Flyers and the old days of movie advertising.

I am at one of the many parks in Chennai for my morning walk. I keep trying different
parks and hope to do a post called "Parks of Chennai" or something like that soon. :-)

You have to give credit to the Chennai Corporation for the way they have renovated
most of the parks in the city. Not only does it make the city look good, it provides
greenery (lungs for the city) and also a place for people to exercise, walk or just plain
unwind.

As I finish my walk and walk out of the park, I am accosted by a guy with a flyer, which advertises a gym in the locality. Many years ago, I was a daily gym-goer and loved the experience, but then somehow the habit died away. I do think of joining a gym, but am
not sure whether I would be disciplined enough to do it daily. Anyway, I politely decline
the flyer (why take it & dump in trash, when I have no plans of joining) and walk home.

I was reminded of a time long ago when there were flyers of a different kind. And when
me (and my sisters) would vie for these flyers. Like many other things of the past, this
has also become extinct and so I thought it would be a good idea to share it here for
those that have never known about this.

Also, having posts about such vignettes of my childhood on this blog would make this site
a sort of a repository for my son to browse through when he is able to read and will help
him know about how life was in his father's time & age.

In our school-days, when we were staying outside Kerala, one annual routine was the
2-month summer vacation that we would spend at Kerala with our grandparents.
They looked forward to it as much as we kids did. After spending 10 lonely months,
they awaited the 2 months when we would be at home.

Like with other NRK (Non Resident Keralite) kids, we found a lot of things new and
intriguing at Kerala. Stuff which we did not see in other parts of India that is known
to us. And one of them was the peculiar way in which movies were advertised back
then. Ofcourse there did exist movie-posters stuck on walls, but the theatre-owners
used another advertising medium, which we kids from out of town found interesting.

Every Friday when a new movie was released, a car fitted with loudspeakers would
do the rounds of the town, with a guy extolling about the new movie, the actors and
stuff. We could hear the racket even when the car was still a few hundred metres
away and would run to the main gate. The motivation being the flyers that they
would throw out of the car windows.

The flyer would have the movie name & brief storyline and other related stuff printed
on it. Plus ofcourse a miniature replication of the movie poster itself. We would wave
out to the guys in the car and on most days they would throw out a bunch of flyers
which would fly here & there behind the car and which we would go collect.

Since our Malayalam reading skill was almost zero back then, there wasn't much
sense that we could make out of the poster, other than gawking at the picture on it.
We would take the flyer to our Grandpa who would read it out for us.

Over the years, this way of advertising movies died a gradual death. Today the daily
newspaper lists out the movies playing at the theatres in town. And ofcourse you have
the movie posters plastered on the walls in town.