The Airtel Ad

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I suspect that I should warn y'all that this is going to be a soppy sentimental posting about a soppy, sentimental advertising moment: this one, in particular. I'll admit that I find -- found? -- it moving (at least the first couple of times I saw it). I imagine that it's supposed to be set in the neutral zone between India and Pakistan; and given that that border is sealed again now and tense, in the aftermath of Benazir's assassination, it seems instantly recognizable to all in India as such. I have to admit that when I first saw it, I placed it between Palestine and Israel. I suppose the location doesn't really matter... the emotion it evokes in both those putative settings is the same.

So am I a schmuck? A sentimentalist to be moved by something so... engineered? There is a part of me that's rolling my eyes at the easy sentimentality that this ad -- that ads like this always -- appeal(s) to but there's also a part of me that thinks this is a very interesting ad in the context of the political situation in India. I don't think it's any secret that I've been saying that the entire South Asian subcontinent is getting more and more polarized in terms of religion. The forces of fundamentalism -- both Hindu fundamentalists as evinced by the increasingly open Hinduvta platform of the BJP, and Muslim fundamentalism in -- is on the rise, feeding on each other in a vicious cycle. The ideals of secularism seem more and more like irrelevant footnotes from the idealists of the anticolonial generation, a generation that may have won India its freedom but which, in the end, proved its inability to cope with the consequences of this freedom -- that is, the global reality of capitalism by embracing the "non-alignment movement" and an ineffectual form of socialism -- at least, this is how the current generation of zombielike and zoomingly globalizing middle and upper class Indians would see the last half century's history.

So, commercially speaking, it's not an environment in which platitudes about tolerance and secularism are especially well received, I wouldn't think. Airtel is a cellphone provider -- and incidentally, cellphones (and their service providers) have been phenomenally successful in India over the last 10-15 years -- so it's interesting that this is the showcase ad for Airtel right now. Then again, perhaps even within the young and wealthy market segment that Airtel is hoping will be reached by its ads, there are enough people who pay lip service to the sentimental ideals of "no walls, no barriers" to find the ad memorable.

What are we to make of it all?