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shouldn’t we be angry? this is the new times of india campaign. ‘teach india’ they call it and these are the images.. it’s a series where obviously privileged young men and women take time off their busy schedules and ‘help’ the unfortunate by educating them. this is in today’s newspaper. a wide toothed fair young man takes time off his busy exercise schedule (note the orange track pants and the hurdles in the background) to teach a darker thinner and thus marked as such - underprivileged man to count - the hurdles perhaps. there is an ipod headphone dangling from his left year and a towel in his hand that wipes his sweat with. but the real difference is in the body language and the eyes. the difference between the two looks to the camera is amazing. while the yuppy teacher reeks of smug satisfaction, the reluctant student seems shy and even resentful beneath the apologetic slump as he raises his eyes to meet ours. the ‘u’ ties the two men together across sparkling white t shirts. while one man fills his up the others hangs limp around his skeletal body. the image is carefully assembled with signs that make sure that 'times of india' readers don't even begin to identify with the wrong man. we all know which one of the two it is addressing. disgusting. incredibly offensive.
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21 comments:
Relax.
I am not really sure... I think you are over-reacting. The person who is taught is definitely a bit shy...thats's precisely why you need education. education gives confidence, the confidence you see in the eyes of the other guy. About the fair/dark bit, that's a prejudice Indian society has. It's not right, and yes, even offensive, but not the campaign itself...
I agree with Amrutha here. I think you are over reacting.
By showing those two men, the ad also shows the plus points of having education.. the difference between an educated person and an uneducated one.
Don't see them as persons or go by skin colour as such. I think they depict dark & bright sides of the whole thing.
Cuckoo
I dont see anything wrong with this, relax!
maybe i am overreacting, but don’t any of you find it strange that nowhere in the image is it mentioned which one of the men the ad is addressing- yet we seem to identify automatically with the fairer, taller guy. or the fact that in built within the system of signs that make up the ad are the following: dark people can’t read / fair people are richer / darker people cant do social work / a clear and blatant caste and class bias. or the smug self satisfaction by which it is assumed that ‘we’ are to make ourselves feel better about the world by teaching darker poorer people, patronizing them and making us feel superior.
just yesterday one of my marathi speaking students was speaking of her experience being in mumbai and was agitated about the way that the whole city is packed with a system of signs that makes her language, her body, the clothes she wears invalid or ‘verny’- and therefore of a lower status. she is not stupid or uneducated merely because she comes from a village on the konkan belt and wears polyester salwar kameez, she insists. do we believe her or continue to fall in with what the media and mainstream culture insists is ‘correct’?
and then we wonder what the big reservation row is about. just wondering.
I don't think you're over reacting- although your tone might have been overreactive :)
But yes I think these cues are all in there and we take it as so acceptable - apparently these things represent realities of caste and class but reservations don't.
Cuckoo - you don't see them as people of skin colour but as representing the darkness and brightness? You do know that Fair and Lovely is the highest selling product in this country - perhaps everyone wants to be a symbol of brightness?
Amrutha - dark and fair isn't only an Indian prejudice. It's racism - in India it takes the form of colour prejudice which has a relationship with caste. In the US it is colour prejudice related to racial identity.
It's when we don't personally suffer as much from these divisions and the messages of this symbolism that we can blithely say that it's being taken too seriously.
I'm not sure what alarms me more - the cynicism of the advertisement or the determined innocence of the responses.
I don't think you are over-reacting. I had much the same reaction as you as I saw the hoardings plastered all across the city. In every one of them, the fair-dark contrast was just too blatant and deliberate.
On the other hand, it is very rare to see rich and poor persons in an ad, in the same frame. This is not equality, and it is patronizing. What should we compare this with, in the Indian context? Are there images which bring rich and poor together in more harmonious terms? In ads? Which ones would those be?
In other words, I am not sure which side to take in this debate. I can see points on both sides. I am not sure though, what the reference point should be.
