Power the flower

“Is there a way to quantify ‘progress’, when it comes to the female sex? In a country where men significantly outnumber women and in a world where businesses are still largely run by men, the scope of opportunity is bleak. Women across the globe have been conditioned into multi tasking and that’s a skill they tend to take with them to their married homes and their urban jobs. In 61 years of independence, a new stratum of female workers has emerged. This is a demographic that comprises of women of all ages that have one thing in common, circumstance. These women value enterprise, respect labor, crave financial freedom and ultimately desire to be ‘individuals’.
And yet we deny these women a place in the sun, even before they become people, we deny them the right to live. What we need to do is eliminate discrimination and not the ‘child’. In order address the issue of ‘elimination’ we must incorporate awareness as a solution and a tool.

Academic courses are now being offered at high school level, mainly to discourage young marriages and also to encourage a sense of enterprise. Indian girls fare better in school and given the opportunity, they are more likely to complete college. The main reasons women don’t work in India are high birth rates, discrimination and complete lack of support. Opportunity fortunately is not lacking any longer. Women are making their way into aviation, armed forces, politics and other male bastions but this is at a macro level. Look closer and you will see a new, young and innocent India. Between the grass roots are the future mothers of India’s business force,
India’s entrepreneurs, India’s young Turks!”

This was the introduction for a CSR campaign Photosindia.com did in conjunction with Exchange4Media.com last month. It was probably one of the most painful forewords to write because contextually it was hitting home in two ways, I am a woman and I have a daughter. Both of which I consider blessings. So it is hard to imagine a world that thinks otherwise. Please excuse my gullibility, I have seen the statistics and I know that majority of couples that abort a female child are urban couples in metro cities. So I guess it isn’t one ‘those’ things after all. It is a rampant, heartfelt, reacted upon evil we are construing as an issue that only old India dealt with. A sculptor I met in Nainital once told me that this ‘son’ fixation was all over the world. The typical all American father wanted nothing more than a son to toss a ball or two with and that Nordic fisherman would never dream of taking a daughter on board. I listened quietly and when he was done I asked if any of these fathers killed the daughters in the womb? He said ‘no’!

There is no dearth of media focus on this subject and yet it refuses to go away, we managed to curb AIDS numbers but we can’t get the natural balance in our population back! So in a series we want to simply call ‘SAVE’, this is the first installment – ‘Save the Girl child’.



This campaign was promoted extensively by Exchange4Media and we were honored to receive entries in triple digits, considering there were no prizes mentioned the mailer, this seemed like a purely 'social responsibility' kind of activity. The idea was simple yet driven by a deeper cause. We offered 3 images to the creative community to come up with a poster on 'Save the girl child'. We wanted an 'awareness poster' yet we were keen to avoid a typical preachy quality that awareness campaigns have and project a more emotional representation of the plight of Indian girls.

Watch this space for the winners. Due to immense popularity of this campaign we would like to make this contest available to the readers of our blog as well. Please wait for details on the next topic and the images you can use.