What do Indian ads serve us?

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     Indian ads that we see daily on television, promote a lot of gender stereotypes, distort human pictures and give birth to dehumanising images of men and women.

Eg. 'Mard Hoke ye ladkiyo wali cream use karte ho?' Or 'men will be men' or when a girl gets job because she uses fair and lovely.
     One of the ad that disturbs me alot is the 'MTR BREAKFAST MIX AD' where the woman of the house early morning in kitchen asks the family members as to what would they like to have for breakfast and each of them put their choice, the husband says 'dosa', followed by the daughter 'upma' the father in law 'rava idli' and the son 'vada'. The lady cooks them all at once possessing six hands.
 
       Is it really necessary to show a lady as superwoman and increase more burden on her settling a rhetoric image of a woman in the minds of people?
    Though not consciously but media does effect and influence us sub-conciously. Is it really possible for a woman to have six different hands and cook four different items at a time so tirelessly? Is it necessary to show the family members ordering a normal human being to do these things and the worst part is that she serves them with some virtual magic powers.
      And why do all the advertisements focus on women or women and children when it comes at selling cooking products? Why? Because the mass would relate? No, all they do is reinforce gender stereotypes that cooking is all about women or vice versa and no men. Children because the entire duty of nurturing them is that of a mother.
     The graph of gender equality slips downwards when the media promotes such gender stereotypes, rather than breaking it.
     Undoubtedly, there are many such ads that break many stereotypes (eg. Titan raga, tanishq etc.) But they don't exist on mediums which is consumed by the majority of masses and common people daily i.e. television but are more visible on YouTube.
    It's high time the media should contribute in the development of country, it could be the best medium to bring in gender equality as it has a wide reach and a huge mass connect rather than promoting gender stereotypes.

Comments

  1. Unknown28 March 2018 at 12:22

    Nicely written....You hit the devil at the right place

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rutvi Dattani29 March 2018 at 02:43

    Thankyou for the feedback 😀😀

    ReplyDelete

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