Let’s try a thought experiment. Observe the following fictional advertising film script ideas.
1. A ‘meeting of families + girl meets boy’ situation before an arranged marriage. During the discussion, the groom’s family makes a demand for a hefty sum of money as ‘dowry’. The situation becomes tense with the girl’s side of the family looking at each other in shock that such a demand is being made so casually and openly. Just then, the girl gets up, asks to speak to the boy in private. They go up to the kitchen and the girl opens the fridge to get a large bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate. She breaks three pieces and gives it to the boy while telling him politely and softly that seeking, and paying, ‘dowry’ is a crime. The boy comes back to his family, speaks to them quitely. The family acquiesces, the ‘dowry’ demand is dropped, and the discussion moves towards other topics.
2. A family is at a government office to register their new apartment, along with the builder. The government officer in charge of the registration process uses a hand-signal under the table to indicate that he expects ‘something’ to perform his job. The little girl in the family looks at her dad knowingly, picks up a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate and hands it over the officer along with a hand-written note. The officer looks down to see the chocolate bar, is visibly taken aback by the note that says that her dad had already taken a hefty loan and is very worried about the repayment schedule and monthly EMI. The officer feels pity on the little girl’s parents and goes on to do his job without the bribe.
3. A girl is walking through a busy street. A couple of young boys walking past her casually ‘eye’ her and whistle as they walk and turn towards her side. They start walking behind her with whistles and cat-calls. She takes a few steps ahead, but suddenly stops and turns around. The boys stop too, a bit surprised, and wondering what she’s going to do next. She opens her tote bag, and takes out a large bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate. She then breaks the bar into smaller pieces and starts to hand it over the boys one by one while asking them, “You are Deepu, right, from flat 202? And you… aren’t you Khanna aunty’s son?”, and so on, identifying each boy with a house number or their parents’ names. The boys feel ashamed and start apologising to the girl. She brushes them off and says, ‘Don’t indulge in such crude stuff boys. Let’s meet at the coffee shop in the evening?’. They all agree and move on.
4. When a first-year student is walking up to this hostel room for the first time, a group of senior students in the adjacent room call him to their room, with ‘Oye “first year”, come here!’. He walks in. One of the seniors—a Jimmy Shergill knock-off—asks him, ‘Aye, what have you got for us?’. The first-year student says, ‘Chaaklet’. The seniors burst out laughing much to the bewilderment of the first-year student who has always pronounced it as ‘chaaklet’. He asks them what he said wrongly that they are laughing. The senior student who called him feels pity for the first-year student’s innocence and starts singing an old Hindi song to change the subject, adds the first-year student’s name in the song’s lyrics at an appropriate word, but interjects it with ‘chaaklet’ at another point in the lyrics. They all laugh and hug.
I doubt if the first three scripts would pass the legal filter at Cadbury’s or at the agency level (Ogilvy India), but the fourth one did.
For the record, all four situations depict a crime – seeking (and paying) dowry is a crime, seeking (and paying) a bribe is a crime, eve-teasing (a ludicrously mild phrase in itself) is a crime, and ragging is a crime.
Ragging is not just the extreme version that makes it to the news and one that we have become numb to, considering the frequency with which it makes it to news among other crimes these days. India’s ministry of education and University Grants Commission’s anti-ragging drive (which requires an undertaking to be read and signed by all students before to enroll into any college in India) defines ragging (opens a PDF document) to include, among other more serious instances,
- Any conduct by any student or students whether by words spoken or written or by an act which has the effect of teasing, treating or handling with rudeness a fresher or any other student
- Asking any student to do any act which such student will not in the ordinary course do and which has the effect of causing or generating a sense of shame, or torment or embarrassment so as to adversely affect the physique or psyche of such fresher or any other student
- Any act that affects the mental health and self-confidence of a fresher or any other student with or without an intent to derive a sadistic pleasure or showing off power, authority or superiority by a student over any fresher or any other student
Sure, the ‘Chaaklet’ ad film by Ogilvy, for Cadbury’s India does not indulge in ragging-related extremities, but anyone watching it can clearly identify it as the beginning of a ragging process. It’s not a ‘meet-cute’ or a cordial self-introduction session. It starts as a show of power, of who is senior and who needs to be treated with deference.
Let’s start with the basics: do the seniors know the junior? No. They do not call him by name, they don’t even know his name. They call him, derisively, ‘First year’. So why is the ‘first year’ supposed to bring something to the seniors he doesn’t know at all?
Think of what would have happened if the fresher had said, ‘Sorry, I’m busy, and I have a lot to do right now’.
Sure, he did not, and he just strolled in, probably feeling safe that he found this college in the list of institutions in UGC’s anti-ragging website and that he had signed the declaration. But he was most definitely mocked for his accent, not by his peers (other first-year students), but by seniors.
Sure, one of the senior students warmed up to the first-year student’s innocence, but him changing his mind on the nature and extent of the ragging they were going to perform that day has no bearing on the fact that it was a ragging session in progress.
In fact, both Cadbury’s and Ogilvy did depict a far more demeaning version of ragging in 2012, for the same product, under the now-ominously (in context to ragging) titled ‘Shubh Aarambh’ series.
This ad features a young Vir Das knockoff as one of the ragging seniors and it shows a couple of first-year students ‘performing’ supposedly amusing dance movements and actions to the entertainment of a big group of senior students (both boys and girls). The seniors seem to be thoroughly enjoying the show being put up for their merriment.
From that ad, 15 years ago, the new ad is a climbdown of sorts, dealing with a seemingly more benign version of ragging, probably owing to the horrendous news about ragging these days.
But ragging is just ragging. There’s no mild version of ragging or serious version of ragging. Ragging is a show of power, and one party (seniors) exert their power to make the other party (juniors) do whatever they want. This can be just a seemingly innocuous asking-the-name, to making them get something for them (including ‘Chaaklet’).
Showing ragging, any version, however supposedly ‘mild’, is akin to showing an act of seeking dowry, or eve-teasing, or asking for a bribe. That such situations involving a crime are defused because of a change of mind on part of the perpetrator is no excuse to showing and normalizing them in the first place.
For context, ASCI did ban a 2020 ad by Pepperfry because it portrayed a violent crime being attempted:
While murder is an obvious crime, isn’t ragging too crime enough to not be normalized in mainstream advertising, that too for a product that targets kids too (a terribly bad idea, but that’s a topic for another day).
Kidnapping and seeking ransom is a crime too, but quite a few ads generously use this situation to ‘comic’ effect. Here’s an example for a real estate project from Hyderabad:
Even if you argue that we are not meant to take ads seriously, and depicting even obvious ‘crimes’ in advertising for comic effect is perfectly acceptable as a form of ‘creative licence’, when news of the impact of such crimes in real life adorns our news media regularly, seeing these ads make light of the same crime for comic effect feels jarring.
For some such ads, our nation collectively outrages, as we did for the Layer’r Shot ad in 2022.
But we could do a lot more. And a lot less ‘normalizing’ crimes like ragging for selling mere ‘chaaklet’.