I am no genius or Socrates to give a final verdict on this but at times writing down your own thoughts gives you an insight that you hadn’t had earlier.Going through the history of advertising in our country, when did we start? Not a very long time ago we used to watch the keera/sundi ads of sona urea and “karate” pesticides killer. Quite a few jingles that I am sure a lot of us would still remember like “Uth merey beliya” and “ay Khuda meray abu salamat rehain”
Sing and dance was the key then, and so it is now. But why is that so? Because we don’t have any better alternative; or is it because we cannot think of any better solutions? Most of us do visit adsoftheworld.com every now and then and keep on getting good bulk of emails containing some pretty decent ads in our emails every other day. We do appreciate them, but can’t create them. Why is that so? There has to be a problem, and that is exactly what I am going to attempt to explore in the following article.
They say our country is flooded with talent; it’s just that it is never polished or given a chance. I think on the contrary. Our country is actually at a huge shortage of talent. No offense to anyone but that is actually a fact, and probably that is why whenever we go out on the hunt of a new job position opening, we have to screen at least a cent of resumes and interview quite a few people and even then we compromise on our requirements and hire someone who can possibly wear many hats at any given job title but does not excel at any one. Cost Cutting? I don’t blame the employers and I don’t blame the employees either. I blame the society norms.
I was watching this video the other day and in this video they showed a gentleman who was given an aerial ride in a helicopter for 45 minutes over Rome. Later he was given 3 days to draw everything he saw. To my disbelief he drew everything in such a detail, that even the number of pillars of Pantheon and the number of windows of the worlds most complicated building i.e., The Colosseum were exact. All the streets were in precise position and it was as if you were looking at Google Maps hand sketched. Is it super natural? I got no issues in believing so!
The email I received the link to this video had a couple of replies in which many have described their own encounters with such people in their routine lives. We the “normal” ones call them retards. Some medical terminologies have defined them as patients of Autism, or dyslexics. They are usually around us, and I am sure we all have seen them around us in our daily lives, not knowingly. The reason we cant point them out is because the poor souls are trying to live a life that our society has defined as “Normal” life. But what is “Normal”? I think this can be very easily defined. If 7 out of 10 people start calling “day” as “night”, it wont make it night, but yes it will become a norm. And those 3 who will continue to call “day” as “day” will be called Abnormal, Retards and what not!
The reason I have given this above example, is to explain my point. So when I said that we don’t have the talent in our country, I actually mean that we snub the real talent in our society. I know quite a few people who have adamantly pushed their kids into professions they were least interested in. Professions like medicine, engineering, management etc that they were never willing to pursue. For that mater now I see a lot of our advertising agencies have people sitting in very senior position with very little or absolutely NO creative background. But then these are only handful of people.
I am not saying that the placement of these people is not right, they are doing a perfect job and absolutely meeting all the requirements that any professional creative is required to do, but that is happening because the story is exactly the same on the other side of the fence. People who are building brands didn’t know they wanted to build brands until they landed into a job like that. They keep nice looking heavy books on their workstations. Few of whom do read them too, but I doubt if there is a take away. I need not to prove my point here, but the kind of brands that we have built here are quite a disappointment. And I don’t blame those brand people entirely.
The point I am trying to make is, that we all have a retard in us. It’s just that we don’t bring it out. Now that could be due to the society pressures, peer pressures or a family thing. We can’t turn back time and change what happened in the past. However we can always decide what future we want for ourselves. We can chose to make our next generation an engineer or doctor with force and our emotional danda, or we can let them explore their talents and fly their own skies; make their own destinations. We might lose a few of them on the way, but we will surely ensure a lot of good talent (that we so religiously claim to have) and where it rightly belongs.
Imagine those creative professionals and brand builders that we run into every now and then. What if their actual talent was explored when they were learning algebra? We might have ended up with some Al Khwarizmi and Pythagoras of advertising making us proud today.
It won’t be easy. They will be called retards or abnormal or special. But that is exactly (at least) I would like to be called.
I am giving below the list of some of the Dyslexics and Autistic(Asperger's Syndrome) people. After reading the list, I am sure you will want to be called a Retard!
Steve Jobs (Dyslexic)
Walt Disney (Dyslexic)
Napoleon Bonaparte (Asperger's Syndrome)
Benjamin Franklin(Asperger's Syndrome)
Thomas Edison (Dyslexic)
Adolf Hitler (Asperger's Syndrome)
Cher (Dyslexic)
Tom Cruise (Dyslexic)
Salma Hayek (Dyslexic)
Alexander The Great (Asperger's Syndrome)
Leonardo Da Vinci (Asperger's Syndrome)
Beethoven (Asperger's Syndrome)
Socrates (Asperger's Syndrome)
Pablo Picaso (Dyslexic)
Gustave Flaubert (Dyslexic)
Alexander Graham Bell (Dyslexic)
Tom Hanks (Asperger's Syndrome)
Marilyn Monroe (Asperger's Syndrome)
Shakespare(Asperger's Syndrome)
Bill Gates (Asperger's Syndrome)
Thomas Jefferson (Dyslexic)
John F Kennedy (Dyslexic)
Steven Spielberg (Dyslexic)
George Washington (Dyslexic)
Issac Newton (Asperger's Syndrome)
Elvis (Asperger's Syndrome)
And
Stephen Wiltshire (is the guy whose story I gave above: Autistic)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire
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Fahd Sadiq
Tuesday. January 4, 2011
