We Can Fight COVID-19 by Chanting ‘Am Am, Am Am’

A parable for the ages uncovered by Manish Thanvi, Senior Creative Director

There is no typo. This is not a drill.

Hi! My name is Manish Thanvi and I am here to entertain you till the self-proclaimed twitter noob who we lovingly know as Binaifer drafts her next set of ‘Keeping Up With COVID’ thoughts. If you haven’t read them already, ignore this post and do yourself a favor by clicking here or here.

Think of me as the substandard nameless opening act you have to endure before you get to see the headliner and that’s how you do ‘expectation setting’ kids, nice and low.

So as opening acts go, let me take six seconds (occupational tendency) to introduce myself. Carbon-based life form at C137 who despises knuckle-thumb readers. Most active on Instagram with zero posts.

Now let’s address that headline.

I found myself in a conundrum, at the ripe age of 14.

I had to pick a third language in school. I wanted French because my then flame wife was taking it. But like in any one-sided love story, we had a villain. Turns out as a student, your choices are directly proportional to marks and inversely proportional to the feels.

Disheartened, I chose Marathi.

Now Marathi is great. My grasp on the language, not so much.

So my teacher did what any respectable human would. Snitched on me by calling my parents for a community cribbing sesh a.k.a. the parent-teacher meeting.

My fate was sealed. I was asked to watch Marathi Sahyadri every day. True story, I think they saw it as edupunishment. But I was not the one to take an L.

The programming on Marathi Sahyadri in the 90s was, let’s just say, concise. I was introduced to this wonderful thing — aamchi mati aamchi mansa (our land, our people) — an agricultural show with an opening title that’ll make sicko mode’s editor press f. To date, I have no clue what they were on about but every day for a year I binged on this show.

Fun fact, I have also been a patron to the aamchi mati aamchi mansa theme park in deolali camp, Nashik. Needless to say, I stan.

So why this unnecessary trip down memory lane?

Because my conditional repetition has led me to believe that the answer to defeating this pandemic is in amchi mati, amchi manasa.

You know the real pandemic is prejudice.

—voices in my head

What is the most successful PSA campaign in the history of mankind?

Now some might say it’s the supreme leader’s gift of Juche which if you aren’t aware of, please google it for a lighter err… glorious laugh. But since the humble folks of North Korea don’t have access to the world wide web, we’ll have to rule them out.

28 Lions say it is Dumb Ways To Die. This seven-year-old Australian stinger passed advertising’s Turing test i.e. the Ogilvy test with flying colors by becoming a campaign that has successfully sold for years. From viral videos, Mobile games, Christmas singles, Offputting merchandise you name it they’ve sold it. But then the question arises, but did they save.

Now, this is where we enter what the internet kids call ‘unpopular opinion’ and if you are Gen Z with a bluebird lean than, Bomboclaat.

The effectiveness of DWTD has been very scarcely documented and is a cold topic of debate among many so I’ll leave links for you to form your own opinions and respect the word count set for me. Read this and this. The most credible statistic (picked from the submitted case study) the campaign helped to reduce near misses and accidents around trains by 10 percent. Hold that thought.

David Ogilvy also said, “What works in one country almost always works in other countries”. Don’t be surprised, the man said a lot of things and wrote even more.

Now I want you to think if DWDT would have worked in India, the land where blob’s sing and dance all the time on your Instagram explore tab and don’t even get me started on that other thing. Tok tik.

Is the 10% reduction in near misses and accidents a reality we could achieve. What if I told you we achieved 100%?

Aagla Station, Dadar

The first planned area of Mumbai was also the second-highest railway station in Central railways in terms of trespassing and trespassing related deaths.

With 2.9 lac daily commuters using the station, it isn’t a surprise. The surprise was what they did to reach trespassing zero. You see in India near misses and accidents happen when people try to cross rail tracks. Why not take the foot-over bridges or escalators, you ask. Good question, I’ll let the smirking authorities get back to you on that.

Well, one authority had enough as his palms clenched, patience weak, the jaw was heavy. Will the additional divisional railway manager Ashutosh Gupta, please stand up. His idea was simple. He put grease on the fencing.

His zero dollar costing market insight, “people are very careful about their clothes.”

This radical understanding of consumer reality with an at-most clinically immediate and universally regularised solution achieved a 100% reduction in people playing a fatal version of donkey kong at the station. Read about it here.

Am I saying David Ogilvy was wrong? Did Central Railway create a more effective campaign that DWTD? Is that a lizard on the wall?

“I read it. But what is your point?”

—first draft reader

It’s high time we question the nature of our reality like Mr. Gupta.

The fact that a 20-second handwash is news to a large majority of Indians, predominantly because isolated basins and running water is not a reality that is shared by everyone. The sheer fact that an average Indian household is under 500 sq.ft and top search trends for words like lockdown and social distancing have a prefix of ‘what does’ and a suffix of ‘it means’ pushes us more towards creating solutions that are closer to home. Solutions that are more inclusive of all realities and not just ours. A great man once said, “Our values call upon us to care about the lives of people we will never meet.” It’s time we account for these strangers.

Strangers who are desperately grasping to understand the impact of this pandemic and are latching onto what we might term as frivolous institutionalized tasks as a distraction to the consequences that stare blankly at them. Strangers who are trying to run, walk, crawl back to their homes because the concrete jungle of dreams has failed them. Strangers who are being beaten in the streets for stepping outside because there just isn’t enough space inside to co-exist for 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Be it the 92,000 strangers who braved the abuse and called out for help or be it that one stranger who leaped towards the end because suicide made more sense than the test results. Now more than ever, do I see the meaning in the phrase, truth is stranger than fiction because while fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; the truth isn’t.

It’s time we address the truth of our land, the truth of our people.

So the next time, as you whip your dalgona and think of a TikTok dance idea challenge or a never seen before spacing hack for your logo, take a minute and like Rancho beat your chest as you chant am am, am am, maybe reflect and continue with your regularly scheduled programming.