About Image and Impression

Do you know or like people because of the things they have, or because of who they are? Very often I see TV commercials where they show people respecting the ones who own certain cars, certain pens, live in certain localities, eat at certain joints, wear certain clothes, etc. This quasi-cultural phenomenon is rampant, it seems, everywhere. We just want to impress people. The only thing that matters is, what impression you make on others (Hence expressions like: The first impression is the last impression). Rather than working on ourselves, we work on acquiring things.

I’m not against owning a snazzy car. I’d love to buy a Mercedes or a Volvo (I have always wanted to own a Volkswagen convertible) but not to command respect. I like them for the facilities and comfort they carry. I want a car in which I don’t get tired, in which my family is safe at the time of an accident, that gives me good mileage, and in which most functions are controlled by the press of buttons. I couldn’t care less if nobody knew I owned such a car. My self-esteem does not hinge upon other people’s reaction towards me. Even if it does, I certainly do not want to depend on a car to command respect; I want to do it on my own merit. In fact if I want to own a car because I want to show it off, I suffer from low self-esteem and I need counseling.

This is the thing that worries me when I see such commercials. Are there so many people suffering from low self-esteem? Why is it prestigious to own a car? They go to such extents that individual is totally absent. Only the car remains. In another advertisement Amitabh Bachchan screams that you don’t mean anything if you don’t own a Parker. It is another matter if you can write a single sentence with that pen or not. More and more companies are doing this. This means there is such an audience who appreciates and gets driven by such campaigns. And these are ordinary people we are talking about, not the likes of LN Mittal, the steel tycoon whose daughter’s lavish wedding in Paris became more known than his daughter.

We are constantly worried about what the others think of us. In this pursuit, we ignore the real growth. We just become puppets of mass psychologies and forget what we actually want to do in life. That is why there is so much mediocrity around. We don’t excel in arts, we don’t excel in sports, our cultural movements languish in the alleys of pretension, most of our inventions are money and fame driven. People want to be known by the things they own, by the people they know, by the properties they own. They have stopped working on themselves.

I never worried about materialism, but now I do. We might all turn into consumer zombies just to earn to pay to companies that sell us goods to enhance our prestige. The costlier the car, the higher the prestige. The costlier the car, the higher the effort to earn more. The higher the effort to earn more, more the money becomes important. More the money becomes important, lesser are the values (because I don’t equate money with wealth — they are two different things) and this goes on plummeting downwards. These tendencies are already glaringly evident in the number of crimes being committed just to make quick money.

These commercials do not even give a single indication of how a person can acquire such a car that brings prestige. They never show how that money is earned. They never show that the prestige is not for the car, but the hard work required to be in such a position that you can afford a luxury car. They focus on the light. You can spread light by painstakingly lighting thousands of candles. You can even quickly set a house on fire to create the same sort of effect. The majority goes for the latter option.