KARACHI: On Sunday, Pakistani actress Sajal Ali posted a trailer of her upcoming Hum TV drama titled Yeh Dil Mera. The actress is starring alongside her real life fiancé, Ahad Raza Mir who plays her love interest, according to the trailer.
The trailer has had us scratching our heads if we’re being honest. Sajal Ali plays a vulnerable character who is ecstatic at finding a job interview is shown to result. However, her interviewer, who appears to be the CEO, asks unrelated questions and starts flirting with her instead. This unrelated discussion comes across as a classic case of sexual harassment in the workplace where the doe-eyed young employee is shown to view this inappropriate behaviour as flattery.
Sajal Ali’s character is then shown to be smiling at her laptop proceeding this encounter with romantic music overlapping the scene. The nuance of this scene progressively instills a feeling of showing women as opportunity grabbers when it comes to settling with a rich, well-established man rather than showing women as independent beings who can be passionate about taking work seriously for a change. This narrative is insensitive to an already patriarchal society that determines a woman’s success through traditional roles of marriage and child bearing and limiting her abilities through prioritised domesticity.
The onset of the trailer sparked the audience’s interest but not in the way the drama producers had hoped perhaps. Many people have taken to social media to call out the problematic glorification of the seeming harassment in the drama. However, since this is just a trailer other users are asking people to base their judgement after watching the serial to get a better sense of what the story will progress into.
