Visual pollution or urban culture?

They are distracting. They have affected the city's skyline, and they hide lovely buildings... they are everywhere. But are posters and huge hoardings really a bane? GEETA DOCTOR analyses the scenario.

"I'd like all those in favour of banning posters to sign a petition saying that we demand their removal," said a speaker at a recent seminar on urban culture. The majority of the participants - architects, designers, environmentalists - were in favour of the petition. A small but vociferous minority, however, shot down the idea. For one thing, public culture cannot be dictated by a small coterie who go around stamping their feet like the Queen of Hearts saying "Out! Out! With the posters, the hoardings, the ads, the pamphlets and signboards that line our streets and sidewalks. "For another thing, posters and hoardings are the very spice that make up our city life.

The ban-the-poster brigade has a point when it says that posters and hoardings are a form of visual pollution. They clutter our streets, they hide our buildings, they distract motorists and pedestrians by offering a violent mix of images from films, advertisers and politicians and you-too-can-be a Bill Gatesers. They represent a form of cultural invasion that conquers us through our eyes. They engorge our imagination, by creating in us, yet to be dreamt of, desires.

What can a person heading down the Gemini flyover make of the magnificent vista presented by a new and glamorous ad that spreads itself out on a 100-feet wide hoarding, with a view of the Caribbean sea-scape and the mystical two letter word that appears again and again, over this image? It seems to be the very elixir of life. Yet, what it offers is the humble deodorant, a Western inspired formula to banish odours! With the multinational companies muscling in with their global outreach interests these images are bound to multiply. We will be told how we should smell, how we should bathe, only the whitest soap will do, what we should eat, wear, drink, drive and even use to control our sexual desires.

We will be made the slaves of what Karl Marx described as "commodity fetishism". It suggests that buying a brand of soap, or a bottle of tomato ketchup will automatically make a person powerful, as young and beautiful perhaps as the pink skinned young woman, who's floating in a bath-tub, a pretty sight, no doubt, in a water-less city, or as fulfilled as the Heinz kids, who by smearing their faces with red tomato paste are trying to tell us that their tomato sauce is more natural than ours.

This intensely competitive skyline of ads and counter ads, promises, screaming headlines, dizzying dot.com displays, mobile ads, like live Venetian blinds and the often witty slogans, that have sprung out from unexpected sources, Kumaran Silks for instance, or Mushtaq's talking posters on Khader Nawaz Khan road are what create a new kind of dialogue in our urban lives. In more brutal times, when conquerors had to advertise themselves, they lined the approaches to a fortified town with the heads of their victims, neatly spiked on the ramparts. In our more conservative age, when all we need to do is to sell insurance, an internet connection, a TV comedy slot, or hospital offering a particular brand of service, we resort to painting a message on a board.

Some of the effects are still pretty bloodthirsty. "Chicken Pox can strike you anytime, anywhere" yells a message, dripping in blood like letters, that seem to be quivering with anxiety. "Call a doctor" it suggests. If this is public service advertising, it goes back to the days of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes, who had their own methods of using terror to persuade the public. This seems to be the preferred method for dealing with diseases, like AIDS, or cancer, the hidden threat behind the velvet words.

Death on the other hand has been getting very good publicity. In a startling series of ads, that appeared both in the print media and on hoardings around the city, the manufacturers promoted a new type of refrigerated coffin or "portable morgue". They promised "immortal life" and even advocated taking the body around on a refrigerated tour of the country for 20 days, all the while plugged in to an electrical source, whether in the house or in the van, en route to whatever tourist destination, suitable for a corpse. Obviously the need for a new method of preserving a dead body has become essential when so many of the loved ones, who have to perform the last rites have to fly in from various destinations around the globe. The best part of the ad was the delicate balance it tried to preserve between showing a traditional tragedy-stricken wife or mother, sitting on the floor, next to the refrigerated coffin and the jolly tone that implied the sheer luxury of life-after-death for the loved one. No doubt, future models of the "porta-coffin" will come with additional options such as stereo systems, playing the favourite music of the deceased and built-in jets for wafting the surface with incense.

The one genre of ads that used to be the pride and glory of the streets of Chennai, the painted film hoardings that lined major cross-roads all the way from the Fort of St. Thomas Mount, are sadly on the retreat. They too were full of blood curdling images, the hero turning into a savage animal in front of our very eyes, or the clothing slipping off the heroine's form in three-dimensional perspective. With the advent of new technology that prefers the printed format, the sheer inventiveness of the old hoarding painters and their easy understanding of painterly techniques that would highlight the film's main story in primary colours, will soon be lost forever.

Instead, what we get now is a fabulous choice of cloth and clothing ads. Have you wondered what "Chinos, Pantaloons, Double detached cargoes" have in common with each other? Have you tried to figure out what "polynosic" might be? Is it a record label, or a type of fruit from Polynesia? And whether Peter England and Allen Solly are related since they are so often seen so close to each other? Have you often wanted to find "Price tags that make you smile?" If you have, you will know that all these items are connected with the world of men's clothes. Some of these ads are truly inspired, as for instance the Levi's one that makes use of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of the "Universal Man" and clothes him in "double detached cargoes", pants, in ordinary language. This easy mixing of ideas, from different periods can be defined as a form of transculturalism. Like the Indian "bindi" that is now being sported by most pop singers, these are emblems of our growing global culture. Are they to be feared or shunned? Or are we to absorb them as one more facet of our growing ability to be part of a multi-cultural world?

As in every case, there are the sly fly-by-night operators in the poster world. These become particularly active in the summer months. They prey upon the anxiety of parents who want their children to succeed at the new mantra of e-mail educationists and summer tutorials. These posters deface more electricity meter box junctions and telephone boxes, walls and trunks of trees that have been crucified by repeated nailings, than any other form of advertising. They are small brightly printed posters that are secretly pasted during the night by hordes of street children, who have been bribed to paste and run.

"We'll offer a pizza free for every metal hoarding that we nailed into a tree" said a well-known pizza outlet in a rare gesture of making amends. By this time, they had already nailed 3,000 metal signs on the trees of Chennai. Each metal sign had six, if not twelve nails. Many of the nails continue to remain embedded in the tree. Not just that, this short sighted campaign has led to a spate of copy-cat advertisers, who have deformed the trees around our city.

Genghis Khan come back, we need you to nail each one of these advertisers to their own trees! Failing this, we need to regulate the use and display of posters and hoardings to certain areas, commercial districts and long stretches of the main roads, that do not disturb the traffic. We need to educate both the users and the public on the kind of ads that are useful and entertaining. As in the case of the ad for Yellow Pages which says, "Let your fingers do the walking," we should be able to have a healthy dialogue with the people who put up the posters, maybe even have a citizen's award for the best campaign, "Let our eyes do the talking," we should say as we walk down the streets of Chennai looking at the posters.

Ban posters? No. Enjoy them.

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