Batteux from 1746, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle gives us an interesting view which probably explains why the kind of sad art that we are being exposed to, in the name of advertising falls short not only on advertising, rather also on the parameters of art. 

Speaking of art, rather as Batteux calls it, Polite Arts, he writes: “All man’s effort must have been to make choice of the most beautiful parts of nature, to form one exquisite whole which should be more perfect than mere nature, without ceasing, however, to be natural”. 

He contends that this is the fundamental plan of all arts and that ‘all our rules should tend to establish the imitation of beautiful nature’. 

The problem with spate of pictures which are being passed on to us in the name of advertising is not that they are sad, but that they lack enthusiasm even in sadness. They are dead, emotionless. 

They neither carry emotions nor invoke one. Those who are students of advertising would agree that an advertisement must stir emotions, of some kind, if not of happiness always. 

These advertisements seem to have been created with zombies as their target. The problem is not that they are sad and represent gloomy men and women. The bigger problem is that they represent gloomy men and women without enthusiasm. 

A Devdas is hopelessly despondent, or a Great Gatsby gloomy and grieving, but there is an enthusiasm with which the writer portrays their despondency, their gloom.  

Pathos has its place, say when you are raising funds to support victims of a disaster. But even that Pathos devoid of passion will not work. Enthusiasm is the key. These advertisements lack that enthusiasm. They are limping on the tracks which are going nowhere. They are making this lack of enthusiasm about the colours of life, fashionable. It is the pandemic of pathos they seem to create that worries me. 

That such advertisements with ideals most likely borrowed from the West, do not sell products should be a cause of worry for the advertisers. 

There is a problem with pedagogy in advertising. It insults the intellect of the masses you are wanting to attract. Advertising Guru David Ogilvy said wisely — ‘The customer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.’ 

If you look around, you will find many women happy and enthusiastic about life. How about not serving them the gloom of death and melancholy in the name of advertising?

Maybe give her something to throw her head back, laugh aloud with abandon, and maybe hum a little song into the wind.