Shocked by ‘A Bad Girl’ visual on social media? Hold your horses, it is a satire

MUMBAI: Roshan Shakel, Furqan Jawed, Sparsh Saxena, Stuti Kothari, Jaiwant Pradhan: this bunch of 22-year-old art students from Bengaluru was in for a big surprise Thursday when one of their assignments for the subject Visual Culture and Vernacular became a rage on social media.
The poster, titled ‘A Bad Girl’ or ‘Ek Buri Ladki’, generated surprise, anger and shock among many social media users, who were trying to come to terms about the images being real or satirical. According to the poster, a Bad Girl pouts, cannot make round rotis, goes to Goa alone, has breasts, letches at boys, falls in love in the park, eats too much and eats too little and so on. By Thursday afternoon, the image went viral all over Facebook, with some users adding their own list of “bad girl” behaviours. On Twitter, the hashtag “#goodgirl” started trending nationally where users were generating their own versions of what good girls and bad girls do.

“We looked at examples of the 'vernacular' visual culture, and educational posters and sticker charts were one of the areas of our study - we were mainly focusing on what makes these posters look the way they look: drawing styles, elements, colour schemes, layout, and so on. From there, we were asked to create our own poster in the same style as this, old and textbook-like, with a satirical theme added in as a twist” said Shakel, a third-year student of design at Bengaluru’s Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology.

“The idea was that if our fake assignment poster was to be put up next to an original one, one shouldn't be able to guess the difference visually, though of course the content is a completely different matter. That was the aim of this exercise,” he said. “And, I think the confusion is great, it means we did our job well.”

Last year, a series of posters titled Adarsh Balak (An Ideal Boy) created a similar response on social media. The posters of A Bad Girl, though, were taken quite literally by some users, who blamed “the regressive minds of some people for thinking like this way”