What is the problem with this picture?
It isn’t that such a reputed(?) national newspaper carried this ad with the chutzpah of a Zee TV journalist talking of nanochips in currency notes. I do not have to tell you why this is not surprising at all. Such newspapers, radio stations, social media feeds, and TV channels exist everywhere in the world. Always have and always will.
It is not that someone who has so much money as to buy out ToI’s first page for advertising is confident that they will make all this and more money back. There are many entrepreneurs who dream impossible dreams and lose money. I am one of them myself and have no problem seeing why this money was spent.
It is not that the issuer of this ad was confident that no one from the FDA in India would send them a show-cause notice, ask them to prove their claims, or prosecute them for misleading people with a fraudulent health claim. This is a country that has a separate government department and Union ministry for AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, and Homoeopathy, each of them quackery, each of them proven to be so). This is a country with so much pseudoscience and obscurantist thought, that even within the scientific community, one has nuclear physicists and literal rocket scientists and brain surgeons believing 6 impossible things before breakfast and no one bats an eye. None of this stops them from being good scientists and researchers in their specific fields. Not an ideal situation, but here we are.
It is not that the Advertising Council of India is not taking cognisance of an advertisement making such clearly wrong and unsubstantiated health claims. Ramdev’s Patanjali products, Chavanprash from various makers, and quacks like Dr.Batra’s have been advertising with gay abandon for decades now. This is, if anything, par for the course.
It is not that the ad brazenly mentions large and reputed Indian and foreign trans- and multi-national companies and brands such as Tatas, Aditya Birla Group, Bosch, DeBeers, ABB, HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, MRF, Vijaya Group of Hospitals (yes, hospitals!), Muthoot Finance, Bridgestone, and so on. Large conglomerates like these are not centralised when it comes to buying office equipment. Some superstitious, obscurantist manager with a small discretionary budget in some small corner of the world may have placed a purchase order for these believing the hype and the stories. Or maybe even the entire brand/group of companies could be led by such people (case in point, Rajiv Bajaj and Homoeopathy) who may buy this story and fall for it hook, line, and sinker. At the end of the day, this is neither unique nor unexpected.
It is not that they are claiming CE compliance that ‘conforms to the regulatory requirements of EU, USA, Canada, Mexico, and so on. Nobody, other than engineers and manufacturers, is supposed to know that while the CE approval is necessary to sell into these first-world countries, it is only for health, safety, and environmental protection standards for products sold within these territories. It is neither an ‘indicator of the quality’ (CE’s own website is clear about this) nor evidence or proof that the said product works. It simply means that when connected to the power grid, it will not trip it, shock anyone, harm humans, blow up, or damage other equipment. Also, it is self-certified, which means that there was no independent testing agency that has awarded this mark for it to be taken at face value to denote quality of reliability, leave alone as evidence that the thing does what the manufacturer claims it does. This loophole has been and continues to be used extensively by frauds (many of them in China, who had at one point started to claim that it meant, ‘China Export’) to claim that somehow an independent third-party government agency in the EU had tested and found their products excellent. In that way, there is nothing new in a company claiming that their self-certified CE mark means they make world-class products that do what they claim. Others have done it, and so has this manufacturer.
It is not that gullible people will buy this product and remain innocent of the fact that they have been fooled even when the product does not work as advertised, because like all things pseudoscience, the blame for something not working will never be laid at the door of the product, its manufacturer, or its seller, but on the user. A case in point is astrology, where all predictions that come true are proof that it works, and all those that don’t are proofs that the subject’s (the gullible believer’s) faith or adherence to the ‘strict’ guidelines was lacking. This is neither new nor confined to Indians. There is a sucker born every minute across the world. And where there is demand, there will be supply. Free markets one-oh-one.
It is not that the scientific temper that our Constitution advises us to inculcate, indeed says it is a duty of every Indian citizen, has never been followed or consciously nurtured, right from our education system to our political leaders. No one cares about science, not even people in charge of education and science. No one has ever in the past (except for a few notable leaders and scientists). Indeed the whole 42nd amendment, which is full of flaws anyway, needs to be repealed, rewritten, and re-adopted for reasons beyond the scope of this post. Indians have never had scientific temper as a massive public movement. Even our (eventually successful) struggle for freedom from colonialism had a religious beginning, a religious core, with a religious covering, and a religious outer packaging. We were tremendously lucky to have a secular humanist rationalist as our first Prime Minister. So, that there will be naive folks who will dip their hands into their wallets and buy the advertised product is not really a surprise. Nor it is limited to Indians. Indians do not have a monopoly on naïveté.
The problem with this picture is that people like me are no longer surprised by it. Finally, this society that installed this government to rule on their behalf and continues to support not just the specific government or specific ministers in face of clear and massive evidence that these people are taking them down the path of destruction, but also has, by its deafness and blindness to what people like me are shouting about, made us (or at the very least, me) uninterested in trying to correct the course. As someone wise said, “The opposite of love is not hate. It is apathy.”
P.S: That last para with the ‘…extremely proud to say that we are a 100% Atmanirbhar India company.’ should say everything about our society and the leadership we have voted for.
