Virus alert
Feedback: anilkakar@gmail.com
Tags : Backbeat
By Anil Kakar,
Chief Creative Officer, Gasoline
There’s a whole new virus in town, which is threatening to reach epidemic proportions. It’s struck the food business (McAloo Tikki/ Masala Maggi), the tech business (Nokia/Made for India) and even the luxury business (Cavalli/Nehru Jacket).
But, most of all, it continues to claim its fair share of victims in the advertising business. It’s called whatstheindianidea.exe.
Three out of five writers complained of nausea and headaches, while four out of five planners reported a case of relapse every two hours or at a presentation, whichever came earlier.
Once downloaded, it more often than not uninstalls other applications such as BigIdea 9.1, Craft 11.2, Style 8.3 and replaces them with applications such as Jingles 12.3, Celebrities 4.2, BihariHindi 10.0 and WarliArt 1.2. Consequently, you’ll notice a distinct slowdown in applications such as Memorability 8.3 and Distinctiveness 11.2. In some cases, iTunes reportedly re-arranges the playlist and renames all the files as ‘Rehman.mp3’.
Thanks to its advanced geo-tagging capabilities, it automatically senses a conference room environment and launches a file called ‘Proud to be Indian.ppt’, with black and white portraits of Vishwanath Anand, the Indian Cricket Team and Big B, of course, with clips from the movie, ‘Bunty aur Bubli’, thrown in for good measure.
whatstheindianidea.exe is known to have syncing problems in the states of Goa, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Nagaland, Andhra Pradesh, Tripura, Assam, Meghalaya and Karnataka, where a local language version of the software is unavailable. These states roughly account for 33% of India’s GDP.
Additionally, the worm infects programmes such as Pronunciation 10.2, replacing the alphabet ‘S’ with ‘J’ in most cases, as reflected in the statement, ‘Life ij Eajy’. (When it quite obviously isn’t.)
Experts are flummoxed at the fact that brands such as Facebook, Google, Shoppers’ Stop, Volkswagen, Axe, Vodafone and Taj are thriving in the marketplace without installing whatstheindianidea.exe in their ommunication.
If you feel you are a victim, if your identity has been stolen or if commands are being sent without your approval, it’s not too late to uninstall the virus. You’ll notice that you’d have cleaned up your disk space to install more productive applications such as whatstheuniversalidea.exe. If it’s not yet there yet, you just might find it soon at the App Store. It’s where all the universal ideas seem to be coming from, anyways.