Says Dr Anjali Monteiro, head, unit for media and communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, ‘Any representation in any medium, be it advertising or cinema, that legitimizes and normalizes violence to children, sexual or otherwise, should be questioned. In advertising one obvious change over the past decade is greater visibility of children in more advertising, as also a greater number of ads being targeted at children. One also sees a greater degree of objectification at work. Not only are children more visible, but they are also being represented as attractive objects and at times—particularly in the case of female children—as objects of desire. There are examples where these representations can be grossly and overtly sexual, for example the Mexx print ad where a little boy is shown at the bedside of a woman with his pants down. Most of the time these representations are a little more subtle and hence the more insidious. A little girl in an off-the-shoulder black velvet dress and ringlets, dancing in Bollywood film heroine style, frontally, for the camera, may even appear cute to some viewers. But this objectified representation of the little girl mimicking an adult object of desire is to me objectionable. While its links with Child Sexual Abuse may not be direct, it normalizes a particular way of looking at young girls, a way of seeing that it shares in common with pornography, namely, the girl as an object of gaze for the voyeur and not as a person. Such modes of representation also begin to set the benchmark for the way little girls dress in everyday life, so much so that one sees young girls today wearing more and more inappropriate clothes. Which their conservative parents are quite happy about; partly also because these girls are pre-pubescent and hence—the parents incorrectly think—not at that dangerous age where they have to worry!’

If advertising is only about getting people to buy products, not changing society for the better, it stands to logic that the hidden persuaders have no right to subvert the existing norms of society to their detriment either. So: can we expect the Indian advertising fraternity to internalize certain norms so that they reject or resist representations that are voyeuristic of children?

‘No,’ booms the guru of advertising Alyque Padamsee. ‘Expect nothing from advertising which you do not see in society.’ Padmashree Padamsee, as is evident, remains steadfastly loyal to the trade he has stamped. Thus, it is unexpected that he blushes when it is pointed out that his own work in creative advertising does not reflect such a thinking. One never saw little boys being taken to the market by their mummies when Lalitaji took Ravi to the bazaar to buy her bhaajis and Surf and even publicly remonstrated him to behave himself. There was also that time when men were drooling over Karen Lunel’s body and the morality brigade fuming over her little green bikini; but Padamsee had tapped right into a working woman’s important yearning: her almost always unmet desire to have an uninterrupted bath when she can privately soap away her worries, soothe her fears in a shower with the sensuous thrum of water on her skin.