By Sanskriti Pandey:
There’s something cruel about a good cause gone wrong. Often, when the narrative fails to represent an issue correctly, it ends up taking a few steps back in the cause it was trying to further in the first place. Take this recent Brooke Bond Red Label advertisement, for example.
While the ad sets out to normalise the idea of live-in relationships, it fails miserably in the tools it employs to do so. Building upon the tussle of emotional sentiments we attach to family versus our own so-called modern preferences, the ad tries to represent a balance between the two as facilitating change in mindsets. But are the attributes of being able to cook, donning “decent” attire, or family-oriented attitudes prerequisites to obtain a certificate of live-in approval for women? What if, in this ad, the female partner did not know how to make good chai, despite the aromatic and unquestionable goodness of the tea leaves it’s trying to sell? Do live-in relationships, then, need regressive conformity to convention, or in fact need to “strike a balance” in order to prove their legitimacy for choice? Watch this short ad and tell us what you think of it!
