Richard Gere: Latter-Day Imperialist or Tourist Dupe

Richard Gere stars in a television and billboard ad campaign for the credit card company Visa, which goes something like this:

Gere is touring a hustle-bustle oriental Indian market with his turbanned minder and overhears a conversation a little girl has with a shopkeeper. She tells the shopkeeper that brother is going on a journey, and wants to buy a caged bird to release on his departure, for good luck. Of course she can only afford one bird with the handful of tinkly coins she offers up, but Gere steps in after she leaves and whips out his all-powerful Visa card, and probably buys up the whole shop, because when the girl runs back to where her brother is leaving and when she holds up her single caged bird a whole flock just swoops into the air behind her and everyone is amazed. She looks back and Gere just looks around pretending not to know anything about it. A sitar-riff and the commercial ends.

Some people have complained about the colonialist and orientalist imagery in this advertisement. From how everyone seems to be wearing turbans and traditional dress, to the bustling chaos of the bazaar, to the quaint local customs (releasing birds before a journey), the setting is doubtlessly exoticised (and also sanitised -- where are the houseflies?). Richard Gere, dressed in a white outfit, is the Great White Man taking on his eponymous burden, and flashing his modern symbol of power -- the credit card -- to benevolently help a poor little girl in sad penury. As a result, they see it as offensive to the Indians depicted in the ad.

What I see, however, is a meticulously planned and marvellously successful scam pulled off to get Richard Gere to spend his money buying something he does not need, i.e. Richard Gere is the dupe, not the oppressed former colonial race. The tell-tale signs are all quite obvious once you look out for them.

1. He has a local guide to bring him around the market. Most tour guides have private deals with shopkeepers to bring sightseers to their door, and accept a cut of the profits from the increased patronage. Gere's guide is probably no different. Look at his turban! It's the same colour and style as the turban worn by the bird-shop owner. Doesn't that tell you something?


2. The girl happens to speak English to a shopkeeper even though they're both Indian. Conveniently, she does this right in front of Gere. I'm sure that hospitality to tourists doesn't extend to speaking their language in front of them even when the conversation is no business of theirs. Here, of course, it is Gere's business. More precisely, they want to get Gere's business.


3. The guide helpfully explains to Gere the quaint local tradition of releasing birds, and throws in the key point: more birds, more luck. If one bird was enough, would Gere bother to buy the whole flock? No he'd have, at the most, paid for the girl's single bird. But that'd be poor business for the stallholder.


4. Visa is accepted in an open-air street market stall. Yet another point of suspicion. The only reason why I think this could be so is that the stall is in a tourist market and obviously only tourists would use a credit card with small purchases -- even the girl used coins.


5. The flock of birds are all of the same breed, and roughly the same healthy condition. You'd expect a small market stall to have a small number of birds of each variety rather than a single huge flock of white columbiforms. Conclusion: they were all prepared beforehand, and fairly recently too, in anticipation of Rich Tourist whom the stallholder's cousin/business partner/local tour guide tipped him off about.


6. Finally: the girl doesn't get to release the bird before Gere lets his flock loose. Obviously she keeps the bird to re-use with every new tourist dupe that comes around. It's tame and won't fly off. As for the others, they've probably been trained to fly back again after a while. Brilliant.

Look at the evidence! It is undeniable. Richard Gere is a typical Tourist Dupe. Let this be a lesson, all you credit-card wielders, drunk with the pecuniary power you hold in your wallet. Do not let such elaborate schemes fool you, when you travel to some far off exotic place expecting to treat the local populace with benevolence.