Why Vogue Needs to Make Better Choices

It looks like the opening scene from The Ring. And what follows is far scarier. Homi Adjania, maker of Being Cyrus and Finding Fanny, has rallied the troops and made a Vogue Empower video on what else – women being empowered.

This is part of the Vogue Empower series of videos. This is not the first and, much to my trepidation, I doubt it will be the last. Vogue Empower is an initiative by Vogue India, which is pictorially depicted by Deepika Padukone with tousled hair and in black stockings, high heels and a cocktail dress, standing while holding boxing gloves. Sitting in front of her, with his head nuzzling her bosom is a beefy and shirtless model.

She looks sexy as sin, but what this picture has to do with women’s empowerment is beyond me. Maybe it means women should dress to the nines and pulverise half-naked men. Either way, this picture should have prepared me for the “socially-aware” videos that have followed.

The latest of these is Homi Adjania’s film with Deepika Padukone, the opening scene of which I have described earlier. What follows, after the silhouette of the girl from The Ring, are black and white clips of various women with beautifully tousled hair in black clothes, smiling, looking intense and sometimes screaming silently into the camera. Who are these women? Are they ordinary women like us? Don’t be infra-dig, now.

These are a bunch of celebrities, who seem to have been recruited from the staff of Vogue India and the guest list of Homi Adjania and his wife’s last dinner party. There’s Anaita Shroff Adjania (Homi’s wife and Fashion Director, Vogue), Bandana Tewari (Fashion Features Director, Vogue India), Sheena Sippy, Adhuna Akhtar, Kamal Sidhu, model Sheetal Mallar, Zoya Akhtar, Nimrat Kaur, Anupama Chopra and some other semi-famous people. There are some tribal women and commoners thrown in for good measure for around 10 seconds of the video as well.

Now, I do agree that you often need celebrities to get across a social awareness message. If Amitabh Bachchan makes a video telling people to stop killing girl children, or Sachin Tendulkar does a film saying you should not practise domestic violence – people will listen and follow their words. But, along with the celebrity, the message also needs to make sense.

So what is the message here? Along with the clips of all these beautiful people with perfect make-up and tousled hair, we have Deepika’s voice saying the following:

“My body. My mind. My choice. To be a size zero or a size fifty. To use cotton and silk to trap my soul is to believe you can halt the expansion of the universe. You are my choice. I am not your privilege. The bindi on my forehead. The ring on my finger. Adding your surname to mine. They’re ornaments. They can be replaced. My choice. To come home when I want. My choice. To have your baby or not to have your baby. My songs. Your noise. My odour. Your anarchy. Your sins. My virtues. My choices are like my fingerprints. They make me unique. To have sex before marriage, to have sex outside of marriage. My choice. I am the tree. Not the forest. I am not the snowflake. I am the snowfall. You are the snowflake. I am the universe. Infinite in every direction.” (As opposed to when you are infinite in only one direction, I suppose.)

You wouldn’t be faulted for thinking that Kapil Sibal wrote the dialogue for the video. His haiku may actually make more sense than what has been written here. Would you like to be a snowflake or the snowfall? I don’t think I would. While I appreciate Adjania’s ode to stream of consciousness scripting, what do these words mean and why are these women saying these words to us? And why does this look like a poor man’s version of Madonna’s Vogue video? Questions, questions.

If you have a bunch of celebrities at your disposal, is it really too much to try to string together a coherent video with a clear message. Or is being beautiful all it takes to strike a chord with Vogue readers? Going by how much money must have been spent on this video and the publicity around it, I cannot but rue the wasted opportunity.

All Homi Adjania and Deepika Padukone have achieved is to show us how not to make a video on women’s empowerment. Also, if a bunch of Homi Adjania’s celebrity friends and celebrity friend’s wives striking poses with wind-blown hair while unconnected sentences are spoken makes you feel empowered – Vogue and Cosmopolitan must be your bibles for emancipation.

This is the third Vogue Empower video I’ve watched (yes, I’m a sucker for punishment), and the good thing about the videos is that they are consistently illogical and absurd.

The first was called ‘Going Home’ and starred Alia Bhatt. It showed her driving home at night. She speaks to her mother while 10 minutes away from home. Her car stalls. Another car at the end of the road spots her. This is followed by the background sound of deep breathing while a car-full of men stare at her. The deep breathing continues. The car circles and drives up to her. The men look as if they’ve all been fathered by Shakti Kapoor or Gulshan Grover. She walks up to the strangers and asks them help her. After they’ve looked at her the way hungry animals look at a scrap of meat, she asks them to drop her home. She gets in the front seat with two of the strange men. While the rest of them keep gesticulating and whispering about her in the back seat. She, oblivious to their whispers and gestures, reaches home and hugs them warmly. The screen says “Impossible in the real world. Can we give her the world that she believes exists?” And then the rest of the words fade out leaving behind only the words “Can We” on the screen.

Who is this video meant for? Men who rape strangers on the road? Or was it supposed to highlight Alia Bhatt’s poor judgment – at evaluating a bad situation and a worse script?

Then there’s the ‘Start With The Boys’ video by Madhuri Dixit. Here a whole bunch of different people – parents, friends – keep telling various guys of differing ages (babies, toddlers, teenagers, adults) who are crying – “ladke nahin rote hain”. The last scene of the film has a young, seemingly urban and affluent man twisting a young woman’s arm in a bedroom. Her face is covered by her hair, till she looks up and we see she’s been physically abused. Then Madhuri Dixit’s dulcet tones tell us that “We have taught our boys not to cry, it’s time we teach them not to make girls cry.” Once again the leap in logic and plotline is something which would make David Lynch proud.

What does this video mean? That if we tell our sons not to cry, that will lead them to, of course, beat up women and make them cry? This is the most bizarre co-relation I have heard of and a leap of logic which would make even Salman Khan’s film scriptwriters proud.

Vogue India though, seems to be on a better footing than its counterparts. This is the same magazine group which in March, 2014 had an editorial spread in Vogue Italia in which a white model covered in tribal paint and headgear wore designer clothes while straddling and being surrounded by taxidermied animals. In October 2009, Vogue Paris carried a spread with white model Lara Stone in full black body paint. In March 2013, Vogue Netherlands carried an editorial called “Heritage Heroes” which featured models in full blackface.

To give Vogue India credit, being vacuous and nonsensical are far milder crimes than being racist. But my suggestion to them would be to focus on what they’re good at – selling us unrealistic concepts of feminine beauty interspersed with airbrushed pictures of Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt and Madhuri Dixit. Spare us the gravitas and the trauma of trying to inject logic into these videos. It would make at least me feel far more empowered.