In America, there are laws against false advertising. Not so in India. You can lie as much as you want, and very little can be done against you. Let me give you two examples.
The first is a two-wheeler made by Bajaj, a very large company in India. The advertisement is great. A cool man is standing there near his motorcycle, holding onto some sunglasses. A group of motorcyclists shoot by, and one man grabs the sunglasses out from our hero's hand. So, he gets on his Bajaj to chase them, but of course he takes a shortcut. He's shooting through the forest...no issues so far. Suddenly, you see him at a dam, going so fast that he's defying gravity. He's actually sideways, like if you move a cup of water so quickly that the centrifugal (or is that centripetal?) force is so great the the water doesn't fall out when the cup goes sideways. Bajaj's two-wheeler is so fast, it can become like a Graviton ride at a carnival. Of course, our fast hero beats the gang and coolly rescues his sunglasses, winning the attention of a female. Moral of the story: this motorcycle will help me win chicks (or birds, as they call them in India), an idea common in America, and it can defy gravity. Okay, I'm pretty sure that if I tried what he did in the advert, I would be in a cemetary by now. At least in American ads, they tell you that this is a professional driver on a specific course. Not here.
The second is in print media. Haresh Fua pointed it out for me. An advert for Fairness Cream that claimed that, in only four weeks (char atwaadiya), my skin will go from a darker color to a lighter one, as is indicated by a picture. Half the shown face is dark, the other half light. First of all, four weeks for such a change is most likely impossible and unsafe. Second, the picture itself is the greatest falsehood. If one looked at it for most the five seconds, it becomes obvious that the picture was changed in the computer, most likely to a random lighter shade. How can we tell? Whoever did the computer work neglected something obvious. The eye color. Unless the model was putting the cream on his eyes as well as on his skin, there's no way this is the same person. The hair didn't really change much, but the eyes...the difference is striking. Obvious lie!
These could never happen in the US nowadays. If adverts make great claims, they must indicate that this is a dramatization or that these results are not normal. Here in India...let's lie!
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