It's second coming for sandalwood smuggler

One undertook a historic motorcycle voyage across his country to explore the dark underbelly of capital ism, the other was a bandit who prowled a forest for more than a decade, smuggling ivory and sandalwood. Their deaths were as dramatic as their lives, with officials hot on their heels -but it's one's luscious whiskers and the other's scraggly beard and intense gaze that have fetched them a place in popular culture.
The notorious sandalwood smuggler Veerappan, in all his fuzzy glory , has joined Argentine Marxist Che Guevara, among others, in staring out of T-shirts and jars that are using his name to sell. With the forest brig and -marked in everyone's mind more fo his lush bristles than the fear he struck in the hearts of the scanty-haired -being featured on the lid of a branded moustache wax, he has become the latest poster boy among other popular faces like singers John Lennon, Bob Marley and Kurt Cobain who up the “quirk“ quotient of consumerism.
To compare the two may sound sacrile gious. But market analyst Harish Bijoor explains the unlikely link between these faces VEE that draws the market.
WI “Most brands are staid entities. Some are quirky but more reactionary in nature.This involves taking a persona and creating a romance around it,“ he said. The moustache MARKE wax, he explained, has a market in London. “Having a lanky man with a big fuzz adds to the mystique that shrouds the sub-continent, especially India, often associated in the west as the land of snake charmers and dacoits. I know Che, Marley and Veerappan were poles and oceans apart but all of them were rebels in their own way and anything anti-establishment strikes a chord with many ,“ Harish pointed out.

Lush Cosmetics, a 20-year-old company with more than 900 stores in the UK and 48 other countries, is selling Veerappan Moustache Wax for $15.95. The once outback outlaw, whose kin barely eke out a living now, features as Smuggler's Soul, one of Lush's perfumes. The irony that the same man who killed at least 200 elephants and chopped down hundreds of sandalwood trees before being shot dead in 2004 is being used as an icon for a brand that prides itself on “fighting animal testing“ hasn't been missed by many .
Ankur, a Mumbai-based market analyst, says there are two streaks to people: who they are and who they want to be. People relate to these faces be cause they want to live vicariously like them. They want to stand out. “There is also a section of people who have no clue who these people are but just buy the brands with their faces because the design looks good,“ he said.
Che's mystique draws in-part from being hunted down by the CIA. The Ameri can spooks had gadgets to smoke him out - who else but the asthmatic Che would light a stove to make boiling water during the summer in Bolivian jungles.
Veerappan was hunted down with little respect in the jungles and became a trophy for the police.“The man was a thief and a poacher. Why would you name something after him?“ asked a senior police officer who was part of Operation Cocoon that saw the end of Veerappan. Some, however, defend Veerappan. “He came across as a man who had been pushed to being what he was. I have spoken to political leaders who admitted they had at some point or the other used him, and when he became an obligation they just dissociated themselves from him,“ he said, adding that while Veerappan was no saint, there were others who needed to be hauled up too.
Besides T-shirts, footwear and motorbike stickers, Che also lives on in the idealistic imagination of many . For millions of Latinos he is an atheistic saint -a worthy role model. The physician was a scholarly man of action who quit the comforts of a high post in Cuban government to foment revolution elsewhere. Veerappan, in his green fatigues and with the ebullient moustache, remains a distant figure as much for the marketing folks in London as for Tamils today .