Padamsee is uncharacteristically modest but refreshingly honest, ‘I hit lucky. Maybe it was subconscious but I did not deliberately plan gender-sensitive advertising. Yes, I think it was subconscious because as a child I always had strong women around me, especially a strong mother.’ Alyque Padamsee’s office is on the top floor of the building named after his mother, Kulsum Terrace. She lived here too, the fiery and gritty Kulsum, who sat at the crucial curve of the enormous horseshoe-shaped dining table set in the high-ceilinged courtyard-like room as antiseptic sunshine filtered in through the skylights. Kulsum, subconsciously or otherwise, also taught her son a lesson or two in effective parenting. By Alyque Padamsee’s own admission, ‘I make a far better parent than partner.’

The father in him made a public service advertising film, thirty seconds, titled A Father Is A Girl’s Best Friend. The opening visual is a tied girl-doll. A male hand unravels the bandage from her eyes, ‘A father is a girl’s best friend by opening her eyes to education.’ The hand unties her hands, ‘By freeing her from the drudgery of housework.’ The hand unties her feet, ‘By helping her find her feet.’ Not surprisingly this public service ad has not been shown enough, those being the days of undiluted Doordarshan. But what is to stop public service advertising around children and Child Sexual Abuse today, specially with the profusion of channels? Nothing, except the Indian advertising fraternity itself which will probably see no staggering profit, of the monetary sort, in it.

The ‘new’, ‘improved’ millennial male in Indian advertising, however, does make money. And so we must see advertising with this kind of man taking time off from the board meeting to eat a soggy sandwich with his spaghetti-strapped daughter. The millennial male has yet to grow into Father Courage, though, to share soiled nappy change time with the exhausted mother.

But will the mother—in real life—let him?

Will the woman relinquish some aspect of those mystical powers attributed to motherhood?

And will a mother ever tell her son about menstruation? Why must he learn from outside what happens to his mother and sister, and what will happen to his wife, every month?

Why does a mother not explain to her son about other people’s daughters; isn’t she one herself?

Why is a mother, in turn, rude to a daughter-in-law? Why should the man be the crux of the lives of either?

If a father does not do it, why does a mother not give her son condoms and tell him about Aids?

Why does a mother not get off her pedestal—upon which her husband and son have dumped her so that they can glorify her from afar—to put them in their place?

Why does a woman not draw the line with her man even when she has a home to her name, money in the bank and a good job?

Why do mothers and fathers keep telling their daughters how to behave, why isn’t it already high time they told their sons?