Sister act: Raksha Bandhan ads drop the thali trope

For all the cinematic weight that the mother carries in Indian life, there is another figure who slips in unnoticed, less celebrated, less mythologised, but no less influential. The sister.

If the mother is the emotional foundation, the sister is the emotional mirror. She is not exalted, but encountered. She does not command reverence, but she demands engagement.

You grow up next to her, negotiate space with her, watch her moods, decode her silences, and challenge her choices. And in doing so, you learn, without knowing that you are learning, the shape and depth of the feminine world.

In many Indian homes, the sister is a boy’s first real relationship with the ‘other sex’. Not one born of attraction or performance, but proximity and play.

Long before the idea of romance arrives, there is this early, low-stakes dance of learning. Of seeing what makes her cry, what makes her angry, and how her world is shaped differently. You fight, you tease, you snatch the TV remote, but beneath it all, a strange kind of apprenticeship is happening.

The sister teaches a boy what textbooks don’t. That moods can have layers. That being right is not always being kind. That sometimes, love is not in what is said, but what is withheld. That the feminine does not mean fragile, and strength does not always arrive wearing volume.

In a culture that often places men at the centre of rituals, of inheritance, of attention, the sister quietly claims her space by simply being indispensable. She becomes translator, confidante, critic, keeper of family secrets, moral compass, and emotional equaliser. She is the one who tells you when you’ve messed up, and how to apologise. She is the one who teaches you that listening is not a pause between replies, but a form of presence.

This is not the sister of the Raksha Bandhan ads. Not the one standing with a puja thali, offering love with a bow, and waiting for a gift in return. That sister is decorative, symbolic — often more trope than person. She is reduced to sentiment, framed in ritual.

But the real sister is something else entirely. She is witness. She is memory. She is the person who knows exactly who you were before the world taught you who to be. She has seen you sulk, cheat, lose, and cry — and made sure you didn’t forget any of it.

In this, she plays a role few people talk about — she becomes the emotional dress rehearsal for marriage.

So many Indian men enter romantic relationships without the tools to understand the emotional language of women. They haven’t been taught to read nuance, to sit with discomfort, to remain open in the face of the inexplicable. And yet, those who have grown up around strong, expressive, emotionally articulate sisters often arrive a little more prepared. They have seen complexity up close. They’ve been exposed to the untranslatable terrain of female anger, joy, silence, intuition.

In a quiet way, the sister becomes the bridge — from the masculine world of achievement and instruction, to the feminine world of intuition and empathy. She exists fully, and that existence is the lesson.

We rarely acknowledge this in our public imagination. Our festivals reduce her to a supporting role. Our brands continue to cast her in a one-dimensional light — sweet, giving, affectionate, grateful. She ties the rakhi. She smiles. She receives. The brother is shown to grow, to achieve, to express with more freedom. The sister, more often than not, remains static — a symbol rather than a subject.

Which is why the rare ad that breaks this mould doesn’t feel loud or progressive. It feels accurate.

In the Zouk Raksha Bandhan film, the brother waits for his sister outside the metro station, holding her handbag. That’s it. That’s the entire plot. No drama. No messaging. Just a simple, unselfconscious act of showing up — not in the big, protective “I’ve got you” way, but in the real, relational “I’m here” way. For a culture that once treated a man holding a woman’s bag as comic relief or emasculation, this image feels quietly radical. And quietly true.

It’s not just that he’s holding the bag. It’s that no one in the ad — including him — thinks it’s a big deal. That kind of emotional ease, that comfort with feminine space, is not learned in a day. It comes from years of exposure to someone who won’t let you get away with being emotionally clumsy — someone who will call you out, break down your walls, and still be there when you're ready to try again.

The Amazon Raksha Bandhan ad takes this further. In it, the sister makes kheer, but gets the sugar and salt confused. The brother eats it anyway, pretends to enjoy it, and spares her the embarrassment. It’s not protection in the traditional sense — there’s no defending her from an external threat. Instead, it’s emotional buffering. Quiet compassion. A micro-moment of care that feels far more relevant to how siblings express love today, not through declarations, but through gentle interventions.

Both ads do something that’s rare in the Raksha Bandhan space — they step away from gendered power dynamics and step into emotional reciprocity. They don’t try to redefine the festival. They simply reflect what it has quietly become in many households: a celebration not of duty, but of understanding.

Raksha Bandhan, in its literal sense, implies protection. But perhaps it’s time we redefined what protection actually means. Not the shielding of one from the world, but the shaping of one for the world. Not the promise to rescue, but the ability to receive. In that sense, it is often the sister who does the protecting — by equipping her brother with the emotional range to face life with a fuller self.

The brother may return from his new job to tie the rakhi. But the sister? She never left. She stayed. Watching. Teaching. Without ceremony. Without asking to be seen.

And perhaps that’s where the real sacred thread lies — not in the ritual, but in the rhythm of two lives growing up side by side, learning what it means to love in ways that don’t need to be declared.

- Rutu Mody-Kamdar, founder, Jigsaw Consultants