Nowadays to buy or not to buy is not the question. You are almost certainly spoon-fed in this respect by over five hundred thousand hoardings and signboards that litter all over Karachi. All you have to do is stay put and look around.
Even with a casual glance, you can find horadings of every shape size and colour. The variety really attracts your attention from different locations. Atop buildings or screwed insecurely onto tall, shaky steel structures. So keen is the urge to catch your eyes that even manually manned traffic signal stands are not spared. In fact like mobile phones, outdoor advertising too has become mobile. When proudly carried on the chest or back of T- shirts, jackets, and even trousers. When exhibited on the carriers of cabs or coaches.
We see these messages as posters or graffiti, decorating almost all decently plastered walls of commercial, educational or residential buildings. So common is this practice that renowned as well as notorious personalities (dead or alive) are seen as neighbours with their back to the wall!
However, positioned and of whatever shape, size, design or colour the purpose of all billboards is the same. To get to you the message of their sponsors. This is achieved by the use of languages, signs, pictures, numbers and alphabets. The language commonly used is English — which by the way is Greek to more than 60 per cent of our illiterates. And of the remaining 40 percent, 25 percent do not read it, five percent casually eye it and the remaining 10 percent conveniently ignore it.
Urdu is also used in a scholarly attempt at transliteration producing amusing results. My foreigner friend read the billboard exhibiting Madadgar as mad gar (mad house). A semi-Urdu literate friend read Traffic Police written on the police truck as Terrific Police!
Commercial organizations bolster their sale by various selected artifices, hoping that their psychological impact will click and pay handsome dividends. Coaching centres for instance promise hundred percent success, in all subjects, at all levels, on full payment of non-refundable fee, as they are aware that failure is the foundation of success!
Consumer items, however adulterated, artificially flavoured and nicotine rich, are projected to promote robust health. This is profusely illustrated by smiling faces of bonny babies, radiant grins showing sparkling teeth of maidens or mothers and pictures of dare-devil acrobats scaling a precipice to convince the admiring onlookers of their energy by puffing a smoke on reaching the top alive!
Usable items are shown to have profound utility, durability and decorative value simultaneously, though practically speaking, all this depends on the quality, usage and each individual’s aesthetic sense. IT related terminology has detonated with splinters splashed all over, on almost every second signboard. And the splinters have so erratically assembled that not only the layman is perplexed but computer connoisseurs too are confused by the mystic messages!
The letters are of course chosen from the chart of 26 English alphabets, but appear to be deliberately, haphazardly combined to make no sense at all. Not only this, the placement of some signboards is so quixotic that their messages are an antithesis of each other.
The message of a happy mother with one child, (a family planning blessing), and that of an adjacent signboard showing four kids blessed by father with an insurance policy, covertly commends celibacy!
All this hotchpotch is all the more accentuated by careless spellings. Interesting examples are Hell Park, Steal Town, Toilet Ph - , Mood Street, Bust Stop.
Amidst all this rigmarole, a sensible message was discernible on the rear of a water tanker which read Oh Allah, protect me from lawyers, doctors and borrowers. Perhaps the driver had the UN, WHO and the IMF in mind.
Amused or surprised? No need to be. To err is human, to forgive Divine.
