If you watched the recent Bharat–New Zealand T20I series, two things would have stood out. The first was the ceaseless parade of Shah Rukh Khan ads. There was SRK peddling Google Gemini as an agony aunt for everything from parenting to running a business, and then SRK again, this time selling Vi mobile plans. The second was a Durex ad in which a swimsuit-clad woman sits stuck atop a water slide. She stays stuck until a good-looking younger man flashes a Durex packet, and a gush of water sends our good lady whooshing down.
Shah Rukh hams, and he revels in hamming. It is his signature move, and even his most ardent fans will admit the over-acting is part of the allure. But the man has been selling wares for three decades, age has caught up with him, and in these ads he seems desperate to turn back the clock and recapture the youthful “exuberance” he believes is his calling card. Even Sachin no longer saturates the ad breaks like this, and you won’t find a single 60-plus heroine doing so. Amitabh Bachchan still appears, but as an elder statesman, and looks far more gracious and natural for it.
So why is a certain class of yuppie Indian so determined to sell Shah Rukh as the very epitome of stardom and Indian cinema? Yes, Pathaan and Jawan minted money in 2023, but both rode on objectionable, polarising premises.
Pathaan gave us an ISI agent with a heart of gold and a rogue ex-RAW agent as its villain. It also took huge liberties with history. Its hero is a Bharatiya operative fighting alongside American forces in Afghanistan in America’s “war on terror”, a war Bharat never sent its soldiers to fight. Jawan arrived in September 2023, with the general election only months away, and took thinly veiled potshots at the Modi government. Its targets ran from a children’s-hospital oxygen tragedy modelled on Gorakhpur 2017 to a climactic sermon on how to vote. And this political turn came only after the back-to-back flops of Jab Harry Met Sejal and Zero forced him to trade the saccharine romances that made him a star for borrowed action-hero swagger. He has not had a release since Dunki in December 2023.
His off-screen positions are worse. In January 2010, barely 14 months after the horror of 26/11, he batted for Pakistani players to be picked in the IPL and declared of Pakistan, “They are good neighbours.” Sensible Bharatiyas reject that view, not out of blind hatred for Pakistanis, but because they recognise the bigoted state-sanctioned ideology that indoctrinates so many of Pakistan’s citizens. So why is the advertising industry so intent on foisting this man on us when far more relatable, fresh and inspiring faces are available?
Granted, stardom matters in advertising, which is all about selling aspirations and dreams. One might wish that achievers who have dedicated their lives to a cause, such as the Padma awardees of recent years, got their due. The reality is that film and cricket will remain the go-to pools for most ad makers. Fine. But then why not Ranveer Singh, Rashmika Mandanna, Jasprit Bumrah, Manu Bhaker or Smriti Mandhana? These are attractive, fresh faces who resonate far more with today’s youth than a 61-year-old, suspiciously wrinkle-free star of yesteryear. The Gen X bosses running ad agencies seem to romanticise him because he comes from their own heyday. That was an era when Nehruvian secularism, and later “Aman ki Asha” with a terrorist state, were the staple diet of popular culture, and “thinkers” meant the likes of Arundhati Roy, Shobhaa De, Vir Sanghvi and Khushwant Singh.
As for the Durex ad, public health messaging on family planning and preventing sexually transmitted infections has an important role, but this is not that. It is a titillating ad with no place in a sports broadcast watched by people of every age, and these matches began at 12:30 pm IST, in broad daylight. Nor is it a one-off. In July, MP Kirti Azad tagged the BCCI after a Durex ad aired during the Bharat–England T20I at Old Trafford, reminding everyone that children were watching. Such ads are the product of an elitist, deracinated worldview that sneers at ordinary people’s sensibilities, and they deserve to be treated with contempt.
Nor are such objections confined to “Sanghi” WhatsApp groups. During the Asia Cup in September 2025, Ishinna B Sadana, a Delhi-based parenting coach and author, called out a steamy condom ad that kept popping up as families watched Bharat beat Pakistan. She warned that early exposure to sexual content leaves children confused about consent and burdened with body-image issues. Hundreds of English-speaking, urban parents flooded her inbox in agreement. One said it was “so uncomfortable to be in the same room with your kids”, and another noted that no such ads are aired even in the UAE. Many pointed out that Europe keeps such ads to late-night slots. They are right. Britain’s broadcast code keeps sexually suggestive ads behind the 9 pm watershed, and American networks long confined condom ads to late-night television. The West that our elites so admire guards family viewing hours more jealously than they do.
