The Price of Courage.... An insight on the recent killing in Madhya Pradesh

                           Five years ago, a girl from a small town, Betul, in Madhya Pradesh, went missing while on a trip to Vaishno Devi. Her mother, Imarti Bai, kept mum even though she knew what had happened to her daughter. She had been pushed into prostitution by a well-organised gang of human traffickers in her village.
                          Years later, the same fate was planned by Rani Yadav, the head of the human trafficking business, for Imarti Bai's younger daughter. She was a class eighth student who was raped by one of the gang members, Rajesh Hajore. The abduction and rape was followed by Imarti Bai lodging a complaint against rani yadav and others at the village police station. Six weeks of running from pillar to post, with nobody paying heed to her cries, the inevitable happened.
                           On that fateful night, Imarti Bai was shot by Rani Yadav's husband in her own house, for she complained about them to the police. Thus ended the voice of justice in Betul, Madhya Pradesh.
                           A film script? No, not at all. It's a true life story of Imarti Bai. In India, we may find a thousand similar stories to this one. And the recent case to come in the public view is that of Imarti Bai's. But what must have happened to the other girls who stood up against the injustice they encountered?
                           A mother's fear that her daughter would be kidnapped and sold into the flesh trade drove imarti bai to stand up against the goons. The roots of her anger lay in the incident where her elder daughter was pushed into flesh trade by the very same Rani Yadav.
                          These people involved in the human trafficking have a very simple agenda: they first rape the girl. This naturally change the girl's life, and nobody would agree to marry a raped girl. And taking advantage of this situation, she would be pushed into flesh trade or prostitution.
                          But when a person stands against this injustice, aren't the police responsible to help her? But in this case, the police instead of taking charge, turned a deaf ear to Imarti Bai's pleas. Had they listened to her intently and provided some protection to her when she had asked, she would have been there to protect her daughter from the goons even today. This shows us the irresponsible behaviour of the police in states like Madhya Pradesh.
                         We say India is developing but is it really?If it is truly changing, then why aren't the horrors of prostitution and rape disappearing with the changing times? Why isn't the position of women changing in the country? If reports are to be believed the police told Imarti Bai to go to an schedule-tribe police station, as she belonged to the tribal community. Is protection given to the common man on the basis of his caste and category in our country? If so, then why do we say that the line between the classes and castes is gradually fading?
                        Incidents like these show that with changing times the line is becoming thicker and thicker than ever.  As for the human trafficking business, the modus operandi has not changed for many years and we the common man is still falling prey to their trap.
                       People don't care about what others are undergoing in their lives. Had the witnesses stopped the abduction of the young girl (which happened in front of about 120 people), the fate of the young girl would have been very different from what it is now. But nobody helped her, and nobody will ever help any other girl. It's a shame, that in a crowd of 120 people nobody felt like helping the innocent girl.
Human trafficking is a heinous crime, it has to be stopped. But it is in our hands to save the world from this evil. Because as Fannie Lou Hamer, the American social activist, said, "Nobody's free until everybody's free".

Número UNO

                 Número UNO is a term coined out for no. 1. Numbers are everywhere! From size zero to jersey no.10, it's everywhere. And you can't live without them.  Hating maths is one thing, but you can't really escape numbers.
                Children will not like solving addition sums but will love to count the runs while playing gully cricket! Or while playing Monopoly, i bet you would love to be the banker even if you don't like mathematics in school.
                Let's start with the superstitions. 786 is regarded as one of the luckiest number. From car plates to Amitabh bachchan's number in "Coolie" or "Deewar", the number  has been seen everywhere. Whereas 13 is regarded as the most dangerous number. And if it's a Friday on the 13th of a month then it is even more dangerous. I just love this day!!!
                Then come the lucky numbers. Dhoni is lucky for India because he wears a jersey no.7 which is his lucky number. Jersey no.10 has it's own tradition that only the best player wears it. Pele, Maradona, and now Messi, and back home, Sachin don the jersey. Dunno how Munaf Patel came out lucky during the world cup tournament wearing a jersey no.13!
               It was the ninth of February in the year 2011. My neighbour's  Daughter ran away with her lover. I consoled her mother and came home to upload this very story when I glanced on the date. And I was mind blown. It was 9.2.11. What a perfect date to run away! Nau do gyaarah! Truly perfect!
              Chetan Bhagat too has a love for numbers!  FIVE point someone, ONE night at a call centre, THREE mistakes of my life, TWO states! No doubt the next book had to have FOUR as a word and even if it was not FOUR it had 2020 (2+2=4)!
               Everything in this world is numbered. It's funny to play with numbers on the car number plates! They say that 666 is the number of the beast! Even songs question us about do aur do paanch kyun nahi?( Farhan Akhtar in ROCK ON!!!)
                So it's obvious that numbers play an important role in our lives. Its up to us to make our lives more comfortable with numbers.

