By Malay Desai
From: Orchard, Bangalore
The reading device Kindle’s first mainstream commercial for the Indian market opens with a man paying his respects to his dead mother’s picture before leaving his city home for a remote beach village. On the way, he buys a book on his device and keeps reading throughout his multi-legged journey. Soon after reaching the village, the man is shown narrating the story animatedly to an enthused group of children, as parts of the book appear on the screen. The session goes on for long, but continues despite rains and eventually evokes tears among his young listeners. ‘Celebrating the joy of reading’, goes the only voiceover of the film.
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’Tis the season of film and literary festivals, and I’ve already received a dose of long, artful film sequences and book readings by kurta-clad authors on lawns. Fitting in somewhere between films and modern literature is this effort, the first commercial by Kindle, American retailer Amazon’s revolutionary e-reading device that was launched in India in June 2013.
The biggest challenge for the e-book reader, besides seducing those who buy tablets, is to convince the tech-savvy metro slicker that the joy of reading a soft copyof a book, is the same, if not more than holding one in your hands. Kindle, already a hit with the suave, eco-friendly reader/traveller, wants to sell its classic variant to more than those, and resorts to Ram Madhvani of Equinox.
It’s a top investment, for Madhvani is the man who’s aced the ‘travel wide to make crafty films’ genre, watch the warm SatyamevJayatetitle sequence for proof. But more than his knack of presenting landscapes well, he digs in to his skills that hit our hearts in the ‘mute girl’ and later the ‘money transfer’ films for Airtel. Here, he takes a Sri Lankan holiday with the protagonist of the film, to return with a winding, piano-laced plug about the joy of reading.
The film tugs on the ‘mother-and-child’ way, one of the oldest and most dependable routes taken by our ad walas since much prior to ‘Sehwag ki maa’ days. But the treatment is different, storytelling if you may – this is about a man who relives his mother’s tales/ways of livening up a bunch of kids.
He’s revisiting a place, meeting young people he already knows and those who’ve been awaiting him. He then immerses them, makes them laugh and sob, just the way he did while reading. And of course, through the film,he uses several functions of the electronic device in multiple environments.
Well played Amazon, we hope thisKindle also resists falling tears.
(To watch this film, look up Youtube.com/KindleIndia
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