zong ad - pretty whorish

Been subjected to this awful ad and song sung by Ali Hamza.  


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL7rnZvyaJs

Ok, what's wrong with the picture?

Get it? 

All the women are spineless retards who wait to be rescued and breathlessly follow husbands, from one continent to another  

Wife

You (the man) do not need to discuss your resignation or your immigration with her.  You tell her when you are ready for the next big move.  You glare at her when she walks in behind you, and glancing at your computer screen, she realizes for the first time that you are quitting your job, moving countries, leaving your family, and setting up a project for the deaf in Pakistan.

And do you have a discussion with her at that moment?  No.  She returns to bed, and acquiesces to the quiet, moral power of your decision.  Once you return to and are settled in a laughing village of your nostalgia, you make a quick phone call and instruct her to return.  Firmly.

Now as someone who has moved countries, with kids  -- at the very least it requires:

packing boxes

lots of paper cuts

seventeen trips to goodwill

big donation bags

renting mailboxes

selling furniture

finding friends who will store

sitting at U-haul

six months pregnant, and wide

lots of cheap chinese food
and Gatorade

  

But hell, he's made his money.  She can do it alone.  Or She can hire some hispanic movers, right.

Sister

He returns to the innocent memory of his deaf sister and they sign to each other in mirrors.  She is cute and childlike, coy and virginal like a Zia era school girl.  She is the inspiration for this project.  Yet its her father, this brother, and a male friend who examine maps and plans for the new project. 

(While she braids her hair in ribbons?)

I hope for her sake she finds some bumkin to bang in the chanay ka kheth.

Mother

Looks up from her prayer and finds her son there. Amen, my lord!  "I can now spend the rest of my miserable days not lamenting my son's absence, but feasting upon his sight."

Worst of all, it invokes patriotism in the most vulgar way - farmers harvesting fields of gold - carefree children tossing cricket balls.  Forget that most of the country is drowning in inflated prices, and food insecurity, scrambling for crumbs -- in a grotesque migration for city wages, and switching 3 buses to get to jobs.  

The song acknowledges that the country is poor and and disabled by illiteracy  -- yet advocates that solutions lie in individual, wealthy philanthropists.  It does not question the capitalist economy, and the politics of migration- but salutes the man who makes a killing in stock markets and business strategies in a wall street like venue.  And returns a portion of it to a good cause.

Indeed, just as Gandhi's silly comment about the affluent using a portion of their wealth for themselves, and holding the rest as trustees for the poor. (that Arundhati Mocks)

And for godssake, its an ad for a cell phone company. ZONG.  I am not exactly expecting a feminist anthem.  But is it too much to ask that women not be portrayed as whores?  


Please.....snap out of your patriarchal wet dream.