The people I met said so... (Part 1)

               I attended a talk by Madhukar Sabnavis, the Country Head for Discovery and Planning at Ogilvy and Mather India, and the Regional Director for Thought Leadership, in January. The topic of discussion was "My one wish for creativity in advertising". It was very interesting given the fact that he himself is a very creative man. At the end of the talk he expressed his wish in the following words, "As we grow and adopt in the advertising world, let's keep the Indian soul while taking up western culture".
             True! Today, advertisement is one of the largest propagated medium to the common man. It has played a huge role in spreading knowledge about FMCGs or fast moving consumer goods like lakme, l'oreal, Nike, etc. to the masses.
            If we look at a time span of about thirty years in the Indian advertising industry, we see a huge change as time passes.
            The mid 80s saw the western influence on India. Advertisements like the cadbury dairy milk ad, showed a young couple wearing very western clothes playing hide and seek, thus letting people relate to the upcoming western culture in India. But as we progressed in that decade, we saw upcoming actress, Raveena Tandon, debuting in the Asian paints ad, in a backdrop of a big traditional Indian Wedding and Raju Hirani in an 80s Fevicol commercial with elephants. This shows that the late 80s advertising had begun a new phase where they were based on Indian scenarios.
            In the 90s, the radio and the cinema came back and the television took a back seat. But, the consumer durable world and the fashion world opened up in the 90s, and advertising was at it's peak. With the changing times, the form of advertising also changed. Global tie-ups began and a lot of agencies started globalising. The position of women also changed in the 90s.
           More and more female based advertisements were made in order to connect with the "Typical Indian Housewife" seen in the Indian household. Advertisements began to touch the heartland of India, but simultaneously brands in India were globalising. So, brands like Coke, Nike, Surf, which were global, were indianised for the Indian public. But brands like Bajaj, which were Indian looked global due to it's advertise content. Thus, it was proved that India caters for the local Market rather than the Western Market, and it was necessary to indianise the ads in order to connect the product to the masses.
           In the new millennium, we see about 72000 print labels, 500 radio stations and about 15000 tv channels. Advertising in the 2000s became a challenge for the creators with each brand or agency coming up with ideas which would be a food for thought for the Indian public. The "Tata tea" ads with the tagline "Jaago re!", was based on the political scenario in India, while the first "Idea" ad with the tagline "What an idea, sirji!" was based on riots prevalent in India. The blackberry boys ad with youngsters singing the song too, saw the westernisation brought about by new products coming in India.I think the "zoo-zoo" ad campaign was one of the most successful ad campaigns in recent years, with the agency coming up with about 25-30 ads with the zoo-zoos.
            Today the Indian advertising industry is fully concentrating on connecting with the Indian public and thus are bound to produce ads which include the scenes from a normal Indian house rather than showing an american or an english house. Weddings, birthdays and anniversaries are the popular themes for these ads and even we enjoy watching such ads.

            We have to admit that the advertisers in India have managed to assimilate the best techniques from the west but at the same time kept it all Indian. I just hope that this continues for a very, very long time!

The Digitised Generation: but are we ready for it?

                         The world has turned into an infinite digital canvas today. Digits are not just digits anymore but they are the basic building blocks of the modern lifestyle. This is so because each and every participating member of the world is totally dependent on the digital media available.
                       We are used to the "normal" cackle of the alarm clock early in the morning, but not to the "weird" cackling of the cock. We are happy to carry a tablet with us to college rather than a whole bunch of books and papers. We are happy to see a slideshow of our photographs on the computer rather than go and develop them into hardcopies.
                        I guess no child born in the 21st century has ever “dialed” a phone or placed a coin in a pay telephone,walked to the television to change the channel, taken a road trip, without a DVD player in the vehicle, researched a topic using books alone, surfed the web using a dial up connection or known a world without the Internet. A child of three would know how to surf and children in school uniforms know how to blog and use the social networks.
                        In the 1990s, the internet and the mobile phone caused a huge stir in the digital world leading to many different inventions which were about to bring a tremendous change in the history of modern man. There was an alarming increase in the number of inventions, the various companies which came into existence. Steve jobs' apple brought out outstanding innovations like the iPod, iPhone and the iPad, with all others following suit. And what was seen was man panting for some more digitised, compact and simplified version of the previous invention.There's a fascinating trend among this upcoming generation of young consumers. As prices for technologies such as mobile phones and PCs continue to fall, these devices are now accessible to an expanding proportion of the pre-teen class.
                        On the other hand, The advent of social networking sites, starting from Orkut, myspace and then Mark zuckerberg's Facebook, it turned out that more and more people are hungry for virtual social interaction. But it was always ignored what man would become when he would face all these new things in his life.
                      Today as we enter the 2nd decade of the 21st century, the sins of the past decade are here to haunt us like never before. Man was materialistic since the industrial revolution but he has turned a virtual being in this century. The social networking site has given the young and the old a new identity, one which would be their fantasy, their dream to become. Chatting turns out to be with the chattering of the keyboard, not with a person but with a photograph of them. People are more confident talking online rather than talking face-to-face with the person.
                      The blackberry messenger and whatsapp are the two most worshipped apps by any teenager. Young children as small as 10 years yearn for a cell phone to be able to ask their homework to their classmates. Through these apps, not only can we be in touch 24x7 but also we can send pictures as soon as we click them. Literally, all these inventions have brought the world close, really close! An elite school in Mumbai, has made it compulsory for all it's students to have an iPad to study. Now that's called a digitised generation, isn't it?

