The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Some books force you to drop whatever you are doing, find the nearest mirror, look yourself in the eye and ask difficult questions of yourself. ‘What Should I Do with My Life?’ by Po Bronson is one such book.

The first time I read it, more than a year back, I ended up weeping in public at Istanbul airport.

The second time I read it, almost six months back, I decided to start searching for something I could devote my life to.

When I moved into my new house last December, I thought of an excerpt from the book and promised myself that I won’t let my lovely house trap me into a life of complacent comfort.

When I spent a weekend, three months back, reading Judith Levine’s ‘Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping’ and decided to go off consumption for a year, it was another excerpt from ‘What Should I Do with My Life?’ that helped me make the decision –

Shouldn’t I make money first — to fund my dream? The notion that there’s an order to your working life is an almost classic assumption: Pay your dues, and then tend to your dream. I expected to find numerous examples of the truth of this path. But I didn’t find any.

Three months back, I was someone who tried to never eat alone — at least three times in a week, I would either eat out, or invite someone home for ordered pizza/ home-made pasta and a shared bottle of wine.

In the last three months, I haven’t been inside a restaurant even once, I have entered a coffee shop only to use the washrooms, and the one time I ordered pizza home, it resulted in an upset stomach in a classic cautionary tale turn of events. In the beginning, I compensated by inviting my friends over more often, but now that my wine collection has run dry, and my stock of munchies is over, even throwing a house party isn’t as much fun anymore. As a result, instead of socializing thrice a week, I’m meeting my friends once in three weeks. In fact, I think it has been more than a month since I spent any time with my best friends Kanishka and Avantika.

In the spirit of scientific curiosity, I took away my social context, knowing fully well that —

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

Inspired by Paco Underhill, and with half an hour to spare, I stepped into the Atria Mall at Worli to do a little retail anthropology of my own.

I saw a few hundred families on their Sunday afternoon outing, I saw empty shops and a full food court, and then I saw the perfect off white linen jacket from Provogue.

I have been searching for an off-white linen jacket for months, I totally love the brand (more than half of my shirts are from Provogue), and, on any other day, I would have whipped out my wallet and paid the four and a half thousand bucks without even thinking about it.

However, even the most perfect linen jacket is so obviously not a necessity, especially when I already have half a dozen jackets I wear no more than ten times in a year.

So, I lingered on for half a minute and let my fingers roam over the soft textured fabric, then reined in my temptation, and walked out of the mall, thinking of the lime-green shoes from Judith Levine’s ‘Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping’ —

In the middle of a discussion on authenticity in marketing, I think of the Target poster from Judith Levine’s ‘Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping’ and smile to myself –

The job of consumer culture… is to blur the line between need and want. A poster for Target Stores… plays explicitly along this line. The picture is an Exquisite Corpse-like photomontage of a woman’s head, the upper half of which is a lampshade of ivory satin… a bit of twenty-first century Victorian kitsch. “The lampshade you need,” the copy says. The lower half of the montage is the woman’s face from bridge of nose to sly smile to slender throat, around which is tied a small scarf in a Fiftyesque green and white circle pattern: “The scarf you want”… It is hard to say which is practical and which frivolous, the scarf or the lampshade. We cannot see the model’s eyes, but she is winking at us. For both Target and the consumer know that… almost nothing that is advertised is actually necessary.

The Saturday Night Movie Marathon turned out to be exactly what I needed after working all day on another big presentation.

To begin with, fewer people turned up — and, while twenty is perhaps the right number for a party — five works better for a movie marathon.

Then, GK turned up with a few DVDs of his own and we decided to leave aside my lineup of classic World War 2 movies and watch ‘Into the Wild’ instead.

I have been dying to watch ‘Into the Wild’ ever since I read about it in the April 2008 issue of David Report. So, as we settled down on my futon with two bottles of wine, a bottle of Johny Walker Black Label scotch, and miscellaneous munchies left over from my last big party, I was already high on the sweet serendipity of being able to watch it so soon after reading about it.

It’s a mind-blowing movie, especially in the context of my experiment, but the spectrum of emotions it triggered off in the next two and a half hours deserves another post.