(Walter Vieira is a Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants of India- FIMC. He was a successful corporate executive for 14 years and then pioneered marketing consulting in India in 1975. As a consultant, he has worked across four continents. He was the first Asian elected Chairman of ICMCI, the world apex body of 45 countries. He is the author of 16 books, a business columnist and has been visiting professor in Marketing in the US, Europe, and Asia for over 40 years. His latest books are "Marketing in a Digital/Data World with Brian Almeida and "Customer Value Starvation can kill" with Gautam Mahajan. He now spends most of his time on NGO work and is presently Chairman, Consumer Education and Research Society, India)
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The ‘star questioners’ exist in any audience, seeking attention of the speaker by starting with ‘Sir, as you rightly said…’, earning sympathy even if their comment/question is meaningless.
A prime example of attention-seekers are Bollywood actors/actresses, who get stories published in newspapers about some inane happenings to them, accompanied with their photograph projecting their youthful charm or physical fitness.
We see frequent full-page ads by state governments listing their achievements and goals, not only in local but even in newspapers published a thousand kms away.
Announcing to the world the birthday of a prominent social worker is done quite often on hoardings hung at vantage points. Waiting at a traffic signal, recently, I counted at least 50 pictures of the local social workers on a single large hoarding put up by a political outlift. Only 4-5 pictures among them were large enough, the rest were small like postage-stamps arranged in rows.
I grew in a place surrounded by cotton ginning mills. Every week or so, sirens will sound and fire engines were on the run to extinguish fires on cotton dumps. The fires were real, or part of a nefarious attempt to claim insurance money, I could never find.
Honking by vehicle drivers whenever the traffic ahead of them stops, or during the duration of a red signal, is no way of seeking attention. It only raises the unhealthy decibels. The same is true of drivers of ambulance vans, with whom the rest of the traffic co-operates to give way, but who keep ringing sirens continuously even when a choc-a-block traffic can be seen ahead of them.
In Mumbai, if one hears a soft ‘pom-pom’ sound of a brass horn with rubber hand pump, it is an Idli-seller on a bicycle, who also sells tea in labour areas or slums. A pomfret fish seller wants to sell quickly to avoid decay of the exotic variety, and so yells, ‘Paaplate!’ signaling his arrival in the street.
A few vendors use their signature calls for an inspired sales-pitch, such as: a blackberries (jamun) seller singing ‘Jamu kaale nee ra’, while pushing his handcart; a dahi-vada seller shouting ‘Bhalle, Bhalle!’ from his handcart parked under a shaded tree in the month of June; or, the vendors who rushed into the Novelty cinema hall of my home-town as soon as the Interval was announced shouting ‘Reod, mungphalli, papad-e’ with baskets holding large papads, and packets of groundnuts and revadis.
Bottle-openers are made to create noise over glass bottles to attract attention of viewers who come out during the Interval of a movie in cinema theatres, or even opposite school-gates during recess.
A newspaper vendor selling Evening News of India near Flora Fountain in Mumbai during late 1980s made a unique soft hiss behind you, whispering ‘Ek-dum mara gaya’, creating enough sensation to trigger you to buy his newspaper.
BEST bus service in Mumbai uses no electric or electronic horns. Their drivers use a soft ‘bhompoo’ instead, when needed. A conductor in a BEST bus just makes a sound of ‘tick-tick’ with his ticket-punch to alert a passenger to buy a ticket, if not done till then..
At times, an event can be signaled without making a sound. Food trolley girls in a Japanese shinkansen train turn back towards the passengers to signal their exit before moving to the next bogie,
Quite the opposite of attention-seeking is the use of tall concrete poles with colorful paintings of birds on top of each of them, set up along the road stretching between Santa Cruz airport and Bandra during mid-1970s, to distract attention of the arriving tourists from any depressing views of slums on the way.
- Prof. Dr. J.V. Yakhmi