As a bona fide Indian uncle I am thrilled.
Cadbury has recognized my power. Their ad for Valentines Day this year targeted the Indian uncle.
Cadbury’s 5 star, a smooth nougat caramel chocolate bar put out an ad which open with a grey haired data scientist in a suit. An uncle basically
UNCLE1: You’re probably wondering what a middle aged guy is doing in a five star ad.
It turns out his job is to to destroy Valentines Day.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
In India Valentines Day has become quite a rage these days. A week before valentines day shops spring up selling giant plushie hearts and teddy bears. Malls get into the act. Bakeries bring out heart shaped cookies.
And every year fringe groups bring out protest marches calling Valentines Day un Indian and immoral.
PROTESTS
Well Five Star bar has an idea.
To destroy the pernicious Valentine’s Day once and for all, they are calling on all uncles to step up to the plate. This does not involve heckling young couples trying to go on a date at a pub. Nor does it require thrashing an interfaith couple trying to get married in a court. That happened recently as well.
Instead the ad for 5-star candy bar requires uncles to embrace Valentine’s Day whole-heartedly. If they fill the cafes with teddy bears and balloons, wear shirts with heart prints, it will be the end of Valentine’s Day. As the ad tells us
AD1: When uncles join a trend, the youth instantly lose interest in it. It happened to social media platforms, skinny jeans, YOLO and many others.
Now uncles can kill Valentine’s Day. With love.
AD2: We’ll pay uncles to hit the streets, flood the internet and go on dates… until everyone else feels out of place
All cultures have the uncle problem. But the Indian uncle is a breed apart. No uncle knows as much as this uncle. He knows the “real” motives of both Donald Trump and Narendra Modi. He could fix the Indian economy in a jiffy. He can hold forth on whisky, women, mutual funds, the football match he played in 37 years ago and the GDP. Intermittent fasting is an acceptable topic for discussion, enlarged prostrates not so much. Denial is the first commandment of uncle-dom. The other day I met a friend’s father. He scolded me for letting my hair go grey. “If you all let your hair go grey, how will we look?” he said disapprovingly, his own slicked-back hair a shiny jet black. I am hardly immune either. The first time someone in the market called me “kaku” or uncle I bristled. I still wanted to be “dada” or brother.
Indian comedy specials are full of toasts and roasts to the Indian uncle. Stand-up comic Punit Punta says Indian uncles have only three preoccupations - give lectures, spread fake news on WhatsApp and stay away from their wives.
PUNIA1: Every uncle secretly believes if he hadn’t got married he would have changed the world.
In an essay about Indian uncles, economist and writer Shrayana Bhattacharya writes “we live under the tyranny of the “Indian Uncle” from corporations (where they want everyone to work Sundays) to the building associations (here they object to everything) and they live to dominate, and insist on imposing their bad jokes on everyone. But while it’s easy to pile on the patriarchal tyrannical conservative uncle who fumes about feminists, she writes that “self-professed liberal uncles” are even more problematic. They are the “unhelpful uncles”, the gatekeepers and mansplainers, the ones who are “stylish in the sexism,” smilingly ignoring the input of female colleagues while they suck up the oxygen in the room as they deliver non-stop wisdom.
But what strikes me from my unscientific survey of WhatsApp groups is that Indian uncles are not just killjoys but that they are singularly joyless. They like to shoot down new ideas and are ever ready to tell you why something will not work. And I worry that, surrounded by a cohort like that, I will easily become like that as well, sitting in the club, drinking dyspepsia on the rocks.
That’s why the 5-star candy bar uncles gave me some hope. For once the uncles were having fun without tired sexist jokes. They were wearing brightly colored outfits, they were whooping it up in cafes, and holding onto teddy bears. Of course the WhatsApp uncle will sourly point out this is all to sell a diabetogenic candy bar.
But at least for once Uncles Just Wanna Have Fun.
CYNDI LAUPER
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW