Adman fights back molestation
(Hindustan Times)

A FEW weeks form now, if you see collegians staging plays or screening documentaries on fighting molestation, in your locality, your college or at the nearest railway station, you can be sure they are being driven by this man.

Zubin Driver, an enthusiastic bespectacled 37-year-old, who works with the Television 18 group as Network Creative Director, will be launching the ‘Fight back’ campaign against molestation. The campaign will begin with the launch of the website www.fightback.net next week followed by a nationwide contest that will call youngsters to create plays or short films on the problem and the possible solution. Some of the best work will be showcased in a segment on Driver’s show ‘Through the Looking Glass’.

The Cell, the advertising division of Network18 Group formulated by Driver, will create a poster campaign on the Juhu molestation issue to be displayed in colleges across the city. “Ages ago, when I was acting in a play in college with an all-female cast, I found that each one of those women had been molested,” said Driver seated in his cabin in the buzzing TV18 office in Lower Parel.

Driver, who worked as an advertising professional for over a decade, noticed that when incidents like the Juhu one occur, they follow a pattern. "It makes front page news, the stakeholders come into the picture and all this goes on for two or three weeks before it goes "poof", he said. It is a cycle that then begins again with the next victim while the previous one is forgotten.

Driver felt the need for a tool that would break this cycle and “engineer some systematic changes” through public discourses on the issue.