What makes the government’s inaction baffling is that the rules already exist. In December 2017, the I&B Ministry barred sexually explicit condom ads on television between 6 am and 10 pm. It invoked the advertising code under the Cable Television Networks Rules, which forbids ads that “endanger the safety of children or create in them any interest in unhealthy practices”. It later clarified that only titillating ads were covered, which is exactly what this one is. Why the Union Government will not enforce its own advisory is yet another mystery of the Indian bureaucracy. Streaming muddies things further, because the same ad on SonyLIV sits in a grey zone between I&B and MeitY. A good place to start would be dedicated ministers for the two ministries, with a clear line drawn between their responsibilities. Both are currently held by Ashwini Vaishnaw, who also runs the Railways.
Why would an advertiser shove a face or a sensibility down the throats of an audience it knows cannot relate to it? What vanity and epistemic arrogance is this? It showed up again in GIVA’s noxious Raksha Bandhan ad, in which a bizarrely dressed Kriti Sanon ties a rakhi to her brother and to her dog. The brand was forced to withdraw it from all media after a public backlash. Why are Indian elites so obsessed with moral grandstanding and social engineering that they will gamble with the reputations of the very brands they are paid to sell?
The same thing happened with Tanishq, whose “Ekatvam” ad showed a Hindu woman married into a Muslim family, doted on by her mother-in-law. It landed just as grooming jihad had become a national concern. National-level shooter Tara Shahdeo’s horrific ordeal in 2014 was followed by many more. In July 2020, police in Meerut dug up the bodies of Priya and her young daughter from the house of her live-in partner Shamshad, who had first approached the divorcee on Facebook posing as “Amit Gurjar”. Within weeks of the Ekatvam ad, Nikita Tomar was shot dead in Ballabhgarh for refusing to convert. Case after case has forced society to confront a radicalisation problem within a section of Indian Muslim society, one that indoctrinates its youth into seeing non-Muslim women as disposable objects, to be converted or exploited. That Tanishq ad, too, had to be withdrawn. How do marketing agencies, whose entire job is to read the public pulse, keep missing such basic flaws instead of sticking to messaging grounded in reality?
Perhaps they aren’t missing them at all. Dr. Nandini Murali’s dissection of the Tanishq ad offers a clue. The ad, she noted, was technically superb: monochrome aesthetics, lilting music, a mother-in-law cast against stereotype as her daughter-in-law’s ally. But its real work was done in a single exchange. The Hindu bride asks, “Ma, these customs are not followed in your family, are they?” Her mother-in-law disarms her with “Keeping a girl happy is every family’s responsibility.” The bride’s discerning question is muted, the real differences between the two faiths are papered over, and the grim reality of most such marriages, beginning with the bride’s mandatory conversion, is airbrushed out. What remains is a blemish-free fairy tale, “bubble-wrapped in superficial notions of Ekatvam”.
The method is what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief”. The viewer is transported into a feel-good alternate reality, emotionally invested before the critical mind can object. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, explained why this matters. In his theory of cultural hegemony, a ruling class secures its dominance less by force than by consent. It shapes culture until its worldview passes for the people’s own “common sense”. Advertising is a near-perfect instrument for this. It works on Bharatiya minds below the level of argument, conditioning us not to see the ugly realities we would otherwise reject.
That should surprise no one who looks at where the industry’s creative talent comes from. Many come from liberal arts and mass communication programmes. Indian humanities departments have long been captured by Leftist academics schooled in Western theory, Gramsci included, and are wholly disconnected from Dharmic thought and wisdom. They train students to see Bharatiya tradition as something to be deconstructed, never understood. The graduates then carry that lens into agencies, and from there into our living rooms during a cricket match.
None of this is about rejecting everything about the West. One can read Shakespeare, admire the West’s material achievements and still remain rooted in Dharma and our lived history, as generations of Bharatiyas did. Western mainstream society itself still remains largely family-oriented and protective of children. The pathology of India’s left-liberal elite is different. It mixes self-loathing with a fascination for the most radical fringes of Western thought, thinkers like Michel Foucault, who signed a 1977 petition defending sex between adults and minors and was later accused of abusing young boys in Tunisia, and gender theorists like Judith Butler. Having absorbed the worst impulses of the Western left, these elites now peddle a culture of permissiveness and perversion that even the West’s own mainstream keeps at arm’s length.
But the new Bharat rattles this old Westernised elite. It questions the status quo and refuses to settle for second-class citizenship. The elite preferred a time when the aam aadmi was meek and subdued. He stayed in his lane, made do with whatever crumbs the ruling dynasty let trickle down, and revered anyone who spoke polished English as an “intellectual”. Meanwhile, the elite enjoyed the perks of power and scratched each other’s backs. The ad agencies are still selling to that India. It no longer exists.
