Why do we drink, smoke and consume large-size branded coffee?

I notice with great amusement the guys featured in ads of cigarettes, whisky and soft drinks. They are handsome hunks, sport athletic bodies and perform stunts flawlessly; nubile women swoon over their bravado, willing to surrender. What amuses me is the concocted nature of these ads. Here’s what they imply: slaking thirst with cold drinks, consuming alcohol or smoking a certain brand brings sexual opportunities and provides vigour, health and happiness.

The truth: the exact reverse. Puffing hampers with athletic ability, it leads to cancer and pre-mature death. Coke has no health benefit. Alcohol impairs virility, causes impotency risk (Shakespeare: Drinking provokes the desire but it takes away the performance.) causes irreparable liver damage, interferes with rational judgement and breaks families.(Alcohol ads are at best anti-alcohol ads, smoking, anti-smoking ads!)

 A classic case of how companies royally twist the facts. Manufacture perception. And dish it out on a golden platter for us. We pay happily. Why? Because we buy their ‘I-will-make-you feel- good’  spiel. We fall to the perception they shape for us.

   

The feel-good factor extends to other walks of life too. Take grade system in academics, for instance. A study by Durham University, UK, states that an 'A' grade today is equivalent of a 'C' grade in the 1980s. Rings a bell? Well, back as CBSE students of the ‘70s or ‘80s did you ever score more than 65% in any language subject as they do today? ‘The Economist’ reports that in American Universities almost 45% of the graduates now get the top grade compared with 15% in 1960. How so? Are students of the ‘90s more intelligent than their counterparts of the ‘70s or ‘80s? Bring me empirical evidence and I will rest my case.  Schools accommodate more students in higher grades because they want to make students feel good. Academic institutions have, after all, become businesses. But listen closely to the problem that the much patronized 'I- will- make-you -feel- good component of schools creates. The highest grade is fixed and when more number makes entry in the top grade, it devalues the efforts of the brightest students. And the brightest face disadvantage in the job market.

Job market. Yes, it is battling its own demon. That of glamorized titles. An executive with three years of experience is a manager these days. This is an organisation's way of making an executive feel good. So, it may inch his/her salary a tad, or maybe not, but will hook him/her good, conferring a fancy title. You, the executive, buy it. Here’s what happens in the process- labour market loses its transparency. It becomes harder to assess salaries. While you know what a 'steward's' pay is, you will wonder the salary of a 'senior host officer' (fancy title of a steward).

What I note in these feel-good- factors is that they have larger adverse societal implications. We erode our own value system for short term gains.

Food too is fed on feel –good factor. Pizzas makers now rustle up pizzas in regular, large and very large sizes. Burgers are maharaja size, Starbucks coffees come in tall, Grande sizes. ‘S’ is the cuss word these days; Small, I mean.

Unless of course, the item in question is ‘Small’ label of women’s clothing.   Women readily empty their purses if they fit in clothes labelled ‘Small’. No wonder, the earlier regular (or medium) size clothes now come labelled- ‘Small.’ Manufactures are a smart breed you see.

If you are wise spender, you feel the heat of increased consumerism, if you are a callous spender, you justify with ‘keeping with the trend,’ denying having spent on perception, as some would maintain.

How many of us actually see through the game? And the frivolity of paying higher for items which actually devalues health or system. Or both.

But why am I writing a non-educational piece in my blog?  Well, maybe because I wonder if critical thinking and analysis indeed takes place in classrooms- for benefit of society at large. And if education could be a tool to reason out with some Indonesian kung –fu experts who drink kerosene. Kerosene? Why? 

What do you think?

 -end