Symptom: You feel like lobbing your remote, Iraqi journalist style, at the TV set in front.

A website on road rage has the logo that reads …When you just can’t take it anymore. I feel ‘ragey’ about TV Commercials. The ’breaks’ tend to get on your nerves as they get longer and more frequent. I kept count as I watched a movie on a Tamil channel the other day.

The feature film with 150-minute running time was interrupted for commercial break thrice during the first hour, every 15 minutes during the next hour, and once in 10 minutes in the final half hour of the movie. I sat through it, to keep count of the ads.

Each commercial break stretched seven or more minutes; during which they showed 15 ads. What’s cruel, the same set of ads gets repeated in each quarter-hourly break; and a few of these ads are shown twice or more during a single commercial break.

A Tata Indicom commercial featuring Soundarya Rajnikant grabbed my atttention when I saw it first. Here is a girl who, instead of following the footsteps of her actor father, chose a career in animation graphics. Why? Because, as she says, she had set her mind on it. The ad. was informative, insofar as it told us about the career choice of Rajnikant’s daughter.

Anyway half-way through this movie - Rasigar Mandram - the Soundarya ad. had been played out so often that it was getting to be a drag. Soundarya who sounded smart and sprightly to begin with, became bit of a bore. I started finding fault with the tone of her voice, gait, and with her very screen presence. Before long the sight of Soundarya made me switch the channel.

This can happen to any screen celebrity. Remember Amitabh? His exposure in TV commercials didn’t do any good to Bachchan’s screen image. Image-conscious celebrities, who choose their films with their screen reputation in mind, don’t seem conscious of the damage TV commericals can cause to their public appeal.

Film celebrities, in the interest of their image, would do well to have it written into the contract that their commercials shouldn’t be repeated more than twice in any given TV programme. It would also spare TV viewers the agony of having to watch their commericals repeated ad nauseum.

We can’t wish away commercial ‘breaks’ . What we can do is become online activists . Wish someone sets up an Ad Rage dot com where we can share our thoughts , frustration on the tyrrany of TV commercials, and take a snipe at our pet hate commercials . If nothing else, this could be a way of getting round the rage, by hitting the keyboard during commercial breaks.

An ad-raged blogger says the commercial break is getting so long as to be useful; she gets done during the break chores she would have otherwise left to be done before bed - wash dinner plates, let her dog out, brush her teeth,check e-mail etc..