The Vintage Indian Advertisements series is taking a break, even though Season Two is far from over. Scanning, editing and uploading requires quite a lot of sand to pass through the hour-glass and I during the last many days was seriously short of that silicon stuff (don't even think of Pamela Anderson).
Whatever I was doing all those days required me to visit a lot of corporate websites, and to my delight I found that a lot of them are a treasure house of advertisements. Being the underzealous ad buff that I'm, I thought of initiating a section (since this is a blog, it'll be a category/label) wherein you can find links to a huge archive of Indian advertisements that is there on the World Wide Web for you to see. Of course I'll try to recommend the worthwhile views, to save you from the bother of going through all of them.
I had initially thought of making 'The Great Indian Ad Archive' a new and exclusive blog dedicated to the world of Indian advertising, but then I wouldn't have been able to do justice to that. My jottings even on this personal and primary blog is at best erratic. Therefore I thought of putting them together as a single category/label within Cutting the Chai, which would be updated from time to time, as when I (or any one of you) come across new stuff on the internet. For the ones which aren't there on any other websites, there's always the Vintage Indian Advertisements.
The Great Indian Ad Archive is simply a collection of links featuring television commercials (TVCs) and print ads. Nothing original on my part. Just an aggregation effort. Here's the first batch.
1. Company/brand: Reliance Communications (previously Reliance Infocomm)
Sector: Telecom
TVCs
* Link 1
* Link 2
Comments: Downloadable MPEG files. 46 ads on the last count (November 6, 2006)
2. Company/brand: Dabur
Sector: Health care, personal care
TVCs
* Link 1
* Link 2
Comments: This is what I call a HUGE archive with about 150 TVCs encompassing almost all of Dabur's brands. But doesn't include those old Dabur ads that are etched into our memory from the Doordarshan days.
Downloadable WMV files.
3. Company/brand: Tata
Sector: Conglomerate
Print ads
* Link
Comments: The Tata name is undoubtedly the most trusted amongst the brand names in India, but not many Tata ads have remained unforgettable. The ads are a series run by group in the print media from 2000 to 2005.
Detailed viewing will require Flash Player.
4. Company/brand: Godrej Consumer Products Ltd / Cinthol
Sector: Personal care, skin care
TVCs
* Link
Comments: This is a real discovery. Women (of all ages) start drooling, the page includes some real vintage Cinthol advertisements featuring the heartthrob of the seventies Vinod Khanna, the dashing Pakistani cricket captain who won more hearts than matches in India - Imran Khan, a bare torsoed Milind Soman, his marriage would have shattered many a dream. There's also Shah Rukh Khan, and following his Dad's footsteps Akshaye Khanna and ladies especially for your eyes - John Abraham (if only he could act).
The ads are in Flash and not directly downloadable.
[Click on the images to view individual ads]
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I heard you all. So here's a filler while I work on my next 'major' post. This is New Delhi's South Block, the place from where the nation is run.
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Said yes to a friend for bargain shopping company. She wanted to drag me all the way to the southern fringe of the city to Mahipalpur - Delhi's famous factory outlet and second shop area. "It's too far off," thought I. Google told me about North India's first (and only) 'factory outlet mall' at Vaishali, Ghaziabad. Much nearer. Naturally, I dragged her to Ansal Plaza, Vaishali. What she had in mind was a pair of five-pocket corduroy trousers. Her office doesn't allow jeans; cords with the same cut are fine. Only no denim allowed.
We tried every store at the mall (which even on a holiday looked quite deserted, the top floor was still waiting for shopkeepers, most stores didn't have much of decent stock but discounts there were many, ranging from 20 to 70 per cent), but with little luck. Disillusioned we gave Vishal Mega Mart a try and she found the stuff she wanted and that too for a decent price.
"Okay," you say, "where's the story?"
