The real Da Da Ding: India's barefoot women who won't wear sports shoes or feature in a Nike ad
Shoeless, they have been doing gruelling and thankless manual labour for centuries.
After the glamour, the grit.
Last week, Nike released the Da Da Ding advertisement that instantly went viral, with Deepika Padukone predictably stealing the thunder from Indian women sportspersons.
A new video, the first release by a YouTube channel named Epic Spiritual, makes the case that the Nike advertisement was just another example of a glamorised portrayal of strong women. In the video above, the other Indian women are profiled – the thousands who are part of the labour force, engaged in activities like farming or construction (their share in both is around 50 per cent) or just household activities that require carrying water over large distances day in and day out.
They've been doing it for years, and often in inhumane and extremely difficult conditions – barefoot. The scenes with these women make the shots in the Nike ad, also featured here, almost tame by comparison.
There's also the darker side about the global shoe industry to consider. In 2007, inspired by the work of writer Naomi Klein, British band Radiohead released a single All I Need, showing two children on a split screen – one a worker in a shoe factory, the other an average boy in a developed country – to highlight the differences in their lives.
