Airtel's new 'Boss' ad: Modern Indian woman's Jekyll and Hyde moment

A boss tells the two men on her team that they’ve got to work on a very tight deadline. One of the men protests, saying it’s not possible. She makes a sympathetic face, tells them they’ll just have to manage and dismisses them.

If this boss was a man, then we wouldn’t assume there’s any twist in this tale. But a woman who’s the reporting authority to two men — there must be something more than what meets the eye. And of course there is. She’s not just a demanding boss, she’s a caring wife, which may not help with the deadline but hey, at least she’s working around the clock to make sure at least one member of her team is looked after properly.

The new Airtel ad, titled Boss, is a valiant effort to tap into the zeitgeist. So, nodding to hipster love for men’s facial hair, we see a good looking man with a beard featured in the ad. The beard could also be to show maturity, because Bearded Man rolls up his sleeves — literally — and gets down to work. Boss leaves, says bye to her colleagues and once home, she gets down to cooking dinner. Next thing you know, Bearded Man, who is still at work, gets a call on his phone. The caller is “Wife”.

If you didn’t guess that Boss is also Wife, then we can only conclude that you were distracted by your lust for bearded men (in which case, with gents like this one and Fawad Khan popping up in show business, your time is now). Either that or you’re a huge Kitu Gidwani fan and your circuits can’t handle the similarity between Gidwani and Boss.

It’s difficult to tell what precisely Airtel is advertising. The better part of the ad is about making a Chinese dinner at home, which might confuse you into thinking this is a promotion for readymade sauces or kitchen equipment. That, however, is not what has upset many on social media. The Airtel ad is being attacked for promoting regressive values.

https://twitter.com/GabbbarSingh/status/493610536592867328

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There’s a lot going for the new ad. Both the actors playing the working couple are very attractive people who don’t have the artificial gloss of models. A woman boss in a world of ads where bosses are invariably men is very welcome too. There’s the minor detail that no company would encourage a couple to work in the same department, let alone have one reporting directly to their spouse. Then again, those who think advertising reflects reality need a psychiatrist more than they need a 3G connection.

In the world of advertising, male bosses show their commitment to the family by coming home in time for their child’s birthday or remembering their wedding anniversary. By the same token, in the Airtel ad, a female boss has to prove her goodness by cooking dinner for her husband. This begs the question that if Boss, at the end of what has probably been a long working day for her too, had ordered home delivery for dinner, would she be a bad wife? What if she’d made sandwiches instead of an elaborate meal? Maybe Bearded Man could have sent a message to Boss/Wife apologising that even though it’s his turn to cook dinner, he can’t because he has to work late and so she makes dinner instead.

There’s a hint of problematic conservatism in the fact that the wife has to be a domestic goddess as well as a hardworking professional. The construct of a woman being the one who has to be the one to balance both home and the office perfectly is a problematic one because, as the recent chatter following Indra Nooyi’s interview about women not having it all reveals , it isn’t a very realistic ideal. The uncomfortable truth is that regardless of whether one is a man or a woman, if they choose to focus on their career, there’s no such thing as a work-life balance. Unless one has a truly charmed life, something has to give. Most men who have devoted themselves to making a good living have had to sacrifice things like birthdays, anniversaries, home-cooked meals and so on. The same applies to women.

However, more problematic than who makes dinner and what makes for a satisfying dinner — the ad really does come across as more as a promotion for Chinese meals than a phone network — is the fact that the woman comes across as a wee bit schizophrenic. When she’s the one who has given her junior colleague work that has a demanding deadline, why is she also the one telling that same junior colleague to come home quickly? It is as though Boss and Wife are two parts of a split personality a la Jekyll and Hyde who are blissfully unaware of each other. That would, of course, explain the ad’s quaint Victorian sensibility.

Airtel’s ad agency could have easily sidestepped this problem by having Boss send Bearded Man either a photo or a video of the dinner that’s waiting for him at home. While he worked, she could have used the internet provided by Airtel to pay bills, perhaps. Or maybe she could have beat his score on Candy Crush. And whenever he came home, she and the dinner would be there for him, because she understands how much work he has and how long it’s likely to take him to finish the assignment that she as his boss has given him. Instead, once she’s home and out of her office avatar, she becomes the stereotypical stay-at-home wife who doesn’t understand the pressures of office life and pleads her husband to come home.

What the Airtel ad inadvertently suggests is that being the conventional wife is more important than being a good boss for a woman; just as being a good worker is more important than being an attentive husband for a man.

However, as many the company’s subscribers know, there are far worse things to complain about when it comes to Airtel.

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