Awareness-driven awakening and advertisement- driven allurement by various Departments of Government and manufacturing sector players offering a wide variety of consumer goods respectively bring home response from the target sections among the land’s masses in diverse extent and nature. Mysuru’s Urban Local Body and the city’s residents, estimated numerically at more than 1.3 million together testify the inverse relation between the effort on the part of the former to create awareness about pro-actively keeping the city’s space free from garbage and the response from the residents, reportedly accounting for one-fourth of the total headcount living in the city’s slums, apart from a considerable number of residents whose agenda is to indulge in discarding garbage disdainfully in their neighbourhood, roadsides and open spaces, ready to pick up a wordy duel using abusive words when asked to give up their habit. The marketing arms of consumer goods manufacturing industry seem to be leaving no stone unturned while beaming novel allurements, starting from the buy-one-take-two-free slogan to offering attractive gifts with the catch of running up a bill in four figures. Hardly any section of society resists the allurements, not the least some well-marked sections with their pockets jingling.
Unlike the era of reaching the would-be patrons of their products by industry players mainly through dailies, we are in an era of aggressive marketing with the ubiquitous idiot box not sparing anybody who is awake. Glamorously produced handouts, quite often inserted in the pages of dailies as in Mysuru, is the order of the day. Frequently organised exhibition-cum-sale attracts customers in swarms, tempted by irresistible discounts.
