How fair( fool ) are you??
A very beautiful dressed gal walks in the middle of a empty cricket pitch n digs her finger into the pitch to check how it is and then a pink cloth moves on the screen and flashback , the same lady is shown in black and white video standing on her balcony and giving a running commentary on the kids in her block playing cricket and then she mutes the TV commentary n rolls a magazine cylindrically imagining it as a mike and gives a commentary now on real-time players and den her mom substitutes the magazine with a fair and lovely packet and after 2 seconds you can see her sitting next to krish srikanth n joining him in the commentary box and in the end of the game she is flanked by fans and asking for her autograph which out numbers the fans the players normally have.
Another one goes like this “he comes home disgusted and frustrated .Her father, a retired government official, sipping on his hot tea says to his wife “I wish i had a son”. She overhears the conversation as she enters .Without any reaction she walks into the room, throws the bag on her unkempt table. As tears trickle down her cheeks thinking about her rejection, she looks into the mirror cursing her skin colour. An ad from the television distracts her, thus giving the solution to her problem. The next thing you see is a fair lady, closely resembling her, wearing a pink outfit entering into an air-hostess academy. Everybody is bewildered by her looks and the girl gets the job making her dad proud”.
Thanks to the fairness cream.
The above mentioned snippet is a fairness cream advertisement. I am sure many of us remember these funny, lame ads. The stereotypic being the one in which an educated girl proposed for marriage is not liked by the boy because she is not fair. But after few applications of a fairness cream she becomes fair and she is liked by the boy. How meaningless can that get? SOMETHING NEW ABOUT WHAT CLIENTS SAY FOR DE CREAM?
Fairness Cream for women was not enough that it has been introduced for men, also. The ads are even lamer. A tall, dark and handsome guy approaches a girl to ask her out. The girl clearly rejects him because he is not fair. But after the application of skin whitening cream which has something called as “multiplier effect” he can make a choice among the various other girls. For God sake, whom are they fooling? (I know majority are being bought this way).And what on earth is the “multiplier effect”? Surveys have proved that whitening cream as such is not even a pharmaceutical product. They are just a Business strategy affecting the lower layers of the pyramid.
It is even more hurting to see celebrities becoming brand ambassadors for such products. Hope they wake up and use their stardom the right way. These ads are encouraging apartheid and some serious actions have to taken against them, to curb them. This is not the first time that a finger has been pointed to the fairness cream firms. But since it is a free market with people having the right to buy what they want, not much can be done. How many of us are willing to use consumer-rights court to fight it out? It is however; socially desirable to put some constraints on free marketing of Fairness creams since private profits are over-shadowing public interests.
P.S. Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance. ~ John Ruskin, the Stones of Venice [ This article was published in the Y magazine July 14th,2009 ]
