A Railways TV ad for Indians - but where are the women?

Indian Railways's first television commercial - showing a 'human train' running through the streets and buildings of Kolkata - is a hit on YouTube. What hits you though, is that the Desh ka Mel train appears to have no seats for one half of India.

There is not a single girl or woman in the long train that snakes in and out of homes, up and down staircases - it is made entirely of men jogging along in single file, holding on to the shirt of the guy in front, as an adaptation of the popular track from the 1968 Ashok Kumar film Aashirwaad plays in the background, Rail gaadi chhuk chhuk chhuk chhuk.

Piyush Pandey, executive chairman and creative director of Ogilvy & Mather, the agency that created the ad that has now been watched over 45,000 times on YouTube, and has been listed on bestadsontv.com, said it wasn't a deliberate decision to leave women out.

"We tried to keep everyone. But this was a demanding shoot. We shot the footage nearly 70 times to get it right. We needed people who would be ready to jog around for hours and hours. And we barely had a couple of days to wind it up. It was a physically excruciating shoot," Pandey said.

"Maybe if we had more athletic women or sportswomen, we would have used them in the train."

Pandey did point out though that "if you see the ad, women, kids and old people are all watching the human train", and that in that sense, "they are all participating".

Pandey, who has done several ad films for governments before, including the famous Mile sur mera tumhara and the latest ads for Gujarat Tourism, argued that the Rail gaadi ad was about the symbolism of the Indian Railways rather than about the number of men or women who participated.

"I don't think I remember using only women or a particular number of women in the Fevicol ad, where everyone is stuck to the bus. It was a much talked-about ad, and what mattered was that the symbolism got across," Pandey said. "And why just women, you could have also asked me why the railway ad shows no Tamilians or no Kashmiris etc... But this ad has nothing to do with community or gender. We are taught analogies from childhood and we understand them very well. The symbolism in this ad works."

Pandey said he was happy with the way the ad has worked out. "Both men and women have said they like the ad. So it is better not to question the way things have turned out. Creativity goes beyond logic sometimes."

Prakash Varma, director, Nirvana Films, who directed the ad shoot, said there was "no plan to keep women out", but it wouldn't have made sense to use "just one or two" women. "We needed at least 50-60 women, and we fell short of people volunteering for this."

The Indian Railways campaign, consisting of two 60-second films with the lines, "The Magic of India, Indian Railways" and "Desh Ka Mel, Bharatiya Rail", debuted during the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, and was also shown in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

"We were given over Rs 15 crore worth of free ad time as (Games) sponsors on Doordarshan, and the best way to utilise this was with a good ad," said a senior railway official."We got the details of the airtime very late, which is why we had to rush to the ad agency to get the ad prepared at short notice," the official said. "We did not want to say we have 70,000 trains and carry 20 million passengers etc. We only wanted to use our USP - the people who travel on the Indian Railways. And it worked for us."

Source: Yahoo News