Summary of Light My Lucky
The text talks about a clever advertisement (विज्ञापन) for Lucky Strike cigarettes featuring ( देखाउनु) a beautiful young woman outdoors. The ad tries to make people connect smoking with good things like beauty, health, and pleasure (आनन्द). It shows the woman holding (समात्नु) an unlit cigarette and the words "Light My Lucky" below her. The ad wants people to think that smoking these cigarettes will make them healthy, attractive (आकर्षक), and happy.
The woman in the ad looks pretty (सुन्दर) and strong, and the background seems like a nice outdoor place. The ad wants us to think that smoking these cigarettes (चुरोट) will make us feel like her, enjoying the outdoors and feeling good about ourselves.
The words "Light My Lucky" have a double (दोहोरो) meaning. They suggest that the woman wants someone to light her cigarette, but also that the cigarette is a "light" version, meaning it's supposed to be healthier (स्वस्थ). The ad plays with these two meanings to make smoking seem desirable (इच्छा गर्न योग्य) and harmless.
However, the ad hides the truth that smoking is actually harmful to our health, especially for pregnant women. The warning from the Surgeon General about smoking and pregnancy is placed in a small corner, making it easy to miss. The ad ignores (ध्यान नदिनु) this important health information and only focuses on the positive and attractive image of smoking.
In conclusion, the ad is cleverly (चलाखीपूर्वक) designed to make smoking seem cool and healthy, but it doesn't tell us the whole truth about the dangers of smoking. It's essential (आवश्यक) to understand that smoking is harmful, and we should not be influenced (प्रà¤ावित) by advertisements that try to make it look good. Taking care of our health is much more important than any misleading (à¤्रामक) advertisements.
Light My Lucky [Original Text]
At this point we would like to describe an advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes, because cigarette ads are among the cleverest and most technically perfect that one can find, and because their use raises interesting moral problems about the functioning of advertising in general. The ad is very simple. It presents a photo of a young woman (perhaps 23 or 24 years old) in a sweater, in a field or meadow, wearing a scarf, with one hand in her pocket and the other resting lightly on her windblown hair, holding an unlighted cigarette. She gazes straight out of the frame. The words "Light My Lucky" appear in quotation marks, very prominently displayed, starting just below her chin and extending across to the right margin of the page. In the lower right corner of the frame, also superimposed over the photographic image of the woman, is a large image of an opened package of Lucky Strike Lights. At the bottom of the frame, on the left, is the well-known warning from the Surgeon General, which says: "Smoking by Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, and Low Weight. You can visualize the ad, we are sure, or find a comparable ad in a current magazine.
The young woman in the ad is very beautiful. She is outdoors and dressed in outdoorsy clothing, a thick scarf and a heavy sweater. The background is blurred, but it looks like a field or wooded area. What has all this got to do with cigarettes? She is holding an unlighted cigarette in a hand that rests on top of her windblown blonde hair. She looks serious, or perhaps sultry. We read the written phrase in quotation marks as what she says, though she does not appear to be speaking-what she might say, perhaps, but certainly what she wants: "Light My Lucky."
The woman is lightly but carefully made up: an unobtrusive lipstick, delicate but effectively applied eye makeup. The ad makes her the central figure in a cluster of metonymic associations: woman/cigarette/outdoors. This is a healthy, vigorous woman. The makers of the ad expect some of these positive healthy values to attach themselves (in the reader's subconscious mind) to the cigarette.
The woman is also extremely good-looking. Asking someone for a light is a classic sexual approach, presented in countless films, and turned into a metaphor for sex itself in rock songs like "Light My Fire." The phrase in the ad-"Light My Lucky"--quite deliberately suggests these other texts that are now part of our cultural memory. We call this sort of allusion intertextuality. (intertextuality is, like metaphor and metonymy, a way of presenting two or more things at the same time in the same text.) The ad thus associates the cigarette with beauty, health, and erotic pleasures. These metonymies are deliberate: the cigarette is meant to acquire the associations as permanent attributes.
It is worth noting that the word light is used in a punning way in the ad, and that a pun, like metaphor and metonymy, is a way of bringing two meanings together in a single place--in a single word, in fact. Light is used as a verb to mean set on fire: light my cigarette, light a fire. By a common metaphorical extension, it means "inflame" or "arouse," as in "light my fire." But light (as opposed to heavy) is used in our weight conscious and health-conscious society to mean "free from bad ingredients." Light beer has fewer calories; light cigarettes have less tar and nicotine.
These uses are slightly metaphorical in themselves. The "light" in "Light My Lucky" thus refers to both the classic sexual approach and the relative healthiness of the "light" cigarette, just as the image of an attractive woman in outdoor clothing refers to the same two things. Always, in such ads, the hope is held out that the desirable qualities metonymically connected to the product will come to the reader if he or she uses the product. Do you want to be healthy and attractive, and experience erotic pleasure? Smoke Lucky Strike Lights.
The "Surgeon General's Warning" that appears in the corner of the ad refers to pregnant women. But the woman in the ad is anything but pregnant. She is as emphatically unattached as she is positively healthy. The Surgeon General associates smoking, pregnancy, and ill- health. The ad associates smoking, sex, and good health. The idea
that smoking is unhealthy is obliterated by these contradictory messages, leaving only pregnancy connected to ill health. This is an extremely clever and well-made ad.