o you sometimes find yourself going through your socials and just saying dear god why more times than should be normal, but somehow completely is? Join the club. While at Instep we admire any kind of activity that ends in creation – of art, mayhem, music, business, what have you – sometimes we feel that knowing when to just not even start is a good thing to know.

What they did:
The Archies

Zoya Akhtar is the cinematic Quratulain Haider of our times. While her work isn’t going to have the aggression of an Ismat Chughtai, or the brutality of a Manto, she will nonetheless be counted amongst the giants one day. That said, The Archies was so bad I had to immediately watch some Jo Jeeta Wo Sikandar to cleanse my palate. It wasn’t because we had a very Gen Z film at hand, because The Archies is set in the 1950s, it was because if someone were to adapt such a well-known comicverse to an Indian location, there were for sure a million other ways to do it. However, Akhtar chooses the road most travelled by writers and filmmakers of South Asian origin, where they try to make normal things seem more exotic than they are. Or have to be. Really, really, the initial narration of the movie sounds like someone was about to next whip out talk of their grandmother’s champa tree and how the cuckoos called on warm summer afternoons as tea was poured and all the gentlemen came home from their dukaans, to rest in the baraamda. Then she wanted to have a handy tool to explain why the town of Riverdale, India was so anglicized and introduced the founding father (British) and mother (Indian) who created this town for Indian British people.

What they should have done instead: a horror spin on the above story

Riverdale is a town founded by someone from the East India Company, where everyone is half British, half Indian according to the film. On Their fifth birthday, every child is taken to a park to plant a tree. This could easily have been a film about breeding organ donors in the most idyllic town in all of India, with the trees marking numbers of donors and when they will come of age to be shipped off to ‘the big city’ to e.g. kick off their musical careers, but really they’re spending a few weeks being tested and prepped for donation, or their ‘contribution’ to the town of Riverdale, as it’s referred to in code. I know it sounds a little Never Let Me Go, but Never Let Me Go did not have the honest-to-god creepy Anglo-Indian Riverdale to force us to examine the actual repercussions of the East India Company and colonialism at large: once colonized, always a donor (Zoya Akhtar may use this as the tagline for her film).

What they did: nominated Maria B for a Human Rights Award

This is so many levels of wrong, there is no good place to start. In which case, facts are our friend. Something called the Human Rights Council of Pakistan of Pakistan nominated clothes designer Maria Butt for a Human Rights Award. This is of specific interest to us, because Butt was part of the thus-labeled brat pack of designers in the mid-’90s to early ‘00s. She was doing some cute things throughout this time, but then she re-registered on our radars as a disapprover of the transgender community in Pakistan. She has been very vocal about trans activists becoming more vocal about their rights, and trans people participating in life as usual, or being represented in media like any other people of any other binary gender. While you may agree or disagree with Maria B and her politics, can we all agree that any words or actions that can directly or indirectly endanger the lives and wellbeing of vulnerable minorities are really not cool and we should all say no to them, and the people peddling hateful rhetoric that could incite violence against said minorities? Now if this public figure, with their influence and wealth and connections, is for instance nominated for an award, and a human rights one no less, should we all be alarmed? Even if the nomination was made by a council that sounds like it could be the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, but really isn’t.

What they should have done: some light reading

Bro just read the State of Human Rights In 2022 report released by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and really rethink your strategy.

The report literally says the following on the first page: “The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) was particularly concerned about the threatened reversal of transgender rights during the year…Thus, the State of Human Rights in 2022 addresses this as the key theme of the year.”

The council should try to differentiate themselves as much as they can from the commission, otherwise they’ll lose out on their probably right-wing donors, and then who’s going to fund their terrible cultural tableaus on award nights?

What they did: an ‘edgy’ shoot

If we know creatives at all, and we think we do, they’re always trying to do something that will shock. And the thing is, sometimes these creatives are really young and they don’t know if they’re being appropriate. We forgive the youthful ignorance, but we can’t forgive the arrogance of experienced strategists and directors and CEOs who know better than to approve a key visual for a campaign that intentionally or unintentionally alludes to an ongoing mass genocide, which has been affecting millions of people around the world, directly or indirectly. This isn’t just about being a big enough brand to weather the damage, Zara, it’s about bad marketing, and that for someone in the fashion and lifestyle industry is utterly unforgivable.

What they should have done: a normal shoot

If you’re going to have us believe that the immense loss of life and property during war is absolutely of no consequence to you, then go all in and ignore it completely and do whatever a regular shoot would be like. That is actually better than trying to address an issue in the most uniformed and hurtful way possible.