Loved this campaign by Vicks India

It’s time to introduce gender irrespective  pronouns in English (all languages) and more importantly in our thoughts as well.

Few days back while scrolling through my personal facebook Profile, I saw some of my friends shared an advertisement. The number of sharing kept increasing, when ultimately I thought to actually see the advertisement.

The protagonist, a small town girl in her teens traveling in a bus narrates on her mind, that how much she misses her mother when she is send to the boarding school for studies. She recalls how strong is her mother, who made her own life being thrown out of her father's home. The girl's biological mother passed away which she faintly remembers when she was taken by an ambulance. From a child care center, someone(called as "mammi" meaning mother ) adopted her .  Right from the day of adoption when the little girl was sick to now, the caregiver gives care to the orphaned girl as her own daughter. Slowly, the girl holds the hands of her mother , showing the undaunted spirit of her beloved caregiver sitting beside her on the bus. Her mother is a transgender person, clad in a sari (a garment consisting of a length of cotton or silk elaborately draped around the body, traditionally worn by women from South Asia.) Her mother, is not allowed to legally adopt but raising the girl as her own daughter with all the affection, love, care a mother gives to her child.

This is a true story based on the life of Gauri Sawant, raising orphaned Gayatri as her own. 

This campaign has moved me from within immensely. This is not only an advertisement from Vicks India, but a strong social message about the lack of basic human rights to the human beings. LGBT community consists of a large section of our society across the world. But still they are fighting for their basic rights like marriage, adoption, voting rights, proper education to filling up those forms, which has only two options in the Gender column.

I would love to see such bold advertisements in future. It has pin pointedly showed us that basic traits of humanity like love, kindness, empathy, care is independent of gender, geography, social and economic strata from where one belongs to. These innate humanity traits are present in all of us.

In this era of rockets planning to launch in Mars, we still holds our minds with barriers and discriminate people with these man-made falsities. Here I am remembering a great poem, by famous Rabindranath Tagore,

Where the mind is without fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.