End of an ad age.

Disclaimer: The characters who form a part of the following blog are entirely non-fictional, though the events associated with them are not. The author claims protection against any possible defamation suits by claiming that all this is in good humor (hopefully).

Boost has decided that it would pull out of its deal with Sachin Tendulkar because the costs involved were getting unmanageable for them. No, Sachin did not hike his fee. (those days are either in the pre-Mendis era or when Kalki decides to pay, possibly one of the longest anticipated visits, to our part of the universe) The reason as an "inside, highly placed, credible source who does not wish to be named" put it was because of the spiralling costs in their Countdown to 11954 campaign.

In all its eagerness to be associated with the record breaking event, Boost had at the start of the Sri Lanka series decided that on some of the tv channels there will be a sort of a counter which would display the number of runs that the Little Master had to get to cross Lara's milestone. Little did they know they'd have to run the campaign for a couple of months rather than the couple of innings they had hoped for. The source (the same one as above, so i'll spare the adjectives) also suggested that, if only Tendulkar had let them know his intent of breaking the record at home against the best team in the world they would have waited before launching the campaign.

Saurav Ganguly meanwhile has approached Pepsi and asked them to include him back in their list of brand ambassadors. In fact he's offered to do it for free but has made just one request in return. He wants to shoot an ad similar to the "sympity" raising one a couple of years back, where the king of come backs is shown almost fighting back tears as he pleads the nation and the selectors to give him one more chance. Pepsi have reluctantly agreed.

This time however, plans are on to shoot the ad at the old home of cricket where Dada will be seen practicing his off side magical shots on one side of the screen and similar strokes from his still awe inspiring debut century are shown on the other. This is being described as an attempt to remind the selectors,and more importantly himself of what he is/was(choice left to reader depending on whether he/she is Bengali or not) capable of. One factor which they seem to have not taken note of is that Star Cricket has already shown that innings N-1 times where N is k/0. So the moment an image from the match comes up they will switch channels at speeds = k*speed of light (k > 0).

In the meanwhile,Kissan have stated that they are not very happy with the way Dravid has associated himself with their brand of late. They say that Dravid seems to be projecting an image of being stuck in a jam, the traffic variety. On the one hand, run traffic has stopped and on the other the pedestrian signal seems to be always green,explaining why he's almost always walking to and from the pavilion.

However, all is not lost for The Wall. Gillete have expressed a keen interest in extending their contract with him. A senior management official was quoted as saying "We have always prided ourselves on being able to provide clean and close shaves. One just has to watch the replays of his recent knocks and the number of close shaves that he has had will be very much evident. And ya, there are no cuts at all. It matters little though that instead of a clean shave, he's geting himself clean bowled more often these days."

After all, there seems light at the end of the tunnel, the one in which Indian batting stars seem to have gotten derailed right in the middle of.