‘Ad’vice to be wise

It is a quintessential desi marriage set-up. While her son sips on a cup of hot chai, the doting mother comments, “I have been telling him so many times to get settled. After all, how long can you possibly stay alone in the US, where one needs to step out even for a cup of coffee?”

On hearing this, the bride-to-be politely excuses herself and comes back with a coffee machine asking the man to get settled with the machine since it offers coffee 24 hours and needless to say, there won’t be a visa problem. She adds with a smile, “You see aunty ji, I am not a kitchen appliance.”

This is one among the series of ads released by Havells this IPL season with the common theme: “Respect Women”. As the men in the ads go around expecting their better-halves to make juices, chutneys and iron their formal shirts, the women remind them about their place in the household with clever punch lines like (pointing to a mixer) “That is chutney and I am your patni (wife).”

Speaking about the ad campaign, Shriram Iyer, executive creative director of Lowe Lintas, the advertising agency behind the campaign, says, “Even though we have progressed a lot as a society, there is somehow this undercurrent of chauvinistic expectation that the kitchen is a women’s domain. So we thought it would be nice to turn that notion around and let men know in a slightly tongue-in-cheek manner that today it is all about having equal stakes in one’s household.”

He adds that when it comes to promoting a product it works best only when it mirrors the truth around us.