After struggling for months, a student had to cancel his subscription to one of the wireless internet service providers in the city. The connection had not lived up to the promises advertised.
The portable USB modem hardly allowed him the mobility one expects from such devices and the data speed was erratic and unreliable. The internet service provider had allured him with the deceitful promise that it would provide him a speed of “up to x Mbps” which in reality is hardly ever achieved.
That there will be fluctuations in the speed was actually mentioned by this company in the tedious document containing the terms and conditions, which nobody bothers reading.
Because the public is gullible, and no one has the time to go through the interminably long clauses in these documents, some unscrupulous companies get the opportunity to hoodwink clients.
If you call up the notorious helplines of these companies, they will tell you things which will never solve the problem. It is doubtful if the helpline people even know that restarting the laptop or plugging-unplugging the modem is hardly a logical solution to the problem of slow internet.
The reason you have slow and inconsistent performance is that your service provider is probably serving more people than it has the capacity for. Just like a tap meant for ten cannot provide water for twenty at the required rate, if a service provider with the capacity to serve a hundred has twice the number of clients, the quality of the connection for each drops drastically.
If you file a formal complaint against such an unscrupulous service provider, it will immediately produce its meticulously prepared terms and conditions and show you that it mentions “up to x Mbps” and not “x Mbps all the way.”
The truth is, clients do not really concentrate on the “up to” part and even in advertisements, you would notice that there is a tendency to try heart and soul to make sure that it escapes your attention through magnification of the “x Mbps” part.
This is only one of the innumerable cases of deliberate deprivation of consumers’ rights in Bangladesh. The mango juices that the beautiful models in television commercials convince us to try in most cases contain little more than chemical flavours and sugar.
One would not have considered this to be a case of immorality had the advertisements made it clear that the consumers are going to drink some chemical compounds and sugary water. The focus is therefore on consciously trying to dupe the consumers through claims which cannot be substantiated on moral grounds.
Most advertisements on television these days feature storylines which give you an imperfect impression of the advertised product. There is also the need to consider more seriously their intentional departure from reality.
Does that brand of hair oil really help in alleviating your headache? Does using that soap really give you head-turning good looks? You also wonder if using the service of a certain mobile phone operator is so good that it makes you dance on the streets in euphoria.
If you were from another planet, you probably would have questioned innocently how much these advertisements conform to the real world. They show you a world that does not exist at all.
Considering how the Indian television channels have overwhelmed us, it would not be impertinent to mention that the advertising trends in the neighbouring country are also characterised by remarkable lack of respect for reality and the real world.
So, as it is shown, if you use a particular body spray, you have all the women in the world having lecherous thoughts about you, or that it is a praiseworthy accomplishment if you manage to steal a girl from another person by wearing that scent.
Those who claim that these efforts to distort reality have no real influence on how people think are deeply mistaken. You just have to look around to witness the manifestations of “lessons” these nefarious advertisements teach.
How do we resist these harmful transformations? It is by having stringent, practical and effective regulations. But, how do you ensure their implementation?
That really depends on the sincerity of the government and its willingness to make sure that consumer rights are upheld, and we do not breed generations that cannot distinguish reality from fiction.
