Poster on ‘Bad Girl’ by design students now an internet meme

PTI
NEW DELHI, FEBRUARY 25

A bad girl pouts, eats too much, cannot make round ‘rotis’, goes to Goa, walks outside with the hair open, rides a motorbike – these are among various traits that depict a bad girl in the latest satirical poster being shared widely by netizens.
The ‘Bad Girl’ or ‘Ek buri ladki’ poster, which went viral after a user posted it on microblogging website Twitter, gives a satirical twist to the retro Indian Book Depot charts, which were popular in schools across the country in the 90s and highlighted good and bad habits.The poster has twelve illustrations depicting the traits of a ‘bad’ girl — the one who pouts, smokes and drinks, eats too much, has breasts, can’t make round ‘rotis’, eats too less, goes to Goa, walks outside with the hair open and rides a motorbike, among others.
The poster was ideated as part of a project done by a group of five students of Bangalore-based Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. From an exhaustive list of topics when the group zeroed-in on ‘Bad Girl’, little did they know that it would end up being widely circulated on the social media.
“The process was not very challenging as after selecting the topic, we picked about eighteen obvious aspects of how women are looked at. The ideas did not have to be high-pitched but effective,” Furqan Jawed, a third-year student of Visual Culture and one of the five who conceived the idea, told.
The group says it was just a coincidence for their poster to have garnered numerous shares, likes, retweets and reposts across social media, especially as it comes in the backdrop of controversial comedy-show AIB knockout, which sparked outrage among netizens.
“It was purely coincidental that the poster went viral at a time when many opposed the censorship of AIB roast. However, for us, none of this was planned. We were surprised when it generated so much response,” Jawed says.
It was not their idea to come up with something drastic which lays emphasis on how women continue to be subjugated by societal norms. In fact, it was a project where both aesthetics and presentation of idea took centre-stage for the students.
“The fact that a woman is “outrageous” and clad in a saree… We wanted to present these ironies in the project,” Jawed says.
The poster comes months after a series of memes ‘Adarsh Balak’ by artist Priyesh Trivedi grabbed eyeballs on Facebook. Trivedi’s work also became a reference for the ‘Bad Girl’ poster.
The group says it was overwhelmed by the response the poster generated online.
“It was unexpected! Both the appreciation and the backlash. I have been going through some of the comments made on Facebook. It was surprising how people are talking about it. Even the negative comments, I find them funny,” says Furqan.
The next step for Furqan and some of his group members is to come up with a website where people can buy these posters. “We are in the process of setting up a website,” he says.