The adman’s twisted world

It was a perfect world back then. The early man learnt to stand erect, he went about hunting and gathering with no great fuss, and the early agriculturist conned wild animals into accepting the virtues of domesticity.

The alpha man got his share of adoring women, but others wooed their lot too. It’s not known yet whether they drew dirty, sexually explicit graffiti on the walls of abandoned caves, but things looked to be in order then, and till many centuries and civilisational leaps later. Men remained just men and women what they were, unencumbered by the concept of ‘size’.

Then landed the adman with his big idea of ‘perfection’, and went about categorising all by ‘size’ — from zero to infinity — and the style quotient.

Why obsess over Neanderthals and admen on an innocuous, sunny day, one might ask. That is what the adman drives you to. He cooks up the idea of the perfect man, garnishes him with unusual properties and leaves you bristling at your own shortcomings.

Catch the hidden message in the giant billboards on the city’s roads or the mannequins staring at you from their glass enclosures. You are a goner, that’s what they convey. To begin with, your looks have a lot of catching up to do; you lack the smartness, the attitude, in most cases, the hair too, and whatever goes into the package called the perfect person, the model that is.
Stare at the billboard again and read between the smiles.

The hairless hunky man on his bike and the bikini-clad enchantress riding pillion are sending out a not-so-subtle message. “Cave man”, “savage”, “nerd”, they seem to be saying.
Bewilderment seeps in soon. Why is it so? What on earth was so terribly wrong with the everyday Johns and Janes that someone had to devise a new species as the ideal? Then troop in the questions.

How could they find a combination of numbers (36-26-whatever) to define a woman’s shape? Why do they create people for the dresses and not the other way round? Who gave these people the right to sit in judgment about others anyway?

There is no historical or archaeological evidence yet to prove that the early man shaved his chest, acquired an eight-pack, built-up biceps and triceps and preened before the mirror before setting out to woo the woman. There’s no proof either that he wore designer tree bark suits or used deodorant (read: stink remover) on a date. But it is possible he was never reminded of being inadequate. It was a normal world. And they did not have models.

You look around and notice a small crowd — individuals in all shapes and from size sub-zero to size jumbo — ogling at the mannequins. A few are busy smiling back at the underclad woman on the billboard; others walk by barely noticing anything amiss in themselves. Cavemen all, and suddenly the world is normal again.