Kiss Me...Close Your Eyes...Miss Me...

( This post has been tagged as a WOW post as a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda. )

Remember those one-minute irritating commercial breaks after every over during a cricket match? Or a particularly thrilling episode disrupted by a vexing commercial of a cackling kid or a nasal soprano? All the pent-up tension and contained excitement totally diffused and reduced to nothing. One would then have to wait for the stipulated five-ten minutes to get over before one could concentrate again on the ongoing show.

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However, I'm not categorically denouncing commercials. On the contrary, I have my favorites too. The Hari Sadu one was a rage among the working professionals with the limelight on the boss-employee quotient. Then there were those about fairness creams-a sudden transformation from the obscurest complexion to one that would be gleaming white in the sunlight or the complexion scale to measure your skin tone. I guess today such an ad would probably be seen as racist. With time, the content and the symbolism of commercials has undergone a change and a positive one at that. Now there are commercials challenging gender roles like the one in which a man is seen working in a company where his wife happens to be his boss, and some where lesbian girls share a moment with each other. Times have undergone a sea change. My personal favorite used to be the one with cartoons where they played cricket and everything was made of chocolate, including the bat, the ball and the sun. I wasn't awfully young then, nevertheless I loved that ad. Then there was the famous ‘mera number kab aega’ of Pepsi whose pet dialogue really caught on well. There were boring stuff too, like the bank loan commercials and in fact, anything relating remotely to money or insurance (come to think of it, my current project at work is in the insurance sector- no wonder I have a hard time at it) and the like. Whatever be the ads, they used to be so well ingrained in my mind that if you woke me up at 3 in the morning and asked me to recite a certain jingle of a commercial, I would rattle it off effortlessly, as opposed to any of the lessons I might have been required to learn.

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Something also happened that might serve to explain my connection with commercials. We were at that game once- the famed singing parlor game-antakshari. The syllable K had landed on me and I was to make it the starting letter of my song. Unfortunately all the usual songs had been sung and I couldn't find any other worth singing. Just then, a tune suggested itself to me of its own accord. I don't know if you remember it but I still love that song. I started humming it-

Kiss me....close your eyes...miss me...

I can read your lips, on your fingertips,

I can feel your smile, come on my lips,

and happiness in your eyes…

Kiss me…

Everyone looked at me strangely, not even bothering to call foul.

“That's not a song, babe,” one of them said.

“Well obviously it is or else why would I be singing it?” I retorted.

“That's an ad song, duh!”

I had actually forgotten where I heard it and mistaken it for a song. That song eventually found its way to my phone as well.

Sometimes, these short and sweet commercials leave a deeper impression than long-winded soap operas.

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.