Sati or slut? Titan Raga's #BreakTheBias ad is no Women's Day gift
This morning a woman I am acquainted with on Facebook excitedly inboxed me a link that she claimed was going viral on the internet and insisted I write upon its supposed greatness.
The latest ad from the Titan Raga stable, an Ogilvy creation, came with the strategic hashtag #breakthebias circulated just before Women's Day when our need for validation and endorsement as a sex is at an all-time, almost hormonal high.
The commercial began and ended in a stuffy corporate boardroom, where only one woman (but naturally) shared table space with three men, with the skewed messaging starting from the word go - dressed in crisp business gear, the female professional is depicted in a neatly pleated, conservative silk sari; hair cropped short, sans loud jewellery and hardly any make-up. One who remains a mute spectator with arguably no glam value - the kind you would like to associate with women who make it to the top - listening in on an extremely sexist conversation revolving around a list of candidates short-listed for a work promotion.
There is reference to a person whose gender is unspecified naturally - as if on purpose. She is called Kiran, which could be a man or a woman. The individual's character is torn to shreds by the sarcastic and sheepish male honchos, who go on to make the insinuation that she is getting the pay hike and career boost owing to her proximity to her reporting head, who is besotted with her and spends most of his time - both in and out of the workplace - dropping her home, praising her work, et al.
In short, the male colleagues suggest a sexual relationship is responsible for the favours granted to Kiran by her benefactor.
Kiran, "star of Rajat's team", is starkly and by contrast, diverse from the woman in the board meeting - she's young, buxom, a fresher who struts her stuff in short, fitted dresses with slits that highlight her well-toned body. She wears heels, her sex appeal her meal ticket. The stereotypical hot bod at work every guy sitting in a lifeless cubicle probably fantasises about, possibly laying bets with his buddies on who would bed her first.
Rajat, the older male boss who involves her in every project, is shown leaving no stone unturned to be physically close to his protégé, including her in every project and presentation, even on weekends.
While Kiran is slut shamed, the woman in the boardroom, obviously a senior, is shown smirking and shaking her head, making us believe she's playing along. This visualisation and between-the-lines character attack lies at the core of the garbled gender messaging that Indian advertising seems to be selling to women every time - deceptively packaged as breaking a gender construct - when it does nothing but stick another label to a woman who has only two roles to play. Be it an organisation or the society at large - she remains either the Sati or the slut.
The doublespeak is glaring in a country where women constitute a mere 24 percent of the workforce, despite India boasting of one the largest working populations in the world. A miniscule five percent of these reach the top layer, compared to the global average of 20 percent. A recent study by Booz and company claimed that if men and women in India were to be equally employed, India's GDP could go up by 27 percent. According to the Global Gender Gap Report released by the World Economic Forum in 2013, India was ranked 113 in 2011.
So what if Kiran is a newcomer and a gorgeous woman? Is being pretty directly proportional to dumbing down of talent? Is that what women think of other women? Is that why a provocatively-dressed woman professional is always assumed to have slept her way up the work hierarchy?
And the woman in the nine yards a sati savitri? A hard-working, talented professional who manages both home and work, her asexual portrayal a stamp of approval on her character? As if being successful means wearing Indian clothes, cutting your hair short, ditching the high heels for the boring sandals and in short, looking like a man to be an equal. As if the choice is ever that simple!
A few months ago, the same brand had released an ad staring Nimrat Kaur - a single woman who dumps a perfectly eligible man whom she accidentally bumps into at an airport lounge, who tells her poignantly he is the way she left her, and that they could have made it work had she quit working. To which, Kaur equally poignantly says, with a smile: "You too could have done the same Anwar."
The ad ends with the jilted lover reclaiming his manhood, asking how he can quit the job - he is a man! Why does mardangi get reduced to a sex battle, in popular culture? Why does a woman have to quit her job or stop wearing a backless blouse, or promise to procreate to be loved back?
Why is our own view of sexual equality so myopic that our portrayal of emancipation means either bashing goons bare-handed in khaki, like Priyanka Chopra in Jal Gangajaal does, or leading the life of self-inflicted aloneness, that Kaur reconciles to, while caressing a fancy Raga watch.
Kiran, in the latest Raga ad, summoned at the end, turns out to be a man - this takes the woman boss equally by surprise - taunting every single woman professional in this country who probably faces some kind of covert sexism and harassment at work and struggles to be seen the way she deserves.
Why can't we win the way we are?
Blow-dried hair, stilettoes, red-lipped and equally qualified? Why is our body our biggest bane? How long will we be reduced to our lowest common denominator in the name of a centuries-old gender bias that runs deep, and must be tacitly endorsed by advertisers no better than patriarchal Khap Panchayats?
Why couldn't Kiran be the woman in the boardroom instead this time? Why not the only woman honcho in the first place? Why can't we evolve our collective conscience about what is convenient to celebrate in girl power? Why are feminists tagged as jholawalas? Why are girls wearing short skirts openly threatened with rape in metros and degraded by ministers? Is modernity a curse?
What if Kiran must mean the woman who earns her fair promotion? Who isn't dissected and made to stand another agneepariksha?