An office-goer named Dhruv shuffles tentatively when his wife asks him to wear an Indian women’s cricket team jersey. She is irritated at his reluctance.
In a world of Virat18s and Rohit45s, Dhruv feels self-conscious to wear a Smriti18 jersey. Pulling on a dull grey jacket over the Team India blue instead, his entire journey to office sees him flustered and embarrassed at sporting a jersey with a woman cricket’s name on it. Until, the office liftman Ravi, beaming with pride and excited at his own Smriti18 jersey, gently wisens Dhruv up and gets him to lose the prejudice he’d been carrying like the jacket.
By the end of the tale, on that ride up the lift with Ravi, a fan with no hang-ups about cheering for women’s cricket openly, Dhruv had dropped his inhibitions and the jacket.
It’s one of the finest TV commercials, directed by JioStar’s in-house creative brain Riya Singh. It shows that India’s home World Cup has gently seeped into the minds of fans, who wear women’s cricket fandom on their sleeve – while not depending on wins or losses – just like with the men’s team. It’s been received with more warmth than the tired old cliches of India-Pakistan animosity, or villainising the yellow jersey.
Nikhil Nair, the actor playing Dhruv, was so blown away by the simple idea and desperate to land the part and work with his dream writer Singh that he shot his audition video at 5 am while on a separate shoot in Bikaner.
His reward? “When I go to buy vegetables in Mumbai, I get all sorts of people walking up to me and asking, ‘ab samajh mein aayaa women jersey kyu pehenni chaaiye (Now I understand why we should wear the women’s jersey)?’ People avoid acknowledging that we don’t follow women’s cricket just like men’s, but the hesitation is real,” recalls the Chandigarh actor, born to a Malayali father and Punjabi mother.
Siddharth Sharma, head of Audience engagement at Sports, JioStar
Siddharth Sharma, head of Audience engagement at Sports, JioStar, calls the campaign a ‘coming of age of Indian cricket fans.’
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“It’s a gentle nudge to (shaking) biases that fans have, urging them to take pride in every Indian jersey – men’s or women’s. This is our team. A sports campaign with heroes and nemeses can always work, but we thought why not make it a call to fans to show up for the women. It challenges perceptions,” he explains, adding that the network was looking inward and aiming for a deeper change in mindsets.
“We wanted to question the reluctance of individuals who were otherwise ‘strong and progressive’.” They knew those walls could be easily demolished with this nudge.
It helped that Kohli and Smriti Mandhana both wear No.18.
Addressing the prejudice
The idea of the commercial sprung from the first reaction of a team member’s 10-year-old son who had refused to wear a women’s team jersey signed by a big women’s star, some years ago.
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“He said everyone would laugh at him if he wore a girl’s jersey,” Sharma recalls. That got them thinking about the subliminal hesitation in Indian men, despite Indian women fans having happily worn jerseys with the names Sachin, Ajay Jadeja Dravid and Kohli on them and chorused in the stadium.
The denouement for Dhruv, after he finds many ordinary folk on the Mumbai roads happily wearing women’s jerseys, arrives in the scene alongside the liftman, who remarks that it’s the same Team India – be it men or women.
An India fan wears a jersey emblazoned with Smriti Mandhana’s name and number before India vs Sri Lanka in Guwahati. (Credit: Vinayakk Mohanarangan)
Nair jokes that he has never watched any cricket match live, but would sit with his parents to watch Jhulan Goswami bowl on TV.
“We are all fans of Kohli saab, (Rohit) Sharmaji. Smriti, Harman of course are iconic, but I find (pacer) Renuka Singh khatarnaak (dangerous),” he says.
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He adds that the symbolism in the slice-of life-pitch was way too powerful though it was only talking about a jersey.
“In that scene with Ravi, there’s a power dynamic at work where the liftman ends up being more progressive and open than this corporate guy. Uska world hil jaata hai (his core is shaken),” Nair says.
People will deny there’s a bias, he adds, and quote numbers of fours and sixes to justify the skewed love for the men’s game, but both the network and the creative head believed it needed only a nudge.
“When I told someone I’m shooting an ad for a cricket World Cup, their immediate reaction was that it’s not happening until 2027. Then when I explained, they said ‘Achha, woh bhi hota hai?” Nair explains.
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For JioStar though, the response has been overwhelming – Sharma is specifically chuffed because it’s on the notorious WhatsApp groups, and being appreciated. To fill up the “unrequited support for women”, the network has got Shubman Gill to speak on his amazement at watching Harmanpreet clear the ground, Suryakumar Yadav speaking on Jemimah Rodrigues, and Sanju Samson talking about Richa Ghosh.
“Look at the stats. How can you not back this team?” Sharma argues.
