It was sad to see the innumerable ads given out on Rajiv Gandhi’s birthday by the various government ministries and departments in the newspapers. As counted, the Times of India, Delhi edition carried a total of 16 advertisements related to Rajiv Gandhi – 11 half-page, 4 full-page and 1 quarter-page. That’s “gyaaraah-char”, or in other terms “atyaachaar” over the Indian common man – precious public money is being wasted on such monickers without any accountability.
The usual political practice of keeping the inauguration of key projects on hold for such special occasions is also deplorable. Politicians play up this card time and again and use this ploy to get attention of the powers. And the common man suffers at the hands of these shenanigans…
It should be incumbent on the government to discourage such spending. Only if we could have had a single 1-page ad in the newspaper from the Government of India, it would have been sufficient to show the government’s respect towards the leader. But alas. Even newspapers like TOI don’t have a check on such wasteful expenditure by the government and discourage it. In fact they would love to profit from so many ads, which although is good from the business sense of it, can be highly questioned from the ethical point of view of the greater society which the newspaper serves.
Most of us indeed respect Rajiv Gandhi and what he did for India as a national leader. However, I deem true respect to him would be paid not by squandering public money in such useless ways but by ensuring that the intended recipients get not the proverbial 15 paise from a rupee but the full value. Then only would we be able to proclaim ourselves as having followed his espoused principles…
The Face of ME!!! 
he did talk abt 10 paise reaching the common out of 100 paise..through all the social benefit, upliftment schemes…..in tht case this is a insult to him..at this juncture i wd like to remember buddha…who said if u follow the essence of my teachings and not the words…and yet we fail time abd again ….
and i guess we need a public owned media….where the public owns majority of shares and no one holds more than 5%…i guess we need a BBC
Dear Rishi…
What u see in form of newspaper adds is a kind of Branding .. The entity in question here is Congress… what u see is just another attempt by a political party to make the most of one surname called Gandhi 🙂
Hand down for good or bad .. Congress is a party which is best in Branding .. they have been successful in creating a brand and are doing to same to the next generation .. I would say we shud start having Congress as an example in our Marketing Class 🙂
Chao ..
Vishal Shukla
Well said Rishi and Vishal..in fact its true..