India has always been an emotional country, thus it has mostly been driven by public sentiments more than anything else, but of late India has also been emerging as a land of controversies, futile controversies to be precise. One such controversy that caught majority’s attention recently was the one observed as the public’s reaction to Deepika Padukone’s promotional video ‘My choice’ for Vogue Empower Initiative. I personally found the video quite artistically done, visually very strong with even stronger content. It was a straight forward but still hard hitting declaration by a voice that ‘It’s my choice’.
Vogue Empower - My Choice Video
Vogue Empower - My Choice Video
This is the blessing and curse of the true creative content; it could be interpreted in a number of ways, especially in a country like ours where people are so used to accepting any nonsensical garbage in the name of art and creativity provided it is not left open ended and to people’s imagination, provided it has just one clearly defined meaning, however absurd that might be.
Many people interpreted the video as Deepika’s individual selfishly opinionated voice i.e. an individual’s voice, and that triggered a flood of opinionated (selfish or otherwise) messages over entire social circuit. Few stood up in favour of the video, quite a many against it, there were even a few messages directly targeting Deepika in particular. A few people also interpreted it as the voice of elite educated women, but if that is the case then the entire purpose of putting the video together should fail.
I interpreted the video to be the voice of women in general and not any individual’s or elite groups’. There were a few lines disturbing but understandable and in totality the video was bold and powerful but misguiding to an extent, misguiding because if the core of something is women empowerment in the context of India, then the very basic criteria of advertising or spreading the message was not met. Amongst the vast women population of India only a handful of women were seemingly targeted as audience for the promotional video. Also, I failed to gauge that how and why a bunch of self proclaimed social awareness creators should hold the power of speaking on behalf of entire women population without any evidential substance to support that each woman or at least the majority of women agree to what was said, but if it wasn’t the voice of women in general then the soul of it i.e. women empowerment doesn’t holds much meaning, right? Well, it’s up to you to think and decide.
So if it wasn’t an individual’s, groups’ or entire women population’s voice, then whose voice was it anyway? Here I feel comes the pitfall of branding in picture, where spreading the message kind of takes a back seat and propagators and propagation’s desired effect becomes more important. It’s not new for business houses to camouflage their branding under the skin of something apparently more novel and stirring.
A similar video called ‘It’s your fault’ created by AIB floated around 2013 and enjoyed a more acceptable response from people. It was not exactly same as ‘My choice’ but was certainly on similar lines with similar message at the core. Why is this disparity then? Well, where at one hand ‘My choice’ is direct and brutally blunt take on women’s existential freedom, ‘It’s your fault’ was more of a satirical and sarcastic take on the same issue. It worked positively because, besides the satire, the general note of the video was passive rather being aggressive; it did not challenge the pseudo social authority whereas ‘My choice’ was a rebellious declaration, with an ‘I give a damn’ attitude underlying; it directly challenged the moral rule book and social taboos. At a subconscious level people always feel scared of rebels but enjoy mockery even if it is intelligently sarcastic, designed to convey any controversial message.
AIB - It's your fault video
On final note, the only sentence from the entire transcript that I found unworthy of being a part of otherwise poetic brilliance is this following line:
‘My choice; to have your baby or not’
I could not relate to the usage of word ‘your’. Of course it is each individual’s choice to live the way they wish, have babies or not, but in this pursuit of claiming what’s theirs, I don’t think it is necessary to even unwittingly disown the natural responsibility and ownership of a baby. A baby could never be of any one person’s alone, so this would have been more impactful for me had it read as:
‘My choice; to have a baby or not’