You are right. One is clearly superior. This could be other way round. the fairer one could learn a lot from the darker. i go to remote tribal areas of utter illeteracy, and come back a lot richer. i feel that i have a lot to learn from them.
Cuckooji ! nice you see you in Rohan's space.
How do i know that i have the right education ?
please believe me i am not sure.
What right do i have to dump what i think is right on others ?
Hope you are doing fine Cuckooji
my first reaction to the times of india campaign was cold, sceptical how one decides what to 'teach' someone. honestly, i still don't have clear feelings on this and i felt it is good if it makes creates a space for some people to engage with people from another class.
there we are - we are so clearly talking class here and while this ad campaign is highly patronising, the picture posted by rohan is perhaps the most problematic one i have seen so far as it totally milks the class divide for effect by playing up everything - fair vs. dark, neat hair vs. unkempt, happy vs. sad.
while i still think the project is a good idea, i remember a similar campaign made for the national literacy mission's 'each one teach one programme' in the early 90s which clearly avoided all of these 'white man's burden' kind of problems that the toi campaign has. it had manohar singh and urmi juvekar teaching the kids in their village , or of their domestic help, much more empathetic with none of this pity angle the toi plays up here.
and i am sorry, this is terrible copy - 'will learn to count; will learn what counts'.
The literacy campaign ad I remember from the early 90s (at least some were made by O&M I recall) featured an upper caste elderly man and a young lower caste boy. The man was kind and compassionate, and it made the boy happy to learn from him. But the sense of inequality was far greater than the picture posted here. I am not saying this is an ideal ad. Not at all. But Indian advertising, whether private or governmental, has tended to be pretty hierarchical from what I have seen.
Hey, the reason why the fairer one is understood as the educated one, is simple.
Ever wondered how you figured who was who.
I get what you're saying, but advertising is mainly putting up a picture that would be understood by the masses and as much as we hate to agree, we all got it just right. Its a mass dilemma that everyone is responsible for. No way out of it.
As long as the sentiment is not biased.
serena, one doesn't need to be a rocket scientist to visually tell rich from poor. also, very often, ad campaigns and the media in general address you in very condescending tones (like this one does), insulting you, as their idea of the lowest common denominator of the public that must 'get the idea', is frighteningly low.
actually this is perhaps the most offensive image in this campaign so far. the rest seem ok and today i saw that the text on a hoarding at juhu had been pasted over with new text. surely someone in toi or the agency got a lot of flak for irresponsible copy - there has obviously been a hue and cry within, or from outside of toi.
you cannot reduce people to tags and labels, like this campaign does.
I get what you are saying completely, but there are nuances of advertising and propaganda that we might not understand. Thats about it, sometimes people like to look at things in a manner that would frighten and shake them out of it.
As for the text, yea, I guess TOI has a reputation on getting involved with this rubbish an awful lot.
i think its really unfair to say that the skin of their colours suggests what they stand for.. are u trying to say that the darker and not so darker sides of life get represented through the colour of ones skin.. i think more than the picture the comment is offensive..
Dear Anonymous,
You see there is a very thin line between being cryptic and being misunderstood. I quite think you've pushed me into the latter and misinterpreted things.
The shades and the tints, make and add to the so called colours that we artificially add to life through man made festivities and synthetic sentiments. Racism, illiteracy and castes share the same platform that religion, riots and righteousness do. :)
dear serena,
if you read the what the others had to say u would know that the comment was meant for a specific comment posted out there n not a response to your comment(i should have been specific)..
n i dont think righteousness and religion share the same platform:)
When teach India came out, my first thought was great idea and could actually the change the world types. Then they go and put this AD out there. Its cheesy as hell, the ipod addition is like eee – for want of a better word and the casting/scene is truly offensive. But the worst thing about it is that its taints the perceived good intentions of the campaign itself.
David Ogilvy said ‘You cant sell a bad product’. Maybe he forgot to add ‘You can de-sell a good one’
And Muks yr right its terrible copy.
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