Sweet Child O' Mine in Czechoslovakia

When our policy makers had allowed a 75% FDI in the insurance sector, little had they known that this move would impact the parenting habits of Indian parents. If you have seen the latest Max New York Life Insurance ad, you wouldn’t agree any less. Now here’s a guy who has a zaada ka iraada, and wants his toddler son to pronounce Czechoslovakia. No doubt the advert is fun to watch, but for a moment let’s try to analyse the latent message that it is trying to impart into the psyche of the Indian consumer: expect your one year old kid to pronounce Czechoslovakia. Expect him to top in class each time, every time. Expect him to crack the IITs and then the IIMs. Thrash him if he doesn’t. Make him that brick in the wall. Karo Zaada ka Iraada….

Then there’s this HDFC Standard Life Insurance ad, selling the very same product (some child benefit plan) to the very same target segment. Even the backdrop of the two adverts is same: a young, happy family of the Great Indian Middle Class idling away in the living room on a Sunday afternoon. What distinguishes the two ads, though, is the content. While the former advert portrays the typical Indian dad as a pet-trainer, the latter puts him in the light of a facilitator of learning: encouraging his child to dream big, giving her the wings to fly, to be independent, self-made.

There are scores of other insurance ads playing Morpheus to the married (read confused) Indian male. Like this one. Or this one. Even this one. Youtube is uploaded with 79474587834 such insurance adverts (Okay, I made up this figure. The true figure is actually 546735439 :P) in which the role of the Great Indian Daddy varies from the clown to the ring-master; from the mentor to the meteor. The Uber-sexual Papa is spoiled for choice as never before.

Fortunately, the matter of choice was limited for my Dad. It was either Bata or Liberty. Fiat or Amby. Raymonds or….Raymonds! Just a few nationalized banks. And a single player in insurance: LIC. So my Dad had limited scope for experiment. With life insurance. And my grooming. Pretty much summed up by yet another advert: this one.