A few months ago, over happy hours at the recently renovated Mad Men-themed mezzanine of Drums of Heaven, my sister, my friend Bhuvana and I had a very heated debate about the under-representation of women’s liquid appetites in the advertising industry. Why was it that the Indian liquor industry spends such little energy on targeting women as consumers of their brand? We each had our opinions, but, when we started to examine recent advertising history, could only find one ad featuring Priyanka Chopra as singular evidence of a woman being a brand ambassador for alcohol. The 40-second-long black and white film plays with visual and textual semantics, featuring Chopra clad in a sexy black dress walking in and out of scenes as if she was on a runway, leaving gaping mouths in her trail while her voiceover delivers a brief monologue about style. At no point, though, does she actually hold or sip off a glass, which could be written off as one of the compromises made by surrogate advertising. Or was it really an attempt to come to the edge of a line without actually towing it forward?

Let’s not forget Cersei Lannister of Game of Thrones, who, in the season six finale watched parts of King’s Landing erupt with wild fire, the consequence of her own actions, while treacherously sipping from a goblet of wine