What I've liked: Straight to the heart!
I have often said that nothing makes an ad work like empathy. Find a connect and you have done it! That is exactly what the HDFC Pension Plans' television commercial, airing on most channels, currently achieves. Even though the target audience might not have been me and my wife but rather, a younger couple who should be investing their earnings wisely, we both felt an instant bonding with the couple on screen!
The casting has been done so superbly that I am sure that the reaction must be common across the country. Although the couple expresses sentiments that might seem alien to the children of today, they are very much a part of our syntax.
Admittedly, today's girls are far more independent and wouldn't dream of total dependence on any one, it was not quite so just a generation ago. It was the norm rather, for a husband to be totally responsible for his wife's comfort and yes, statements like "Did you ask for my hand to put me through all this" strike a chord. So even if my daughter's generation is reminded of their parents when this ad airs, I am sure it still does its job by getting them to plan for a light-heated retirement depicted by the ever-so identifiable on screen pair.
What I've learned: There is no time more auspicious than 'now'
Bhamidipati Radhakrishna was one of Andhra's extremely popular and noted playwright, film scriptwriter, numerologist and astrologer. He passed away on September 4. What was significant about this event was that he predicted the day he was going to die. Simply put, he knew exactly how long more he had on this earth. He was privy to information not normally accorded to the lay person!
When I heard about this, I wondered what might have been running through his head from the day he came across this little nugget of reality. Did he want to live the rest of his life to the fullest, spending recklessly, enjoying everything that he was putting away for the future all along? Or did he use the time to make amends? Did he try to become a better person? Or did he let himself degenerate in a fatalistic manner? I wonder what we would do, if we knew the exact date of our death.
This sense of 'What would you do if you had just one day to live' reminds me of the Hindi movie Nayak where the hero was chief minister for a day, and of course he went about doing as much good as he could. I am sure there are an equal number of us who would want to splash about as much as we could, trying to extract the most out of what was left of the rest of our lives so that we could die with no regrets or unfulfilled fantasies.
Whatever be our inclination, I think the bottom line is that almost all of us have no clue when our exit will be or at least have no desire to know. So the best way would be to live each day as if it were our last -- in other words, we should try and make each day as fulfilling as we can. When we were young, we had a rule that all sibling fights had to be resolved before bedtime. Besides ensuring us a really good night's sleep, it subtly taught us that tomorrow should always begin like a brand new day. As one more opportunity to live right, rather than spend it rectifying our yesterdays.