I'm coming to that. One thing that I unfailingly do when someone purchases an article of clothing is to read the attached tags. It is usually the usual blabber. The wash instructions and lots of self praise. But on reading the text attached to the pair that my friend purchased, I couldn't comprehend much. Maybe someone can help. It read (I've removed the original all-caps for readability, the rest is verbatim):
Nice Girl
The spirit of style
This style choose to design with meticulous care from the excellent material but. Show the view of nature, generous and elegant!
The brand high class exquisite article dress, it deep to get the essence of the westernand traditional graft. With its cultured stitch the craft consummately, assist with the design that ages feels, make tasty obvious special, combine to make a point of the character make open, try hard for to make your every time worn to experience personally all can be relaxed in proper form, belong to the dress on article it is deep to suffer the high personal status the perso-nage of welcome
The bits that I could make out are:
"Show the view of nature, generous and elegant!" - for feminine clothing. Hmmm... Anyway, I double checked the zipper and the stitches.
"traditional graft" - well, we are champions in that.
"consummately, assist" - where exactly is it heading to?
"to suffer the high personal status" - the reader was already suffering.
Anyway, a consumer shouldn't complain much, as long as the price is right and the quality satisfactory. If it hadn't been for the language (I wonder who wrote this piece and how), it would have gone to that place where most of the kind go - the dustbin (I occasionally save a few good-looking ones to serve as bookmarks).
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Learnt about this via Amit's post. Always envied the collage/mosaic artists and wanted to do something similar. Never did. The closest I came to making a collage of sorts was when I was asked to design the template for a blog called - The Collage.
Had seen quite a few of photomosiacs, but didn't know that they could also be so easy to create. Pre, a member of Adelaider.com has created an image mosaic generator. It doesn't get easier than this, even if it is not creatively stimulating. All you have to do is to upload a JPEG, GIF or PNG image, wait for a few minutes (the resultant image is usually in megs) and view the image. You also have options to directly print or download the image.
Tried these two:
(Click on the images to see a larger detailed picture)
(The Cutting the Chai logo)
(My profile image)
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On the first look this morning's Hindustan Times and Hindustan looked like they had some fonts missing on their front pages. A closer look brought a resemblance to musical notes. It was an ad for the launch of HT Media and Virgin Radio's Fever 104 FM, taking the count of the channel's on the capital's frequency modulation to a dozen.
A friend asked me to set the FM channels on her mobile handset. It is quite difficult to remember the precise frequencies of so many channels. Therefore I searched and drew up a list of frequencies of FM radio stations in Delhi (might be of some help to FM hooked readers of this blog residing within the periphery of the National Capital Region - NCR).
List of FM Radio Channels in Delhi (NCR)
(List sorted in ascending frequency of stations)
Entertainment
* Radio City - 91.1 MHz
* Big 92.7 FM - 92.7 MHz
* Red FM - 93.5 MHz
* Radio One - 94.3 MHz
* HIT 95 FM - 95.0 MHz
* Radio Mirchi - 98.3 MHz
* Fever 104 FM - 104.0 MHz
* AIR FM Rainbow - 102.6 MHz
* Meow - 104.8 MHz
* AIR FM Gold - 106.4 MHz
Others
* Radio Jamia - 90.4 MHZ
* IIMC Radio - 96.9 MHz
* Gyan Vani - 105.6 MHz
In a post about FM radio the award winning FM Mansoorpur deserves a mention even if it didn't have anything to do with Delhi and it was declared illegal and subsequently closed down.
And it is going to be more paisa wasool for my Rs 440 Philips RL241 Digital Clock Radio.
Additions
City-wise list of allocated FM Phase II channels [PDF]
Company-wise list of Cities allocated [PDF]
Tip: To view PDF files try FoxIt Reader. I tried it, it's lighter and faster than Adobe Reader.
[Last updated July 4, 2007]
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1. Company/brand: Reliance Communications (previously Reliance Infocomm)
2. Company/brand: Dabur
3. Company/brand: Tata
4. Company/brand: Godrej Consumer Products Ltd / Cinthol
