Vikram Johri: Ads and difference

Trust the most sombre of ideas to get drowned in tokenism. Early morning on March 8, International Women's Day, Indian Twitter was trending #MenWearingBindisYNOT. The gameplan of Zoiro (which, paradoxically, is a men's innerwear brand), the campaign posted pictures of facial hair and bindi against colourful backgrounds, in what was supposed to be an egalitarian move.

It made me want to jump in with the Kanhaiya Kumar groupies and cock a snook at capitalism. Why does every pleasant idea have to appropriated in the most hideous manner and then regurgitated as pulp masquerading as art?

Let's try and parse the idea behind the campaign, behind its basic premise that men should wear a bindi for a day. Why? What precise women-centric objective can it achieve? Will it make men more sensitive to the plight of women in this country? Will it change laws to make them more gender-neutral? Will it reduce incidents of sexual harassment? Well, if wishes were horses...

What it will do is get some teens to click on Zoiro's Twitter page and proceed to buy stuff. Or, it might achieve a quantum of soul satisfaction that's possible only on Twitter: give one a sense of how important one is based on the retweets and favourites one's posts get. It will certainly do for some what cat photos have been unable to: ratchet up the number of their Twitter followers.

That's all great, but when a men's brand starts lecturing us on women's rights, I am reminded of that sanitary napkin vending machine whose installation at the health ministry last September was overseen by not one person with the XX chromosome.

Sure, advertising can be a wonderful medium to initiate change. Coincidentally, at the same time as the Zoiro campaign, Twitter was also awash in an ad from McDonald's Taiwan in which a gay young man comes out to his father. It's a nice spot, and conveys its intended message wonderfully. That it's a plug for McDonald's is beside the point, since the story takes centrestage.

It reminded me of the Anouk ad from last year which narrated the story of a lesbian couple meeting the parents of one of them. It introduced the couple most naturally, without stereotyping them or loudly proclaiming its politics from the rooftop, and that made the ad so compelling.

I am no grump. I concede that the idea of men wearing bindis can be made to work, but only if it is dovetailed into a larger story, say, about how women today have to take care of both home and beyond, and perhaps men should try doing that for a day. Consider the recent ad for Ariel, in which an old man is introduced to his male privilege when he sees his daughter return from work and begin setting the house in order, even as her husband sits around watching TV.

Now that is a really good ad. It makes an eminent point without screeching its head off. Look at how the husband looks at his wife and makes a gesture of hunger. He is sweet, not a distant monster who cares not a fig about her. He is in formals, so we imagine he has returned from work too. And because the couple is so usual, we notice, through the father's eyes, how problematic this skewed division of labour inside the household is.

This is what good advertisements do. They show us the different within the familiar, and force us to acknowledge it by making it ordinary, even banal. This can be a good rule of thumb for advertisements eager to make a statement: strive for sameness and then gently slither in difference. Remember the Idea ad about a transgender dance teacher? It started with her remembering the slights she faced as a young person, and moved on to showcase her as a successful dance teacher.

Here are some other ideas for advertisements: a masculine footballer who turns out to be gay; a construction worker who likes to read Premchand in his spare time; a cosmetics expert who finds geology fascinating. Anything that goes beyond appearances. Men as more than breadwinners, women as more than… well, women as more than nothing because they already do everything under the sun.

Perhaps I read the Zoiro people wrong. Perhaps all they wanted was to have a fun campaign. But the slick hashtag and the slicker timing make me suspicious. Think about it. It's a pity - but also an inalterable reality - that the world needs an International Women's Day. Even in this day and age, womanhood continues to be a state that, by itself, confers difference.

A male achiever is an achiever; a female one is a woman achiever. While it is great that we are celebrating more and more women today, we still have a long way to go before we can celebrate women solely for their achievements without gendering those accomplishments. As we move (hopefully) inexorably towards that day, is it too much to ask for campaigns that go beyond cutesiness and ignite real conversations?

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