I like the new Pepsi ad – especially when they advise the guy in plaster not to run after speeding vehicles for one Coke bottle and instead to switch to Pepsi which is available everywhere. :-)Damn smart on the part of the Pepsi guys to spoof the Coke ad to sell their own product! But I have always been a Coke fan – Pepsi is tad too sweet for my taste. So I am hoping that the Coke team will come up with an even smarter rejoinder.

And I like the ad by Jeevansathi as well. It’s free of the usual clutter of smiling cheerful bride and groom and happier faces of the parents and relatives. It’s a smart take on the age-old complaint of the male fraternity that we women cannot keep a secret. As a woman, I say “Bah! What rubbish” to this cliché but that doesn’t stop me from admiring this ad. I agree that “searching for a bride/groom without letting the whole world and your friendly neighborhood aunt know about it” is not the USP of Jeevansathi. Scores of other matrimonial sites are doing the same, in fact, that’s the cornerstone of such sites. However, this fresh idea and more importantly, what they call its “execution” in the ad is, I feel well-done.

I have seen the ad by Godrej - in which a school principal decides to get rid of the formality in his attire one fine day and walks across the campus to the admiring glances of his students – scores of times. In fact, whenever this ad is aired, I make it a point to bring the TV out of its Mute mode. I just want to know what this ad is all about. I must admit though that despite watching it many times I am yet to figure out what Godrej is trying to convey through it. :-(

Another ad that comes across as a whiff of fresh air (Pun intended!) is that of Air Wick. It uses cute animations of animals like squirrel/chipmunk and octopus (who is pink colored, God knows why!) to drive home their point (and product!).

Girl who loved Tom Gordon

I was running short of time when I reached the library last time. I couldn’t see any of the books which I had marked last time I was there. I spent 10 minutes browsing various titles. I picked up and kept down “The Alchemist” – “Maybe next time” I said to myself. I also checked out a couple of books by Stephen King but all of them looked bulky and I wasn’t sure I wanted to invest so much of my time in reading a horror book. One of them even had a creepy alien’s face on the front page – stuff the nightmares are made up of! Finally I selected a relatively slimmer offering of his – “Girl who loved Tom Gordon”. The plot looked promising enough – a nine-year old getting lost in the woods. And the back cover had these lines at the end of the synopsis – There’s something else in the woods – watching, waiting!

The first few pages were good enough and then little Trisha got lost in the woods. Her nightmare began and mine too with her. Somehow I felt that King put in too much of detail of her surroundings in the story. The mosquitoes and insects were mentioned frequently and in agonizing detail. I agree it added to the horror of the kid’s situation but I think that only screenplay of a horror movie merits such details. When made part of a paper book, they excruciatingly slowed the pace of the story - in my humble opinion.

I don’t understand a thing about baseball and so the details of how Tom Gordon was playing made me skip many pages. And that’s what made me wonder if I should go on with this book. I hate abandoning any book right in the middle of reading. But this time I didn’t seem to have much of a choice. I just quickly skipped to the end of the book to check if little Trisha survived this ordeal. I am taking the book back to the library. I don’t want to know anything more about the girl who loved Tom Gordon.