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Sanjay Dutt Rants About Manliness In This Unbelievably Sexist Advertisement From 2008

In this 'vintage' ad, the actor had asked men to avoid indulging in 'feminine' things such as cooking and wearing pink.

Ah, 2008. Just eight years ago, a time when social media was still about tagging pictures and 'poking' friends, rather than raging flame wars and impassioned debates about everything, ever.

A video featuring actor Sanjay Dutt, reportedly from then, has resurfaced on social media and it reflects the innocence of that magical time.

In a commercial for Haywards 5000 soda (yeah, right), Dutt breaks the fourth wall to speak about a "new kind of dushman (enemy)" in the lives of men (obvious reference to his 1998 film Dushman is obvious). He then proceeds to describe this pandemic: the then-ongoing wave of metrosexuality, which reduced manly men to wimpy creatures who wear pink, purple or even (gasp!) mauve.

In a two-minute rant, the actor, without a trace of irony, speaks about how men need to spend less time at beauty parlours and more time at gyms. Cooking, looking after babies, salsa-dancing, and counting calories are but some of the things that make men less masculine, according to the then-51-year-old actor.

As this piece on Vagabomb notes, what's truly hilarious is that Dutt has been guilty of several of these 'offences' himself viz. keeping long hair, waxing his chest, and wearing pink as well as floral shirts.

Granted, this is just a commercial and this video obviously doesn't mean the actor holds these views — in all probability, he was just repeating lines written on a bunch of cue cards. More than outrageous, this video is just plain funny — a relic from a time where a bunch of people at Ogilvy & Mather's Bangalore office (as the opening slate informs us) decided that this — what would now rightly be considered an unbelievably sexist and regressive advert — was a good way to sell strong beer.

(Unrelated trivia: Jerrit G John, the director of this video, was arrested in late 2012 for throwing acid at his then-26-year-old girlfriend's face.)

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.