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Sunday, May 16, 2010

Great White Hope



Gulab is large-ish shop in Gurgaon which sells an assortment of Indian sweets, mithai and such. Also has a number of things to eat besides mithai—thali meals, dosas and even the odd pizza—all ‘pure vegetarian’, of course (one day, I’d like to get my hands of something which is vegetarian and impure).

What I found interesting is that to advertise themselves, they chose to photoshop a picture of a rosy-cheeked, plump White man holding a thali which contains roti, daal, chaval and subzi. Not that using White people in Indian ads is anything new; they’ve been used in ads for cosmetics, perfumes and electronics. But to use a White chap to sell a Punjabi thali?

5 comments:

Rakesh said...

maybe they thought he looks like Shammi Kapoor's Younger and fairer brother!

vicious said...

:P .. ya n if at all they wanted to have hot skin , y not a sexy young blonde??

Vadakkoot said...

Post Colonial Ego Disorder. Nothing can match the joy of being served by a white chap ;)

Anonymous said...

I can never understand this.I don't think it even helps the business.

In this case my feeling is this picture was chosen because photos of white men and women are found more easily and they are less likely to sue them since they probably will never find out about this theft.

Now if the owner of the original picture reads your blog... :)

Shoaib Daniyal said...

IHM,

Heh. Quite probable actually that it's been lazily flicked off the web.

But White people do help, as Ghosh babu points out--especially if the ad has a storyline which depends on sex/sexuality to sell the product. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpU9wwflmNs