Marketing movies, Aamir style

So while the rest of Bollywood is still stuck in a promotional groove—write a blog, be a guest judge on a reality show, do a few news channel interviews where you either talk about the person you love the most, or hate the most—trust Aamir Khan to come up with something different for his next film, Ghajini. Aamir Khan, folks, is the man who redefined promotional overdrive when he gave an interview to every channel, including Cartoon Network, while he was promoting the late, unlamented The Rising aka Mangal Pandey. Now he has gone a step further. For Ghajini, which is all about memory (the character suffers from short-term memory loss as in Chris Nolan's Memento so has to write names, numbers and addresses on his body), he has devised a most unusual plan which in fact tests the human being's cerebral cortex (isn't that where memory is located?). It started with the tagline in the posters which says "Remember December 25" (get it?) not "Releasing December 25". And now, he's got journalists who want information on his film—as in pictures, music and credits—to upload their photographs online with their details. Aamir will then write down one thing he remembers best about the journalist before his office sends off the film stuff. Pretty smart, huh? Almost as smart—and shocking—as when NDTV ran bulletins with Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukerji as newscasters, to promote Bunty Aur Babli. About time someone redefined the promotion of a movie. Now that Mr Bachchan (senior, not junior) has made writing a blog seem so effortless, it's clear that the Internet has to be used in a much smarter way. But whatever they do, can someone please stop using reality TV shows to promote their movies? The funniest was last week, when Arjun Rampal (a current judge) and Malaika Arora Khan (a former judge) were on Nach Baliye to promote their movie, EMI. The idea was almost as bad as the movie. Who could tell what the movie was?