It's cool to be Indian and advertise it!

New Delhi: The advertising world is waking up to a new portrayal of India. It's seeing a resurgence of the 'Proud Indian' feeling.

It's suddenly cool to be Indian and flaunt it especially in the face of foreigners waltzing in and buying Indian assets.

It's now about corporate mergers with Indians being proactive.

Rajnigandha Pan Masala ad which shows a man in a chauffeured limo driving past a building called the 'East India Company' and says that he wants to buy that company! He then says the tagline that "Since the British have ruled us for 200 years, now it's our turn."

True, earlier Amul and Bajaj did peg their ads on the 'Indian' theme but here is the differentiator.

Amul's ads satirized happenings and events and Bajaj was more along the 'buy Indian-be Indian' theme but the latest slew of ads like Rajnigandha Pan Masala and Dewan Housing is about an Indian with a global perspective of where he belongs, or rather one who is loudly claiming his stake.

Similarly, Videocon's ad of foreigners chanting the Gayatri Mantra and the tagline 'The Indian Multinational' and even the Adita Birla Group's commercial is a metaphor for patriotism.

And driving this need for a resurgance are new, small advertisers who are migrating to television and looking way beyond the obvious.

The world of advertising has seen it's shares of ups and downs - of having ruffled feathers - the dare-bare Tuff print campaign to well recognised campaigns like Airtel, Idea, Ford etc.

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If the 80s saw the rise of the Indian idiom in advertising, the new millennium may be giving it a fresh look.

Rajnigandha Pan Masala ad is a case in point.

The attitude in this ad perhaps best sums up why its scoring high on recall. Jingoistic and with earthy humour, the ad with a nearly Rs 4 crore media spend saw high rotation.

Created by Rediff's Delhi office, the ad will soon have another phase that takes forward the idea of a conquering Indian.

One of the numerous new entities to begin advertising on television is Dewan Housing Finance.

The DS Group is just one of the over 4,000 new advertisers that discovered the power of TV in 2004.

While some of that number is made up by large corporates venturing into TV advertising for newer brands, a large proportion of these new spends came from small clients putting their money on the tube for the first time.

The spread of news channels and religious channels have allowed for these smaller advertisers to get on board.

Not all these advertisers though are serviced by the top agencies.

Many of these advertisers chose to go in for start up shops or local agencies. For instance, Dewan Housing chose Bugs for its first TV campaign.

That's what gives their ad campaigns the freshness.

In fact, they are usually reflective of the advertiser's ambitions while speaking the language and mirroring the culture of non-urban consumers.