By Dip Sengupta I had been sitting at the reception area of a lender. In such days, a handful people clients were awaiting patiently to our turn in the counter — silent, concealed and exceptionally distanced. My mobile was in my pocket I had not taken it outside — just one less thing to sanitise upon coming home. Thus, waiting for the number to be predicted, I did the second best thing. I began looking around. That is when I saw it a huge wall wrap, carrying two commercials for the lender — a joyful household of four, father, mum, kid — roughly 10 — along with kid — about 8, at a drawing room, sitting and interacting with one another, grinning. Afterward my token was known as on the LED display and collecting up my document, I moved into my countertop and thought no further of it. However, something about these pictures came back afterwards. As I remembered, at the very first picture, the household had been sitting on a couch, the dad, mom and kid forming a comfy unit at the same end of it smiling and laughing among them — a hot sighting of togetherness. The boy was in the opposite end of the couch, smiling and doing his thing with his smart phone. Another picture had a comparable but softer energetic. The father and the girl were discussing a hot daddy-daughter second, along with the mother and son were discussing a different. While the kid had a angelic, nearly old grin on her head, the boy was creating a brattish confront at his mother. Thus far, so great. The concept of this joyful family in their ideal house and the lender’s part in their joy had been coming through. However, was there some other material which was being sent too, albeit inadvertently? I wondered. From the very first picture, was it the responsibility of this daughter to seem nice and angelic, engaging wholeheartedly in the household dynamics while her brother will manage to be revealed to do his own thing, connected into the household unit but obviously a bit eliminated? And at the next picture, although the girl was being her normal saccharine-sweet selfindulgent, it had been fine for your brother to be a bit self-centred brat. Why not the little woman be the brat? Why can not the little woman play a smartphone? Or, to flip things around a little, why could not the brother be saccharine candy? Was the weight of being the candy, joined one at the household the small woman’s lot? And was that the small boy being granted an abysmal get-out-of family responsibilities pass? And that too in this young age? Can I overthinking a seemingly innocent visual? Perhaps. In this event, the deconstruction I was trying was simply a thought practice as I waited for my turn in the counter. Or was it something different? Was the energetic of this brother-sister duo a momentary visual depiction of their sex asymmetry within our society, that observed nurturing, affectionate and affective functions as normal for ladies? In accordance with mentioned sociologists Uma Chakravarty and Leela Dube, girls have been relegated into the homogenous world of the house while men are viewed as organic”controls” of the outside world, of politics, trade and commerce — that the age-old fault traces of the society. According to a United Nations report, although India’s GDP has increased by approximately 6 percent in the last ten years, there’s been a substantial decrease in female labor force participation by 34 percent to 27%, respectively using all the male-female wage gap implanted in 50%. And based on a new Unicef report, India is the only big state where women are more inclined to drop out of college. And that which transpired at me in the wall appeared to be a self-perpetuating cycle — both the yin and yang of sex prejudice — well-meaning communicating unconsciously drawing clues in the monogamous seepage of social bias and then projecting exactly the exact same as okay, normalised behavior. The depiction of this small woman, sweetly incorporated together with her parents at the the images, is a paragon of inherited expectations. The depiction of this small boy, brattish, a bit remote, inward looking, centered on his smart phone. The image on the wall in the bank was just a picture. This had been that the writing on the wall. [The writer is Head (North) and Chief Growth Officer, Creativeland Asia]