The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Perhaps the biggest challenge of being off consumption is the difficulty of maintaining an active social life.

When you take away the context in which social interactions happen — eating or drinking out, or going out for a movie or a play — you basically make it really difficult for people to spend time with you.

A home-cooked meal, or a walk along the sea, works well once or twice, but, eventually, your friends are likely to tire of such simple pursuits, even if you don’t.

So, unless you invent new social contexts, not only dating, even meeting friends may become a problem.

It’s less difficult for me, because blogging provides me a context in which I can make new friends and keep up with my old friends. If you read my blog, you already know me, so meeting up for a walk or a home-cooked meal (or even my sleeping on your couch) will probably feel natural.

I’m hoping that Saturday Night Movie Marathons will become another such social context.

The idea is simple. We meet up on a Saturday night at someone’s place and watch four back-to-back movies, from dinner to brunch.

Last weekend, I hosted the first Saturday Night Movie Marathon at my house with an Alfred Hitchcock theme. The movies on the schedule were North by Northwest, Vertigo, Dial M for Murder, and Rear Window, with Strangers on a Train, Mr and Mrs Smith, The Rope and Stage Fright as backups.

Ten people turned up, apart from me, out of which two left after dinner itself, two left after the first movie and six stayed more or less through the night.

I cooked pasta and served drinks and munchies from my stock. One of my guests insisted that he wanted to eat pizza, so we ordered one. I’m sure that’s against rule #4, even though he paid for the pizza. As it turned out, he didn’t like the pizza, because it had a weird base, so I made him some sandwiches instead.

In the end, we watched only two Hitchcock movies — North by Northwest and Vertigo — before shifting to The Pink Panther on popular demand. Two of my guests got drunk between the second and third movies, so the rest of us had a tough time deciding if their antics were more funny than Peter Sellers’.

The theme for tonight’s Saturday Night Movie Marathon is classic World War 2 movies. We plan to watch The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape and From Here To Eternity with The Dirty Dozen, Von Ryan’s Express, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List as backups.

I’m hosting it at my house, once again, so if you are a movie buff, and if you are in South Bombay tonight, do give me a call at +919223366624 and come over.