                      But if we see to the other side, we see that indeed the world is plunged in a pitch black darkness and surely the light from these digital gadgets is not going to save it. The cause that people are losing their identities are our dear play toys, which we are clinging to so tightly. People don't have time from their playbooks and cell phones for their families and friends. So many scandals, so many controversies, and man has not yet learned his lesson. He is still walking on, far below to the deep end of the sea from where nobody would be able to save him.
                     Be it the Teens committing suicide online or a mother who updated her status while her baby was drowning in the bathtub, it had been a gruesome journey for these social networking sites. But they are still very much popular as they were before. We say today's youth is tomorrows future, but is it going to be possible if the youth is addicted to Facebook and blackberry messenger?

                     It's a question to ponder upon and act according to the right option. It's not possible to completely eradicate these evils but we surely can control it's deadly effects on us.

Is it really "Fair"?

            Watching television yesterday, I saw a fairness cream advertisement which said, "Dark out, White in". The setup was a chess game and the boy knocks out the black pawn very easily suggesting that he will knock out the dark girl in the similar way, but then when the girl applies a certain fairness cream, she defeats the guy and thus the message of "dark out, white in" is propagated to about a twenty million people.
         Young girls in ads are seen ragged in colleges because they are dark, and when they apply some fairness creams, they get the confidence and get what they want. It is a stereotype which is now an integral part of us. This is not only among women but also men, and many advertisements show dark men unwanted and when they become fair using special creams, they are surrounded by girls. This is what the advertisement and film industry going to showcase in front of millions of young population?
          I think that they are the ones responsible for the current scenario in our country. After fair and lovely made it's debut in 1971, it took over the imagination of the young woman and fulfilled her wish of being fair. But what about the other people who didn't really take it's help?
           People judge a person looking at his or her colour, and not his talents. Today be it for making friends or getting selected for a job, everything depends on the fairness of the person, especially if she is a woman.
           Every woman today wants to have a "fair" skin, fair here means White, and not healthy glowing skin. People make fun if one is dark skinned. Sometimes, being talented doesn't really matter, what matters is the colour of the skin. Dark people mostly become the victims of racial discrimination and insults, that too in a country where the majority is dark skinned.
            But I wonder if Indians today are so concerned about fairness and White skin, is there really any difference between them and the english people? For over centuries indians have suffered from the stigma of black skin, and now our own national television is promoting that being dark is not accepted in the society. Is it even appropriate to show such ads on television, which is a medium propagated to the young minds, and create stereotypes in the society?
           Today if you pick up the matrimonial supplement of any newspaper, this is what u get: wanted a bride, qualities required: fair, tall.... Was the word fair really necessary when you a needed a new member in your family and not a product which you can judge by it's colour? But the Indian psyche or the age old prejudices of equating fair skin with good looks will never come to an end.
            Frieda pinto in an Indian interview had criticised this very issue of social inacceptance of dark skinned people. She herself being of wheatish complexion, has undergone discrimination on the basis of colour in India. And surprisingly it didn't happen the same way in Hollywood!
            People don't understand that we all have been dark skinned since ages, but nobody complained then. North Indians may be exceptionally fair, but that doesn't really change the fact that most Indians are dark skinned and there's nothing wrong in it.
            And for the people who are complaining, why do u celebrate Priyanka Chopra, former Miss. World and one of the leading actresses in Bollywood, if u do not respect dark skin?
            I have heard about a number of times people saying that having dark skin is a disadvantage. I really don't know what is it that they don't have what fair people have? It's an issue to ponder on, and think, if its really "fair" to promote "fairness  creams" in a way which is "unfair" to dark people.