Change our advertisements: stop killing our girls

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I am starting today a post that will continue to highlight advertisements and their absolute disregard to the conversations the recent murder of young girl have started in India. A culture and a society soaked with misogyny and patriarchy needs to be brought under the lens. The recent report of the committee on Amendments to Criminal Law will be talked about in the days to come  but that report will need to be broken down into what we can do as daily citizens, men and women of the grand old civilization play a part to lift the weight of an age-old way of life.

Lets begin with this advertisement that I have seen at least 10 times in the last 3 hours today on various news channels etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tzs_bZLDLw

The advertisement plays out the stereotypical roles in household, in society, in relationships between men and women. This is being fed to us daily on all channels in the name of purchasing a specific insurance product feature. I dare the advertising genius behind this advertisement to redo this advertisement to instead depict scenes from real life:

[Scene 1: Husband beating wife and then apologizing]

Husband: I will never beat you again

Wife: Likh key dogey kya?

[Scene 2: Meeting between the girls and boys family to finalize the wedding]

Boys father: We don’t want anything, just your daughter to be our daughter

Girls father: Likh key dogey kya?

I wish our advertisers joined in the conversations by being proactive and not perpetuating the stereotype that is killing our girls and women every single day. I invite you my 1 or 2 readers to chime in and suggest advertisements that irk you and hopefully when each and every member of our social fabric joins demands for justice and equality perhaps then we can change?

Culture of sharing: relativistic approach

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Recently I have been tormented by the cultural dimensions of what one considers ‘sharing’. Here, by culture I mean the difference that is due to where we are from, “the beliefs, customs, practices, and social behavior of a particular nation or people”. I intend to distinguish it from organizational culture as I think that is subculture which is a product of many cultures trying to co-exist, while the other is inherent to us as individuals.

The more global in nature our work environment is the more we assume that we learn the culture of the organization but not necessarily pay enough emphasis on the culture of our contexts which is much larger than that of the organization and plays a role in how we interpret and reshape the organizational culture. This is particularly important when we think of sharing and particularly knowledge sharing. In a multi-cultural (global) context this becomes more obvious when we are confronted with people from another culture that we become aware that our patterns of behavior are not universal.

Within this background I think its important to adopt what sociologists use when studying societies, called relativistic approach. For sociologists within the relativistic perspective, diversity, not consensus, is the central fact of social life. People and groups often have competing or conflicting interests rather than shared interests and goals. I think it is important to consider this approach particularly in the context of sharing. Because if you understand how people from one culture share then you can build systems, mechanism, incentives and technology that allows for greater sharing.

Here I am not at all referring to the concepts of cultural preservation, “Cultures are not museum pieces, to be preserved intact at all costs” (Nussbaum, 1999, p. 37). However, what I do think we often miss is the cultural sensitivity to predisposition in sharing of knowledge that are important determinants in both the success and adoption of any systems/processes institutionalized for systematizing knowledge sharing.

As I prod through my own thinking around this and perhaps the contradictions that exist in this thinking I hope to arrive at a place where I am able to articulate ‘how’ I think it can be done as opposed to the challenges currently we face.