Don't get us wrong. Elizabeth is a fine film. And it's a pity that the people of India will be denied three whole minutes of it because the CBFC thinks they need to be protected from the sight of bare bums. The trouble is, will the people of India want to see the film even if it is shown in its entirety? Or would they just prefer AishwaryaRai's peekaboo belly button.

That's the problem with marketing. Once you choose an image, a positioning, you have to make sure you fit the measurements. It's a bit like Arundhati Roy. Our Lady of Italics felt she was turning into a silver statue with her Booker Prize money for The God of Small Things. What better way to assuage her guilt than to Rally for the Valley? Once you achieve iconic status as an iconoclast -- courtesy her Kapur-bashing -- it's difficult to become part of the spaghetti-strap set.

Which is the dilemma Sachin Tendulkar is faced with. Witness the not-so-gentle knocks he's receiving at the hands of his favourite constituency -- no, not the cricket-loving audience of India, but television advertisers. Whether it is Britannia's Zip Sip which laughs at his Pepsi-drinking or Onida's KY series which mocks at his voice, the star of the cricket-pitch-via-live-TV is in danger of becoming a parody.

It happens in part because of overkill. Kargil turns from being a victory of the armedforces to an election issue to a cottage industry that keeps socialites busy and column inches occupied. Profound thoughts on blood shed by our boys exchanged over glasses of French wine at ticketed events where fashion designers rub shoulders with retired generals make Kargil an empty cut-out.

Which is the danger in marketing politics. There are few things that are still sacrosanct in India -- even religion, 13 years after TV's Ramayana is not one of them. Politics, in its earthy name-calling and door-to-door hustling, still is. So when you're told by the BJP to put your money on `Tried. Tested. Trusted.' (and don't miss the dots) you have to pause. The Surf of last year has become the Surf Excel of today. Yesterday it washed white, today it washes whitest. The Able Leader has grown into an Able Label.

In this headlong rush of sloganeering, even history becomes a punching bag. How else can one explain the ripping off of Mahatma Gandhi's Quit India slogan in a full page newspaper advertisement thatnot-so-subtly asks Sonia Gandhi to leave India? Yesterday's patriotic rallying cry becomes today's cheap shot. It's the same with the Dynasty. What was the meeting ground of the best of Western liberal thinking and the most earnest of Indian nationalism -- Allahabad's Anand Bhavan -- is now just a backdrop to the start of a TV campaign.

Can a Vipassana meditation course and a Colombian girlfriend fit into the Family Firm theory? From being a tight fit, the brand can become a straight jacket. Which is a lesson the BJP's media managers ought to learn from the party they most love to emulate. Kargil cannot sell forever, Atlantique intrusions regardless.

And why look further than the man everybody thinks is the star of the millennium, just because the BBC says he is. Till he was just the Angry Young Man, he was an icon. Once he parleyed his name into a corporation, which then hitched on to many others, he became a badly-scripted comedy. And then they wonder why there is no such thing as a modern-day myth.