Deepika Padukone's Vogue Video: A Souffle Whipped Beyond Taste

NEW DELHI: The Vogue empowerment video directed by Homi Adajania of Being Cyrus fame and narrated by Deepika Padukone has got more and more eyeballs for being superficial and belligerently anti-men .

The video is indeed every bit of that what it's being accused of . It does take a simplistic world-view and caricatures the everyday man as a patriarchal monster. But then, what else were we expecting from a glossy magazine like Vogue whose idea of emancipation of women may well be summed up as liberty to choose between one dress over another.

I can understand the social media having a gala time skewering Deepika for championing such a misandrist view of the other half of the world , and portraying a promiscuous and almost Dionysian image of the 'empowered' woman. But the frenzied denunciation on the part of others revealed a poor understanding of women’s rights. And our choice of role models for women has gone so low that we actually get upset when the cine idols act as per themselves----showy!

At any rate, it is a mark of disrespect to the serious scholarship and years of activism of feminists when we tend to give more time and space to flaying the flawed glitterati (which is no flaw of theirs) than giving voice to the voiceless working in brick kilns and other dens of exploitation.

The video should best be seen as an image building PR exercise by Vogue and Deepika doesn't deserve to be pilloried for it. Just as she didn't deserve to be applauded when she snapped at a photographer who had mounted atop like a hawk to take a look at her 'Andes' . We all tend to jump the gun and feel compelled to take sides too quickly when it comes to an issue which involves a celebrity taking a serious stance.

The recent case of Angelina Jolie getting her ovaries removed to prevent the chance of cancer can be cited to prove this hypothesis. Journalists across the board divided themselves in two camps over the question whether you should do as Angelina says or not . Rather meaningless, was it not?

Now back to the Vogue video, what Deepika says for herself and her fellow Venusians is misconstrued feminism. The path from nunnery to whoredom, and back again, declaimed by her as the prerogative of an empowered woman can never be advocated by any sane feminist . And we should leave the debate at that, trivial as it is .

I don't mind the orgiastic view of woman empowerment painted in the clip-cum-manifesto , which is by the privileged for the privileged, but what is irksome for me is the turning of the issue into a tornado by the left against the pseudo-left . The only difference is that this tornado is not going to move further , forget about moving any cause. This tornado , actually , is a soufflé, whipped to taste.