Myntra logo controversy! Forge or assertive?
Naaz Patel, a Mumbai based activist who made a complaint last December in association with Avesta Foundation NGO about the e-commerce brand Myntra's logo that she closely observed and found obscenity, regarding it as an offensive nature for women.
According to Naaz, the logo is offensive because it shows a position of a woman lying with her legs wide apart implying as it is secretly showing the sexual privacy of a woman. After the complaint the Myntra logo with capital letter ‘M’ is officially termed as offensive towards women by the Cyber Crime Department. Rashmi Karandikar, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Cyber Crime) told PTI that a complaint had approached the BKC Cyber Crime Police Station in that matter. As a consequence to the controversy, Myntra revised their logo on all their digital assets as well as on all packaging material by bearing lakhs and crores of rupees and laying their time and effort.
The issue shocked people as no one ever saw the logo with that view. It is shameful that there are myriad of things that can be fought for but this is what was chosen over setting the priorities discarding real issues and we as a nation are showing signs of intolerance by perceiving the logo with a negative connotation and getting offended out of it. It is such a disgrace that in the last couple of days it has been seen that groping a minor without skin to skin contact isn't a sexual assault, as defined by the Bombay High Court under the POSCO act, but a mere logo can be too sexual and obscene. I personally believe that, activists can set their priorities right, on real problems that genuinely matter to women like dowry, domestic violence, gender inequality, rapes, woman trafficking, child marriage, malnutrition, female infanticide among other things rather than on a company's logo that is unharming to anyone in this world.
If we were to put every logo under scanner, then any logo will be offensive to someone. How many logos are we going to change? When there are lakhs of cyber crime happening everyday in this country. According to National Crime Records Bureau data in 2018, 6,030 cyber crimes were registered by women. "In India 71 crore people are using the Internet, out of which, 25 crore are women. She said 80% of people are falling prey to cyber crimes and 63% of people don’t know where to lodge complaints on cyber crimes." Hence, focusing on petty issues is really a waste of resource, time and energy.
Ritushree R Singh
1st semester
Visualising a thing as it should not be and getting offended by the thought from the view is now becoming so cliché, just stop.
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