My nephew, two years and a quarter old, is yet to pick up speaking. But toddler will just not stop trying.
Ask him how a crow crows, and pat comes the reply `Khakha Khakha'. And does the usual `bow wow' when you ask him how a dog barks. He is not scared of dogs. He goes after them making noises that he alone would understand. And the dogs - they would rather sheepishly walk away than get messed up by the mini-sized human. The first time he saw a monkey on a recent picnic, he was curiosity in abundance. Like most of us adults, he does not like the `kaklaati' or cockroaches. A lizard could scare him off too.
His grandmother, aka my mother-in-law asked him how a squirrel makes sound the day before. His answer, `Ai Aao Uuuuuu' meaning, `I love you', his latest acquisition in vocabulary. She was confused and shocked for a minute. What on earth made the chit of a kid dole out these three all-romantic words for a squirrel?
That's when she remembered - it was that ad. There were hardly any squirrels around home, so when the Kitkat ad with animated squirrels played on TV one day, the whole family stood still to watch it those few seconds. She showed him what a `squirrel' was. When he gaped at the TV screen, little did anyone imagine he would associate those squirrels and the Michael Jackson style steps, the Kaate Nahin Kat-thi number and the crooning, with `I love You'. The ad is refreshing, among the hundreds of stereotyped images of housewives and celebrity infested ads we are forced to watch. But then, what power it holds!
If a 45 second ad could leave such a deep impression on a child's mind, imagine what the oodles of violence and sexist imagery fed to us 24/7 could do!
