Thursday, September 15, 2005
That's not all it takes
There's something about the new Visa advertisement that annoys me. The one with Richard Gere in India, learning about getting good luck by freeing birds, and then proceeding to buy dozens of birds using his trusty Visa, so that he can release all of them on behalf of a girl, who wants to bring good luck to her brother that is going on a journey, but has only enough money to buy one bird. Perhaps it's just Richard Gere. Admittedly he doesn't appeal to me as much as Catherine Zeta-Jones (who, if you remember, was the star of the previous orang-utan-themed Visa ad), despite all signs that might point to the contrary. What gets to me is the way the advertisement reinforces western supremacy and ignores Asian tradition.
Point number one: Colour. Richard Gere has white skin, white hair, and is dressed in an immaculately white shirt. He positively stands out like a lightbulb amongst all the other Indian nationals, who, in addition to their already dark complexion, are all inexplicably dressed in dark colours. Is this supposed to illuminate Gere as the Great White Knight, a beacon of foreign aid, a saviour-of-sorts? He walks the convoluted streets like an angel descended to Earth, mingling amongst the mere mortals living out their lives of poverty, except that his subtlety is sorely lacking, and whatever the purpose I don't think such a distinction of colour is particularly effective, unless it was intended to distinguish the charitable Caucasian from the natives.
Point number two: I just think that Gere's act - of setting numerous birds free as some warped attempt to give the little girl all the luck she wishes for her brother but cannot get because of her financial constraints - is an insult to the purity of the tradition. His actions debase the act of releasing the birds by just grossly overdoing it. Where is the sincerity in that? At the end of it all what he's thinking is probably "Oh how noble of me I've just done a really good deed today by helping this little girl, but let's all pretend (in a really disgusting manner too) that it's not my doing even though it's so terribly obvious to anyone with half an eye that it is." It disgusts me, the way he acts so pleased with himself and stays around to watch the girl's reaction just so the girl realises the grandiose act was his doing, and yet pretend that he had nothing to do with it.
Point number three: The main point underlying all these Visa advertisements is always, Oh look, even though I'm in such a backward place like an Asian country (India, Cambodia, wherever) I can still use my Visa to buy gross quantities of things that I might need to fulfil my little whims. Firstly, you try going to India and see whether the roadside vendor accepts your Visa. This is a minor point, because what is depicted in advertisements are always exaggerations. The crux of it all is that it reinforces Western superiority, because for the advertisement to be effective, it must underline the point that the credit card can be easily depended on anywhere in the world, no matter how backwater, and in the eyes of the Western world, places like India and Cambodia are just about as backwater as you can get.
To quote the tagline from another credit card's ad campaign, there are some things money can't buy. The Visa people should have considered subtlety, sincerity and sensitivity. And the ad is not even anywhere near amusing, entertaining or clever. It's just pure crass. At least the previous one with Zeta-Jones was cleverly done, and that is often an advertisement's saving grace.
All of a sudden I feel like one of those Chinese propaganda agencies slamming Westerners for debasing Chinese values and traditions with their thoughtless use of such concepts in their ad campaigns without showing any proper respect for the proper context and value of such traditions. And basically I am making a big fuss over nothing much at all, because ads are just ads, and there are gazillions of worse ones out there. But you have no idea how irked I get seeing the ad being played over and over on TVMobile when I'm taking the bus to and from TTSH. It drives me nuts.
These two weeks my small group has been attached to Team 2, the Upper GI team, and the people are really nice, especially one reg and one MO. The reg, Mr. K, is almost frighteningly proactive in offering tutorials and telling us to clerk all the patients on the team list so we can discuss their management if we have time. He's the kind of person who makes surgery seem so much deeper and just more, as compared to the first impression you tend to get of surgeons, that they're just people who cut patients up. The other day I scrubbed up to help in a Hartmann's that Prof Low was performing, but didn't get to see very much and ended up holding retractors. At the end of the surgery when Mr. K was stitching up he asked me, "So, how, Andre, do you want to be a surgeon?" My reply, "Err, I don't think so." And he said, "Good, that's the right answer."
There's nothing very interesting going on in my life right now. I think the most exciting thing that happens from time to time is when we sit around gossiping about all the doctors, from HOs to consultants, noting their character traits and amusing exclamations or verbal habits. We gush about the super nice ones, and bitch about those that treat medical students like cellophane. We even talk about nurses. Especially the monster ward sister who is by now almost infamous. Did I mention I love gossiping? Yeah, my CSFC CG can attest to that.
I can't believe that in 4 weeks' time we'll be going to totally new CGs, yet again. I've gotten pretty attached to my current one. Sigh.
Avaris / 9/15/2005 07:59:00 PM
0 consumed