le Scribbles

Why the New Airtel Advertisement is Ridiculous

The recently released Airtel ad doing rounds on TV has been under a lot of fire from misogynist and patriarch-types because they dared to depict a woman who is both the husband’s boss at office and (apparently) earns more than him! So #AgainstIndianCulture! What in the world?? How dare they!! Some things and people in our country will remain stuck in the dark ages, never-changing, everlasting.

I have no qualms at the idea of the wife earning more tan the husband, on the contrary I am sure many lazy-ass husbands I know will be only too happy to let their wives earn more than them, so they can laze around :D However like all advertisements on TV, this one is totally ridiculous when it comes to the depiction of everything else, because TV ads always take place in some other Universe or even dimension where none of the rules of our “real world” apply. Looking at it in that way the only realistic fact in the ad storyline is the wife being the boss :D

Clean Mumbai: What I found the most ludicrous is when the lady leaves office and goes home in her chauffeur-driven Honda Civic, there are only exactly 3 other cars on the road at that time! No honking, no swearing, no shouting, no vehicles jammed into every available millimeter of the road. We could presume she left office at around 9 in the evening. And the city shown is obviously Mumbai. Such clean, empty, sanitized roads in Mumbai at 2100 hours?! ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME??! (Yeah, it is Mumbai only, the registration of the Honda is MH01AS2558). And what is that fancy tunnel? Did they mean the Khar Subway?

Car Pool-less: Boss, it is understandable that elite people like these do not take Mumbai local trains and all. But husband and wife working in the same office and take two separate cars to work? That too with at least one of them chauffeur driven! What nonsense. And these are the people who complain about traffic. Bloody ridiculously stupidly inefficient if you ask me.

Domestic Helpless: The lady reaches their fancy home and like all other inhabitants of the TVC universe are incredibly wealthy (that double door fridge alone must cost around a lakh). She cooks up a delicious dinner with some 5 dishes of huge quantities in no time. Now, the lady should be around the level of VP and the husband a Senior Manager. They are very busy people with hectic schedules because their career is more important than their life. Such wealthy, busy people living in Mumbai without any maid/cook/domestic help? LOL. Yeah right, We believe that, especially when she has a driver?? In real life, dinner will be cooked and ready on the table by the time she reaches home. Do you really think these kind of people will cook up a three course dinner by themselves? And for a single person to whip up such a course it will take at least three hours. So she will have dinner ready by probably 1 am?

Oh maybe this is all happening in another city, country or universe where the rules of the game are different. Oh, maybe that is the same universe where data speeds are so high that videos live steam seamlessly from phone to phone :)

PS: I don’t know if the lady is a good wife, but she is certainly a bad boss. No good manager goes home leaving her hapless team members for an indefinite time to finish work by themselves, especially work she assigned. Especially because she had to go home and “cook” for the husband. In fact, that makes this ad as misogynistic as those opposing it. It would’ve made much more sense if she stayed back, they finished the work together, grabbed some take-away or home delivery on the way home :)

Anyway advertisements like this are made by the elite for the elite.

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Subrahmanian Santakumar

And no company will slow that kind of a reporting structure.

Jeena

What I found unreal about this ad was that when the wife calls from home (why did he save her number as “Wife” except to let us know the fact), the hubby has a gentle smile when he picks the phone – I would have expected him to be scowling or muttering under his breath, after what has transpired. :D

Swapnil

“Anyway advertisements like this are made by the elite for the elite….” I would say – advertisements like this are made by the idiots for the idiots.

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