To most lay persons, few economic phenomena are as puzzling as advertising. It seems impossible to believe that anyone with an iota of sense would be induced to purchase products by the tall claims made about them in glossy magazine and television ads. But when profitseeking firms and multinational corporations spend millions advertising, we can be sure that they have done their calculations right. In 1995 the top 100 firms in the US spent 50 billion dollars on advertising. Each year, during the SuperBowl, the final match of American football, a 30-second TV commercial costs more than a million dollars.

Over the next few weeks we will, in India, witness one of the largest advertisement campaigns that occur anywhere in the third world—the advertising of politicians and their parties. The BJP alone is believed to be ready with Rs 10 crore in its coffer. It is a sad fact of our political life that the marketing is as important as the content—often more.

So, though we may dismiss the ads we see on television and on hoardings, and believe that we are immune to them, the fact is that a vast majority of us is not. In 1994, soon after we arrived in the US, my family would watch on TV the commercial for a cumbersome fitness machine and laugh at gullible Americans. A few months later I was outvoted and the machine arrived. Another few weeks and everybody stopped using it.