Masks, gloves, and a cafe; Parle shows us the COVID-era date in new ad

The pandemic and lockdown changed the romantic date but some things never change.

Has the Coronavirus and the lockdowns killed the romantic date? No, they haven’t. What they did, however, was delay thousands of dates for several months and as a result, make the ‘date’ more daunting for couples than it was ever before. And we don’t refer to couples on their first date, no. We’re talking about every type of couple.

Take, for instance, the new Parle ad titled ‘Cafe’. It features a young couple, a boy and a girl, meeting each other after months. Yes, they’ve conversed on video chats and calls for eons but now it’s time to see each other face to face - it’s like a blind date.

We see the two meet at a cafe, a new scene in Indian ads post the lockdown, and the girl asks her boyfriend if he missed her. What does he say? He says nothing but instead sits down and removes a pair of gloves from his bag; health tops romance.

Once the couple wears the gloves, their hands meet but immediately leave each other when they hear the server approach; some things never change.

Towards the end of the ad, when the girl is leaving for her home, she stops to berate him because, during the lockdown, they spoke to each other for hours on the phone but now when they meet after the lockdown, “You have nothing to say.”

That’s when they guy digs inside his bag to remove a pack of Hide & Seek and we see the girl remove a pack of Milano from her bag. Turns out, the two had a ritual of sharing Parle biscuits whenever they met. It’s like what the ad says in its title, #ToNewBeginnings.