These days, there are two ads that have been making me stop whatever I have been trying to get done during the ad breaks and watch. The Vodafone ad shows a son on a video chat with his mom who is at an airport. He asks her to approach a counter and hand over the phone to the person there. When she does that, the son requests the lady to give his mom a window seat. When the lady hands her the phone back, the mom smiles and remarks that though she knows everything her son acts like this. I just love this ad every time I watch it. It perfectly captures the classic mother-son relationship in the Indian context. The son is protective, a bit over-protective perhaps, of his mother. He wants only the best for her and thinks that he knows the best, afflicted as he is by the typical Indian male superiority syndrome. The mom is proud that her son cares for her but also wants to do things on her own, kind of pushing back against his patronizing in her gentle way. I just love the way she smilingly says 'My son is like that, what to do?' Absolutely brilliant!

The other ad is of Dainik Bhaskar. Of course, I am yet to see it with the Mute button off but I doubt if that has diluted the message in any way. We see a school classroom where a father barges in and orders his daughter to come with him. The small child reluctantly picks up her stuff and trots off after him. Her classmates follow her. We see the disappointment and disapproval writ large over the face of the teacher. As the child starts to walk away from the school one of her classmates puts her arms around her friend's waist in an effort to keep her back. The rest of the classmates follow her lead and soon the father is engaged in a sort of a tug-of-war with the classmates over his daughter. The teacher looks on with a smile on his face while the father gives up the fight. The children all fall onto the ground and the child's friend hands triumphantly hands her school bag to her. The message is that we have to insist on bringing about the change and the world will change. The skeptic in me does ask - what will happen when the father doesn't send the child to school the next day? But I choose to ignore it and smile with the children.