Always Aditya

By Bineeta Fialok

One of my friends went to a store on a Sunday to buy some stuff and saw that they were offering a free gift on a purchase of Rs. 250, but that was only on weekdays. Well, the mere mortal that she is, she couldn’t resist the temptation of the ‘free’ apple and ended up temporarily suspended, if not completely banished from her husband’s list of good shopping companions. Yes, you have guessed it correctly. She went back that day, but only to return with her husband, who had been hounded into accompanying her, a few days later. They bought some stuff and were eligible for the coveted free gift. The salesman went inside and promptly returned with a broom in his hand and a big smile on his face, saying, “Here’s your free gift mam”. Well, my saying that the broom was something useful, if not for anything else then at least for giving her hubby a few whacks and making him clean the house, was definitely no solace to her.

Ek lo ek muft….jodi hai re….seems to be the mantra of every retail business these days. Freebies and free gifts with anything and everything you shop for have become the order of the day. So much so that even before we ask for the price of a certain appliance or any other thing we may be planning to buy, the salesman informs us about the surprise (read shock) gift we are going to get if we buy it. And believe me, many people are gullible enough to fall for the offer and buy the thing even though it may not be so good after all, just for the sake of that surprise gift that they are going to get (which many a times turns out to be useless).

This addiction to the word free starts right from the time when we are still in the childhood phase. We tend to buy only those chewing gums, which have a sticker inside them or those wafers, which have a boomerang
free with them or may be cards with the pictures of cricketers on them. The infatuation with the word, grows, develops and matures (err…may be not) along with us.

The moment we hear the word ‘free’ I don’t know which particular area of our brain goes into an overdrive but something does happen to us. There is an excited look on our face our heart starts beating fast. (I sincerely believe that this can be a rather interesting and distinct topic for a Science student’s Ph.D.)  Some of us can even pass off as the personification of avarice in such situations. Whether we need that thing or not becomes secondary, but the fact that it’s coming to us for FREE is the highlight of the matter.

Here, it would be good to quote the example of a friend of mine who went to one of the shopping malls and spent some Big Bucks in the hope of getting a ‘fabulous’ dinner set for ‘free’. Yes, the word just doesn’t leave you, you see. Well she did get the dinner set, but once she got back home and opened the packing, she found, to her utter dismay that the set was none as fabulous as it had been made out to be. To be honest it would have been a shame to bring it out for anybody.

A set of people who have mastered the art of offering freebies are the ones working for tele-shopping networks. They will present to you a basic mixer and hope to make you jump out of your skin with joy and excitement as effervescent as theirs, as they offer you sundry things available with almost any mixer in the market, for FREE. On the personal front, I do get a perverted kind of pleasure in watching the bubbly goras
chattering on in flawless Hindi, about the woes that their present mixer gives them.

If you have ever noticed it, wherever there’s a sale, the word ‘free’ is almost always written in bold red letters. Somehow, my poor brain which unlike many people is untrained and unaware of the great possibilities inherent in this four letter word, has a habit of associating red with danger (Apart from a few good things, which come for a price of course). Alarm bells start ringing in my mind the moment I read the bold red FREE and I start thinking ‘What’s the catch, honey?’ Some people like me don’t have a trusting bone in them you see. We can’t seem to digest the fact that the owner of the store is actually such a benevolent and munificent spirit that he really wants us to have two or at times three things for the price of one. You see after meeting the Scrooges of this world one starts believing that Mother Teresa’s is just a legend.

Despite such experiences that we all have had at one point of time or the other, the word ‘free’ still fascinates us to no end. We experience the same kind of excitement, the same kind of anticipation and eagerness, every time we get to scratch a card and find out what our free gift is. Those few moments when we hold the scratch card, thinking of what might be waiting for us behind that silvery veneer, all sorts of wishes and dreams and hopes that we have had in our lives come to our mind and we secretly wish that that one card becomes our gateway to those still unfulfilled dreams. However skeptical I or some other people may be, none can deny the hope, optimism and happiness those few moments of probability and expectation give us.