My Life as a Brand Slut

I started reading No Logo. I bought this book way back in 2008 on a whim, I liked the idea that this book propagated.  It a personal crusade against brands and the corporations behind them. It all sounded so bizarre at first, I mean for a layman like me how would you explain the proliferation of brands and the deterioration of life because of them?  

But as I started reading the book I realized that we have become such brand sluts . We want shiny things, we want foreign brands even if are pay three times the actual price for them. In this consumerist culture that is how we define ourselves, by the clothes we wear, the car we drive and the houses we live in and all the things inside.

We want the best of the best. Take a look at mothercare, they sell clothes for kids. The insane prices they charge are justified apparently. They say that these are global brands and they have famous kid designers doing the work for them. And when it comes to our kids we don’t care about the kind of money we spend.  The dresses they sell for an infant of one month are over two grand. The buggies we see all those adoring mothers drag their kids around in parks are no less than 20 grand and they are happy to part with the money.

I am one in a million in this consumerist culture where we define ourselves by these things. Heck, even when I buy stuff in Colaba for 200 bucks I look for a brand. We collect air-miles as if they are our prized possessions. I wasted one whole day trying to claim my missing miles, and when I see them finally on my dashboard I am satisfied. This is not a tangible thing I don’t know what I am going to do with those miles but I want them because everyone wants them.

My life is defined by this culture. I went to IIT because it gives me a brand name thereby helping me get my job and then to an IIM because someone said that this would be the next obvious step. I joined this company because of the brand name. Hell, my whole life I have been trying to pigeon-hole myself because someone somewhere decided this would give me the edge and then I could do whatever I want to with my life.

But the reality is so different. So what if I did all those things, is this going to define me as a person? Hell no. I see my friends twitter profiles; their definition for themselves is something like this “IIT IIM McKinsey” or “IIT MIT Blah, Blah”. Were they able to find the elusive thing that they were searching for after getting these tags no one knows. But we let our society decide what we are worth by these things.

Yes, we are respected when we drop these names but what does it say about us? We are using these entities to define the person beneath.  And the saddest part of it is that we are playing the role of some pre-defined characters. We corporatize ourselves with blackberrys in one hand and an iPad in the other, waving to the world and telling them  how tough life is with all the competition. We cannot or dare not take a different path because everyone expects us to be like this, upstanding citizens.

Where else would we fit in? Are we going to be masked fighters who go out in the dark of the night and pull all those hoardings down?  It’s like that movie Revolutionary Road, we dare not take a step back because we are too scared of the consequences. ( I know too many references to this movie already but it haunts me :|) We live and we die in this, contributing to those unnamed corporations.

Guess who I am working for right now? The Bin Laden group :) dream project indeed. I am not being a racist or anything but we gotta do what we gotta do to pay our rents so we will not complain. 

P. S. R read this blog and you know what he said, I knew all this before hand; what are you going to do about it? The thing is there is not a single thing that I can do. Hence, the rant :)