Mother’s Day is finally here, and if you’ve been online for even five minutes, you already know the drill: brands get sentimental, florists get greedy, and everyone suddenly loves their mother very, very publicly.As a journalist, every Mother’s Day, my inbox floods with brands pitching their products for a listicle feature.
So I finally sat down and went through all of them, and guess what? Vacuum cleaners, roti makers, mops. Every single year, without fail. I have seen it enough to not be shocked anymore. And then a simple pamphlet tucked inside a food delivery order pushed me over the edge, and made me think about how little has actually changed in the way we see mothers.
A Pamphlet That Said Everything Wrong
It was supposed to be a regular order from Bistro: coffee, fries, the usual morning ritual with colleagues.
When the delivery arrived, we found a pamphlet tucked inside,a big, cheerful roti printed across it, with the words “Maa ke haath ki choti si roti” staring right back at us. And look, I understand the assignment. It’s warm, it’s nostalgic, it’s very on-brand for Mother’s Day. But something about it just sat wrong with me.
I mean, if you really want to capture the full spirit of a desi mother, maybe print a chappal on that pamphlet instead.“Maa ke haath ki chappal if you ordered junk again” would have been just as iconic, and at least it would have made us laugh.
Bistro is not alone here. Every brand seems to be reading from the same script. Vacuum cleaners. Roti makers. Mops. Dishwashers. Different packaging, same message.
Nobody is out here being deliberately tone-deaf, but when every brand’s idea of honouring mothers circles back to the kitchen and the cleaning cabinet, it stops feeling like a celebration and starts feeling like a reminder of exactly where women supposedly belong.
And brands do not make this up. They just reflect what we have always believed, that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, and her greatest gift is the labour she does there.
The Pedestal Is Just A Prettier Cage
Putting mothers on a pedestal sounds like respect. But if you look closely, it is really just a more poetic way of keeping them in one place. And the uncomfortable truth is that patriarchy is so deeply embedded in our society that even women have internalised it without realising.
It does not always show up as something loud and obvious. Sometimes it is as quiet as an aunty dismissing your period pain with “humne bhi to saha hai”, women policing other women’s pain because they were once told to swallow their own. It is everywhere, once you start looking.
Just open Instagram, scroll through a woman’s reel, and there it is in the comments, “go back to the kitchen.” An insult dressed as a joke, typed by men and sometimes even women, as if the kitchen is where she belongs and the internet is where she is trespassing.
So when brands roll out Mother’s Day campaigns built entirely around appliances and chores, they are not doing something new. They are just doing the same thing in nicer packaging.
I am not against home chores; I do them myself. But wrapping a mop in a ribbon and calling it a celebration is not honouring your mother. It is just telling her, very sweetly, to stay exactly where she is.
So maybe next Mother’s Day, brands can do better, and so can we. Skip the vacuum cleaner. Skip the roti maker. Gift her a smartwatch, book her a massage, take her out for a meal where she doesn’t have to cook or clean up after. Let her laugh, let her rest, let her just exist outside of her responsibilities for one single day. Because ‘Maa ke haath ki roti’ is not her identity. She is.
