Birthday wishes for two mascots

hi all, it has been my long-lasting ambition to work in basketball into my blog. This is the first draft of an article i am writing. i am putting it up because i don't have MS office on my comp anymore so the formatting wouldn't come out well. A big thank you to Shashi for comp time. Here it is folks,

It is the time of the year again where we take our collective hats off to two of the most influential marketing coups in the youth product market, to have ensued in the past fifty years. If the loose purse-strings of the Generation Next are to be placed in a cultural perspective, the most seminal contributions in this regard stem from two personages whose birth-dates enjoy a fortuitous propinquity - St. Valentine and Michael Jordan.

Opinions differ as to the actual personage of St. Valentine, the Catholic Church recognizing at least three martyrs of the same name. It is undisputed though that the celebration of Valentine's Day is a custom that incorporates vestiges of pre-Christian and early Catholic beliefs. The Valentine culture has ingrained itself, with almost archetypal psychic strength, in European culture. The patron saint of love is honored more unreservedly than the Savior himself in places.

Nevertheless, public attitude towards Valentine's Day remained conservative up to the post-War boom of the late 1940's. It was then that, endeavoring to capitalize on the burgeoning 'teen' consumer market, the mass marketing of Cupid's bower began. By the late 1980's, Valentine's Day was a more integral part of the American culture than Yuletide.

Around the same time, Valentine relaxed its Caucasian base and invaded other cultures, India not being the least of its conquests. The Valentine Day fever, unlike most Indian cultural imports, was contagious at the grass-roots level rather than forced from above by the glitterati of Bollywood. In fact, foreigners often remark at the scale of celebration of the event in India. The immense popularity of the Valentine concept is a beautiful vindication of Vivekananda's, and to an extent Gandhi's, conception of the Indian as an ingenuous purveyor of affection.

Born on 18th February 1963, Michael Jordan stands alongside Pele and Muhammad Ali as a global ambassador of the unifying power of sport. As an emblem for marketing savvy however, Jordan stands in a class of his own. By far the highest earning athlete in the history of team sports, Jordan's meteoric rise in the context of product endorsements was totally unprecedented in magnitude and heralded the beginning of a new era in brand marketing. The global entertainment sports market is a vast agglomeration of parochial interests. And yet, they all owe their success, in some part at least, to the man everybody thought could fly

The 'Be like Mike' campaign was so very effective in the playgrounds and gravel courts of suburban USA that it spawned innumerable replicas all over the world. Be it David Beckham or the Williams sisters, or even Tiger Woods, the primary reason these athletes can demand and are offered obscenely high endorsement fees is the shadow of Jordan and the legendary success of Nike's Air Jordan campaign. In his first year under the Nike logo, the Air Jordan line topped $153 million in sales. His presence elevated Nike to a position of global dominance in the field of sport apparel manufacture.

In India, a land where the utterance of the name of a sport other than cricket is considered snobbish effrontery at its worse, Michael Jordan's impact is still pervasive. If nothing else, the ganjis hung in village markets with number 23 and "Street Bulbs" blazoned across the front would bear testament to the fact. The pampered Indian cricketers have but MJ to thank for their fat endorsement pay-checks.

What is it that unites a 2000-year old legend and a 42-year old icon? In a word - Capitalism.

It is nobody's case that love is found on a specific date of the Gregorian calendar within the folds of a greeting card or the petals of a rose. It is, likewise, nobody's case that wearing a particular brand of shoes named after a phenomenon will cause one's physical prowess to improve beyond bounds. And yet, the plethora of advertisements streaming past the public consciousness through all avenues of mass media insistently reiterates the same theme.

The media's projectivity and the audiences' gullibility both combine to create a market-space that is all but dictated to by the rise and fall of individual personalities in popular perception. Which is why brand ambassadors are picked and dropped as the law of averages works in its remorseless grind. And sportspersons jump out at us at the drop of the hat proclaiming their undying affection for particular brands of colas, candies, hair oils, laxatives, the works.

This is naked, ruthless capitalism at its finest. And this is proof of why the Soviet Republic is now late and no longer lamented. St. Valentine, Michael Jordan and their promoters are out to make as quick a buck as possible. And yet, in doing so, they ennoble humanity in very different ways. For one day, it is now societally acceptable for youth to shake off their shackles and express the tale of their hormones. Thousands of youngsters, instead of releasing their energy in destructive ways, spend hours at their neighborhood courts trying to 'Be like Mike'.

There is beauty in the spirit of bonhomie that the energetic efforts of Valentine Day sponsors have inadvertently created. There is grace in the spirit of competitiveness and raw physical exultation that the Jordan myth has unleashed upon contemporary youth. Both these cultural icons are two major triumphs of the Free Market economy, erstwhile so badly maligned in socialistic paradigms.

If personal expenditure and expressiveness were to be subjugated, the good saint Valentine would stand a strong chance of being excommunicated. If all men were to be equal, Michael Jordan would be pumping gas in Brooklyn. Capitalism can be soullessly ugly and demeaning. But it has its coruscations of nobility. Let us grant to the 'Ugly American' his due.