Pulp friction. Review on Amul Innerwear Yeh To Bada Toing Hai' commercial

Condoms, underwears, sanitary napkins, liquors, cigarette. I pity the manufacturers of these products. If you notice, all of these are either a matter of choice or compulsion. And an improper use of any of them can land you in trouble or embarrassment. So, when it comes to selling these products, the manufacturers are in a dilemma.

On the discussion table, the creative team is racking its brain…

-         Lets make it sexy

-         Lets make it saucy

-         Lets make it suggestive

-         Lets make it humourous

-         Lets make it naughty

-         Lets spread a message

-         Lets make it controversial

-         Lets….

Coming to underwears, and the pre – television era, when radio ads went like..

(A chorus of kids) Papa papa aaye, humare liye kya laaye?!

(Papa, with a lot of enthu) Bobby ke liye underwear, Sunny ke liye baniyaan aur sabke liye..(something which I don’t remember)

I remember in those days, when I was a small kid going on to adolescence, I would stop at a lingerie ad in a magazine. Later, I graduated to magazines which had strictly NO lingerie (ads). Then we had DD coming in and showing ads of trapeze artists in innerwears. Women normally knew what to wear themselves so they didn’t need any television advertisements. At least, that is what I thought at that point of time.

Then, there was a very famous ad of VIP which was shown in theatres. Some guy in a VIP and a dressing gown wide open protecting a sexy lass from a baddie. Later, she is woken up from her reverie inside the car when the man asks :”Dreaming about me??” And she just nods in negative.

Next, came naughty ads. By then, it had become a pre-requisite to have a female model for any product to be advertised. Right from pressure cookers, washing powders, sarees, soaps to liquors, underwears, sanitary napkins (oh com’on) and condoms – everything needed a woman. So, you had a bored housewife wearing her husband’s undergarments to surprise him when he comes home from work. (Pray, what will the husband wear? There lies the naughtiness. Think Think.. )

There were some ads which had men seduced by women. Some giggling group of ladies coming out of ladies toilet and the camera focusing finally on a hunk lying down with lipstick marks all over his torso. Few poor guys tried that in real life in a ladies toilet. There weren’t lipstick, but some other marks on their torso. The ladies came out giggling anyway.

Some ads tried to be humourous or rather slapstick. There was one which had some young females watching a male hunk exercising in his undies, through a binocular from their balconies. Sale of binoculars multiplied after this ad. Don’t know about the underwear.

All these advertisements belied the fact that women hate men underwears. Most of the time, men wash their own underwears or if at all they don’t have time to wash them, they  use - use-n-throw underwears, or get it washed by their wives/ maids. I have conclusive proof that underwears which are washed this way, are either under-washed or simply rinsed in water and hung for drying in the sun far away from some privileged pieces of linen like shirts, trousers, sarees or even vests. Even the washed ones are picked and dropped as if they were dead rats being disposed.

So, the ad in question which has a lady washing a male underwear suggestively at a ghat came to me as a surprise. There were all kinds of suggestions in the ad:

1. Who was the lady actually? The wife? The maid? The washerwoman? The nymphomaniac(tharki)?

Or, put other way, whose underwear was it anyway?

1. If you closely watch, she hardly looks down while washing the underwear. She pouts, bites her lips, closes her eyes and her body is in full rhythmic motion with the background score: Ye to bada toing..hai..

Now, the whole nation is wondering what does TOING mean. Rajeev(psyxx) has already tried to find some meaning in it in his review so I won’t try to rip it further. So, that’s something else they left to viewer’s imagination..

Ye TOING TOING kya hai? Ye TOING TOING?

*GAWD!..How will the spaces disappear?? I am forced to go on to comments section..HUH!