KamaSutra: The campaign might just be more significant than once thought
BACK OF THE BOOK

Nobel prizes for advertising, if ever awarded, should go to ad practitioners. Specifically, to those who master the art of surviving the 'good-grief brief' from the client-terabytes of big words printed on tonnes of paper featuring everything the founder ever said, right down to the rules of body exposure-well enough to express their non-awe. And that too, with originality and relevance.

One trick is to finger-jab the text randomly for stuff to use as creative inspiration, and fly with that. Done on this good-grief book, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, you are at peril of choking on 'Derrida', 'auto-orientalism', 'historical materialism', 'abstraction of capitalism' , 'Achilles' heel' and the like. It's a taxing read, to make an understatement. The author, William Mazzarella, is an aaarrgh... anthropologist at the University of Chicago.

But there's also 'sex'. Overstretched, yes. Cheesy, no. So dig in. Moreover, there's another incentive. This book hints at spilling beans on the antics of Indian 'post-colonial cultural producers' of 'commodity images'. And if that includes you, the adperson, don't be put off by the parts that sound Greek or Aramaic or whatever. Read.

SHOVELING SMOKE By William Mazzarella Oxford University Press PP: 365 Price: Rs 595

The title's explanation is amusing. It's taken from a 1949 JWT memo to India trying to focus a young moderniser's mind on the "task at hand"-selling stuff instead of shoveling smoke-as a way to achieve 'modernity', as conceived. And on this, Mazzarella portrays himself well as an unbiased global observer. He rejects marketing as a project to turn everybody into globalised clones, and so too the 'virgin birth' of modernity in Europe-"a long and ongoing attempt to deny an actuality of miscegenation".

The book features much intellectual auto-eroticism too, but does a good job of presenting Indian advertising as a "compelling point of mediation" between the local and the global, concrete and abstract, particular and universal. These tensions have grown acute after the post-1991 influx of global market forces, and the ad industry has played a good role in keeping it all cool. The usual stories of MTV, McDonald's and Coca-Cola having to 'Indianise' themselves are all there, but the most illustrative case is that of the 1991-launched KamaSutra that repositioned the condom as a sexual stimulant for mutual pleasure ("Nooo! It wiiil be sex!" Alyque Padamsee insisted), instead of a state imposition for population control. In Mazzarella's story, this was a "distilled response" to the frustrations of central planning per se. This imaginative piece of so-called "auto-orientalism" worked by fusing ancient local tradition with global imagery, artfully playing mediator between social ideals and consumerist urges, as also between individual desire and market modernity, to liberate the market from "the paternalist grip of the state" (phew!).

In all, this book could prove well worth your time and effort. It is a clever probe of the particular-versus-universal game in India, as the country globalises, but does not always make good calls on what is reactionary and what is not. The motivations it ascribes to the ad fraternity's promotion of a uniquely hybrid 'Indian consumer', for instance, are altogether too glib for credibility. Of course, global eyes should-and do-roll up in response to some stories of Indian exceptionalism. Some of these claims are made to baffle outsiders and command a premium on cultural insights. But the good stuff is indeed good.

For all its perceptivity, Shoveling Smoke is vague on the larger context. Whether you're trying to shovel smoke or sell something, India remains somewhat defiant of 'global' market simplifications. In brand association tests, you could get both 'Ganga' and 'Liril' as soap brands cited in spontaneous response to 'liberation bath'-and from the same respondent too.

SANDBOX WISDOM By Tom Asacker Pearson Education PP: 128 Price: Rs 962

If the big heavy book on advertising and globalisation featured alongside blows a fuse in your head, try this one as a dose of relief. Written as a fable by Tom Asacker, a marketing man who claims long experience of building brands and selling products, Sandbox Wisdom differentiates itself by appealing to the inner child in you-the marketing genius who overloaded his mind with all sorts of nonsense on the way here.

Inspired by Aldous Huxley's advice of carrying the "spirit of the child into old age", this book tries to defy marketing convention by appealing to your innate sandbox sense. This is the sense that your intellect has dulled over the years, the sense that tells you to be genuine, empower your (and others') feelings, smile all the time, admit your weaknesses, display vulnerability, be a human being, embrace failure, display excitement, let emotions take over, empathise with others, listen to the silliest of stories, tell your own stories in ways people like to listen, ignore the status quo, don't care about what people think of you, value others' perceptions, seek the customer's truth, and dream, dream, dream. Like a child. Unabashedly. The way you used to back in that sandbox-but are too embarrassed to be caught doing now.

So, should you go with this book? Well, read the Bill's Notes at the end of each chapter. And do try recovering your sandbox self. It could help. But that's about it.

MONEY LAUNDERING By Arya Ashok Kumar Taxmann's PP: 200 Price: Rs 195

Before terrorists crashed two planes into New York's World Trade Center, killing 2,976 people in its twin towers, every government knew that money laundering was a flourishing business, but few wanted to do anything about it. In fact, one estimate put out in 1998 put global money laundering at a staggering $2.85 trillion (that's Rs 131.10 lakh crore). The 9-11 attacks changed things almost overnight. By October, 2001, the US Congress had passed a bill aimed at "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism", aka the USA Patriot Act. The act makes it mandatory for banks and other financial institutions-in some cases, even car dealers-to monitor transactions and report anything and everything suspicious. India didn't have any legislation dealing directly with money laundering up until January 2003, when the Prevention of Money Laundering Act was introduced. It's unlikely that the USA Patriot Act would have led to a quantum reduction in money laundering, but it almost certainly has started to turn the screws on launderers worldwide. In this book, probably the only one of its kind, Kumar-a senior bureaucrat with the Enforcement Directorate-gives a guided tour of the money laundering landscape in India and elsewhere. He not just explains the laundering process, but also enumerates steps needed to combat the menace. Bankers and executives who deal with finance or international trade will do well to read Kumar's timely book.