Does media set the societal trends or is media a reflection of the trend? This chicken-n-egg question quite often pops among the debaters. This question came to my mind in the following case.
The idiot box was airing an ad of Complan. A little boy drinks the drink, wins all competitions, mom happy; boy happy. I add other ads with kids – Boost with teenage boys zipping on BMX bikes, Kellogg cornflakes and the smart boy, small boy with bad math score uses a long drive in esteem (or some other car) to butter his dad, Sunsilk and the little girl with beautiful hair, Santhoor soap and a little girl who shouts mummeeee, and so on…
So what, you would ask. Do you see the pattern, I ask. The first few are about health drinks, education, studies, sports, achievement in school and all have “boys” as the protagonists. The last two are about beautiful skin, hair etc. and we have “girls” in the lead role. So here is my question. Are the media guys (and girls) intentionally portraying in their ads that boys are about education, sports etc. and girls are about beauty products. Scarier issue is whether this portrays the Indian society’s bias towards all round development of a boy child over that of a girl child. Are the media people portraying the reality in the society that boys should go to school and girls should stay at home?
Now one may say that given most of these ads are urban based and such bias is absent in urban India. But I beg to differ here. Yes, urban India has girls going to schools and they do get equal treatment. But I believe that there is still a bias against the girl child in the Indian society. One of the best statistics to support this is the deteriorating sex ratio (against women) of India – even a metropolis like Delhi has only 827 girls for 1000 boys against not so good national average of 927 (1991 census). Many Indian homes still would prefer boys given a choice, even if they are not indifferent with the nature’s choice.
One may also point out to ads like that of Maruti Omni has a girl child playing tabla to the world. Quite progressive and hatke I would say. OK, I have not done enough research to study the whole population of ads and what I’m stating is more of an observation. The moot point is whether my observation is aiding the argument or my argument clouding my observation!
Nevertheless, I feel a research on this topic would yield some interesting observations. As for my initial question, this clearly seems to be a case of media following the society.
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