Festive Shestive!

The Big Bang of the world of brands, the festive season is a moniker for the uninitiated in branding and marketing.

It’s also one of those periods where creatives, especially writers are hard pressed to find the nth way to say the same thing. Festivals are by definition, universal. In fact, one of the very few things that really is. Finding something different to say about them each time, is like asking ice cream to be a different kind of cold every time you taste a scoop. The unenviable task of injecting some sort of nuance to this rudimentary sentiment – wishing you a happy Diwali for example – befalls the writer.

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So, just how many ways can you say Happy Diwali, is an argument most writers have had with their account managers in pretty much every office of the country. But as hopeless as it may seem, like ice-cream, Diwali too can have flavour. It doesn’t need to arise from the side of the customer, however, but from the same fountain that whets your appetite for context – the brand and what it means on Diwali. A shoe can help you sustain a tough shopping day,
a towel wipe that rangoli colour off of your new kurta and an empty crystal glass become that vehicle for celebration. Look around, and everything has a role, a part in the whole that we identify and casually refer to as happiness.

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The thing about writing is that while language is limiting – there are only so many synonyms for happy – emotion is a vast recess you can peer into and draw that which you find relatable. No writer can fill anyone else’s shoes as much as he or she can’t write anyone else’s lines. But even in the blatant confusion and frustration that comes from saying the same thing over and over again, there are little nuances that the eye can glean, if you are, you
know looking at where the light comes from and not where it falls – see, I plugged it here as well.

– Manik Sharma, Content Head

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