So Bad It’s Good

The man who invented the pink flamingo garden ornament is a millionaire.
So is the man behind ‘pet rocks’. There is a lesson to be learnt here. If you go into business and your product is crap, you fail. But if it’s really, really, really crap then you become a millionaire.

The surging popularity of kitsch has made millionaires out of DC Comics and Desperate Housewives. Kitsch (or ‘camp’, if you prefer) is a get-rich quick scheme that has been around for ages. It’s potential is vastly underrated. Insight - people like a laugh. Let me rephrase that, people are suckers for a laugh. That’s why so many people forward
dumb e-mails around.

A few years back, I was involved in this sort of artist-community project with my art director, Jiten and another writer George Koshy. One drunken night, we’re telling each other crude puns that make use of harmless English words that sound like obscenities in the vernacular. The kind that Dada Kondke made popular. (Eg: ‘Bank ki lorry’, which on the face of it means, the lorry from the bank. Read another way, it sounds like ‘sister’s arse’).
Check out www.bosedkdesigns.com to see them. T-shirts we made out of these subsequently sold for Rs. 1500 each at an art gallery and were sold out on the first day! Just to give you a sense of scale, the standard rate for a Levi’s or Benetton t-shirt in India rarely goes beyond Rs. 250. Jiten has since moved on from kitsch and makes loads more money making real art (depends how you look at it really) but it’s the corny Dada Kondke joke t-shirts that he is still best known for in design circles.

My armchair entrepreneur brain now goes into overdrive. If we take ‘making crap really, really crap’ as an idea, then surely the Americans haven’t cornered the market. Every country’s got tons of crap. Asia’s already got one winner in karaoke. How about other stuff?

The Ice Kachang has possibilities. But they need to do something that makes it worse. Maybe sprinkle some prawn crackers on it. (If they don’t do that already). Marketed well, India’s tooth powder and beedies can be a hit surely. Prestige pressure cookers will soon be in people’s living rooms with their Phillipe Starck chairs. And if only they up the ante on the cheese factor a little bit more, people will be bidding for Rupa underwear and banians on e-Bay. Everybody’s tried kitsch at one point or the other, with varying degrees of success. MTV’s benefited the most with its Quick Gun Murugan and Banjo-Macho spots. Some time back, a Delhi restaurant called Khaaja Chowk made a few bucks too. There’s no denying there’s money in cheesy stuff. The trick is in deciding the degree of corniness.

I’ve decided to try and get my hands on some of Y&R’s original SingTel and Citibank prints from the 90s. Who knows, it might be worth a buck or two someday.