Onion Uttapam : India's Leading Satire Daily

Leaks can be very damaging. For one, they can change what one is entitled to in a will. And that, as anyone who’s ever been at the receiving end of one will vouch for, can be quite a life-and-death experience.

For those of you already, so soon into this piece, wondering what I’m on about, please find yourselves a way to watch the commercial for M-Seal in which an unscrupulous son forces his dying father to add a ‘zero’ to the amount bequeathed to him and then ends up with only ‘zeroes’ because a drop of water from a leak in the roof drips itself on to the will and erases the ‘1’ before all the ‘zeroes’ he has just forced his dying father to will him. Don’t ask. Just try to lay your hands on the commercial. As always, youtube might be a good place to start.

Now all this is very fine as long as it stays behind the closed doors. After all, dirty laundry is never a great sight to behold. (God knows, why we Indians so love to display it!) But it didn’t. Much like it has regularly happened in the past, one of the selectors opened his mouth and let the frisky cat out of the bag for the media to lay its grubby hands on and sensationalise. Soon, and before you could say ‘Zap’, the television channels were as busy as ant-hills beaming various versions of this juicy tit-bit that had been thrown their way by an obliging selector. Naturally all this left the Indian captain very cross and he angrily termed this unwanted revelation as ‘disgusting’ and ‘disgraceful’.

Sharp as ever to spot any opportunity to shill, one of the men in marketing, this time from the corporate House of Mahindras felt this was as good a window as any to gain some mileage from the gazillion eyeballs that anything cricket attracts in this entertainment-starved country. They swiftly and surreptitiously contacted the said selector to find out whether the committee would henceforth like to televise their closed-door meetings for the benefit of the baying public. In return all the corporate house of Mahindras would ask for is that they be allowed to plaster the venue, inside and outside, with banners and be permitted to interrupt the telecast every 3 minutes with commercials for their epoxy sealant M-Seal.

Eager to make an extra buck for his money-hungry paymasters, the selector promised to get back to them at the earliest. Pray, how did we arrive at this luscious piece of inside information? It was leaked to us by the selector. (disgraceful and disgusting, isn’t it?)

PS: This piece is not sponsored by the makers of M-Seal. That said, the said brand is considering sponsoring MS Dhoni. They believe he embodies all the qualities of the brand and, even better, shares the first two initials of his name with them. All of which, according to them, makes a watertight case for subliminal and not-so-subliminal advertising.

Comments (1)

u k derebail said:

	Well i hope in future there is live coverage of the selection meetings, what is the point in having a suspense. Ultimately the team is going to be announced. Even before the meeting an informal get together can be called for to complete the nitty gritties
	report abuse vote down vote up

November 26, 2008
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