Terrror is nonpartisan. It is a murderous nomad; it leaves no country, and calls none its home. It spares neither the East nor the West; it shows no bias towards the Arab or the non-Arab. Its coordinates leave no clear trail; it is lurking in your backyard, it is playing hide-and-seek in mine too.
Whether it’s the first world Paris or the third world Bangladesh, a cosmopolitan Istanbul or rustic Homs, a Sunni Tunis or a Shia Lebanon, terror has ravaged all with mercy for none.
Terror didn’t even take cognizance of the holy month of Ramadhan when Baghdad turned bloody on July 2 where twin blasts rocked a jam packed marketplace in the Iraqi capital killing over 200. Terror surfaced its ugly head once again on July 4 in Medina, one of the holy cities of Islam.
It is in this bleak backdrop of terror frenzy, that BlackSheep.Works’ public service campaign #SelectiveOutrage assumes greater significance.
Blacksheep.Works, arguably the first strategic and creative agency in Kashmir Valley, launched early this month. Its first campaign jolts us out of our biased reveries and delivers the message loud and clear, that if terror isn’t biased, our outrage against it mustn’t be too.
“Terror hurts all the same. It doesn’t show any bias. We should return the favour,” Asif Amin Tibet Baqual, Founder and Chief Creative Officer, BlackSheep.Works tells me about the insight behind the campaign that has got the attention of the likes of the world’s reputed creative advertising magazine, Lürzer’s International Archive.
We at BlackSheep.Works thought it to be our prerogative to register a strong protest against the world’s selective outrage, where one terror attack occupies larger media real estate over another, sometimes with more causalities and greater display of bestialityAsif Amin Tibet Baqual, Founder and Chief Creative Officer, BlackSheep.Works
The ad agency offers professional communication and advertising services like Branding, Advertising, Corporate Communications, Public Relations, Social Media, as well as Market Analytics & Monitoring. Due to the current unrest in Kashmir, we haven’t been able to have full access to the creative team as most of the communication channels have been snapped, that has put this fledgling agency in a technological quagmire and almost crippled their operations.
Well, this was, in retrospect, a known hazard to Asif – who has returned from East Africa to launch the agency along with his creative partners and co-founders, Suhail H Naqshbandi, Kashmir’s well known political cartoonist, and Yasir Amin, a respected IT veteran in the US.
“It is a small price to pay for moving back to my beloved, fractured Kashmir,” Asif tells me. The creative shop, meanwhile, is hoping eagerly for communication channels to be reestablished, and for peace to get another chance.
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