It pays to gauge your audience

A ChatGPT-generated visual about the content of the middle published in The Tribune today.

WE were sitting in a South Indian restaurant, waiting for our son to join us for lunch. On arrival, he told us: “You won’t believe it. A beggar said to me: ‘May you get a G-Wagen or a Defender’.” We were impressed. The person was remarkably precise in his blessing/wish. More so in gauging what would be of interest to the targeted audience! No generalised messaging, only tailored content, which elicited an instant positive response.

Of course, being old-timers, our minds went back to the Janis Joplin song: “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me/ A Mercedes Benz?/ My friends all drive Porsches/ I must make amends/ I worked hard all my lifetime/ No help from my friends/ Oh Lord, won’t you buy me/ A Mercedes Benz?”

We would lustily sing along in the mid-1970s, expressing our budding consumerist desires. The song went on to beseech the Lord for a colour TV, which was very much a dream in India till the 1982 Asian Games, and then, too, it arrived in just a few cities. As expected, we were oblivious to the song’s anti-consumerist slant at the time; that understanding came later on.

As printed in The Tribune

Thinking about the message from the pragmatic panhandler who had targeted our young man, one could not help but be impressed with his being in tune with the aspirations of the new generation, not Mercedes or Land Rover, but specific high-end models of these vehicles. He was appealing to the very consumerism that we so erroneously read into Joplin’s song. Interestingly, one account of the song’s origin, based on the poem “Mercedes Benz” by San Francisco poet Michael McClure, is that a ride in a Mercedes-Benz 600 inspired Joplin. Later, the company would use it in a commercial, much to McClure’s disapproval. Today, so many songs feature G-Wagens (commonly spelt G-Wagon), Lamborghinis and Mercedes-Benzes. The internationalism of consumerism is a reality, and we all have to live with it.

Most of the time, when we come across beggars on the road, they give us the usual blessings of good health, wealth, etc. Chatting over a dosa, we recalled an incident that happened while we were walking through Gastown in Vancouver a few years ago. It was cold, the steam clock was spewing steam at regular intervals, and we were among the fascinated tourists around it. Suddenly, there was an accented “Sat Sri Akal!” There he was — a local homeless person who had struck the right note to make a tourist part with his rupee-converted dollars. Yes, it pays to gauge your audience.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Chandigarh