There is a particular kind of blindness that comes with familiarity. The longer we know someone, the more certain we become that we know them, their habits, their routines and their role in our lives. What we rarely pause to ask is what lies beneath.
This Father’s Day, Mahindra Rise chose to sit with that blindness rather than look away from it. The result is Ask Dad About Dad, a film built around a deceptively simple premise: asking children what they actually know about their fathers. Not the surface facts. The real ones.
What was he most afraid of? What genuinely made him happy? What did he once dream of becoming? What does he do when a day breaks him?
In most households, these questions have never come up, not because the love isn’t there, but because familiarity has quietly replaced curiosity. The film didn’t reveal fathers. It revealed assumptions.
Developed with creative partner Schbang, the campaign extends Mahindra Rise’s long-running #RethinkTheBias platform, which examines how assumptions shape the way we see the world. Here, though, the lens turns inward. The most consequential biases, it argues, are not the ones we hold about strangers. They are the ones we hold about the people we love.
Rather than casting actors, Mahindra Rise did something that carries far greater risk — and far greater reward. It asked its own employees to participate. Seven families walked into a shoot with no script, no preparation, no rehearsal. Just questions they had likely never thought to ask, and a camera there to witness whatever happened next. Produced by 1947 Films, the result is something that cannot be manufactured: genuine human honesty on camera. What the participants gave was not a performance. It was themselves.
The answers, across all seven families, told the same story in different ways. Children guessed wrong, not because they were careless, but because they had never been given the space or the reason to ask.
The exercise surfaced how much we assume, how little we verify, and how a single honest question might change the texture of a relationship entirely.
Research suggests that 96% of people say they want deeper connections with their families. Most of those conversations never begin. The film doesn’t dramatise this gap, it demonstrates it, quietly and without judgement, through the faces of real people encountering it in real time.
The ask the campaign makes of its audience is intentionally modest. Not a grand gesture. The invitation to audiences is modest: ask one question you’ve never thought to ask before.
Ask Dad About Dad is available across Mahindra Rise’s digital and social platforms. Audiences are invited to share their own conversations using #AskDadAboutDad and #RethinkTheBias.
View the film here:
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About Schbang
Schbang, established in 2015, is a Creative, Media, Technology Transformation company with offices across Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi-NCR, London, UK, Amsterdam and Stockholm. With a team of 1200+ members, it delivers growth-driven end-to-end solutions across creative development, strategic advisory, film production, web, design, content, data science, and media planning & buying verticals. It is also a valued Google Premier Partner, Adobe, Hubspot, MoEngage, Shopify, ONDC, and Zoho Premium Partner.
It has featured as a LinkedIn Top 25 start-up in 2018 and 2021 and on the Financial Times’ 450 High Growth Companies in the Asia Pacific List. In the last few years. Schbang has created some exciting and award-winning digital work for brands like Jio, Britannia, Fevicol, Ashok Leyland, Garnier, Cipla, Finolex Pipes, Crompton, Philips, Kaya Skin Clinic, London Dairy, Johnson & Johnson Baby, Mattel, ASUS, Kotak811 and many more brands.
