Kids These Days

suchithkc


My fellow columnist Deepak Shenoy is a cheap guy. He's supposed to write a finance column - sober, straightforward, and professional - but he is funny when he does this. This is outrageous. The humour is supposed to be left to me and Anand Ramachandran. As Majikthise and Vroomfondel put it, "Demarcation, that's the problem!"
To show Deepak that he can't just walk into rigidly defined areas of humour without facing the consequences, I am retaliating with a column about finance. Specifically, I am going to rant about the worst thing about insurance today.
The worst thing about insurance is not that the regulator is mildly clueless. It's not even that insurance companies insist on selling you ULIPs where you don't see your money again for ten years. It isn't even the compulsory medical test (with twelve hours fasting!) that you have to endure to get life insurance.
It's the advertising.
In the good old days, insurance ads used to play on your insecurities. They used to tell you that even if you died, your widow would have the money to marry off your daughter. And you know what? That's what insurance is supposed to do! But now we have all this newfangled advertising which is supposed to give you a good feeling instead of playing on your fears.
For a brief period this meant that we had insurance ads with cute curly haired girls. Incidentally, in both the ads I linked to, the characters are named Sharma. It's tempting to imagine that they're both the same family, except in parallel universes. In one reality, Mr Sharma didn't die, his daughter bought him a car instead of getting married, and we actually got to see her on screen. But this was too good to last, and now we have a situation where insurance ads are full of kids.
It would be one thing if this was only for the child plans, but kids show up even in ads for pensions1. To be fair, in the pensions ads they don't speak. In the child plan ads they do, and they're insufferably smug. They're always faking a bad report card or wanting new parents. Rascals.
The kids in the child plan ads these days are also always boys, in sharp contrast to the earlier golden age of cute curly haired young women and for that matter even cute straight haired young women (bonus awesomeness in that ad: she's reading Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries, a graphic novel about old Iranian aunties sitting around and talking about the cost of hymen reconstruction surgeries. Pwnage.). And instead of using their insurance plan money to buy their dad a car, they use their parents' money for their own education. Like I said. Rascals.
I don't know whether this absence of girl children is because insurance companies feel their customers don't want to educate their daughters, or because being insurance companies, they don't want to take unnecessary actuarial risks on the daughter in question surviving. It can't be because the child sex ratio is already so low that they can't find a little girl to model for them - I mean, Dairy Milk found one. The Dairy Milk little girl is a spoilt brat2, though, which suggests that the trend of smarmy kids is now spreading beyond the insurance industry. In the past, I had wished for fewer ads with celebrities in them, but I didn't know that the alternative would be this horrific. It's like The Monkey's Paw - the wish came true, but in a grotesque, twisted way.
To see how far this malaise can go, look at the Voltas AC ad. Here, there is no longer just one kid. Instead, there is a roving, almost feral, band of them. They invade peoples' houses without compunction or mercy. And that isn't the most alarming thing. It's the reaction of the people facing the invasion. You, dear reader, are a sensible person and would be surprised and alarmed to wake up to strange children demanding that you change your AC settings. The woman in the ad doesn't. She simpers beatifically. This may be the result of years of seeing kids doing strange things in ads. Clearly, a nightmare future lies ahead.
Other nations have enacted legislation to protect children from being manipulated by advertising. There cannot be advertisements with cartoon characters, or which are blatantly targeted to children. In India, we need to look at this from the opposite angle - we need rules to protect advertisements from containing children, and adults from being manipulated by cute children3. I hope that the government takes up this issue soon. After all, it's as important as all the other stuff it does - preparing Most Wanted lists, managing Air India, and censoring the internet.
1: Pension plan ads are slightly pointless, though. If you're as rich as my friend Kodhi (who is also tall, funny, and single) you don't really need a pension plan. And if you do need a pension, an insurance company isn't necessarily the best option. You should ask Deepak to do a column on how to plan for retirement properly.
2: My darling girlfriend sympathises with the little girl, though, on the grounds that life for an only child is tough and chocolate is delicious. This shows her sweet, loving nature (my girlfriend's, not the little girl's).
3: I am cool with being manipulated by adults, though. Like the thatha in this ad. Whattaguy.