With Shefali Vaidya
#NoBindiNoBusiness, and a saree masterclass on Prachyam OTT — a collaboration built on refusing to treat tradition as decoration.
The Collaborator
Shefali Vaidya is a cultural commentator whose collaboration with Prachyam centres on preserving and promoting Bharatiya cultural identity. The partnership spans campaigns, masterclasses and storytelling that celebrate Hindu traditions without compromise.
Two strands define it: the #NoBindiNoBusiness campaign, and a saree masterclass running on Prachyam OTT.
Why It Mattered
Brands advertise heavily into Hindu festivals while stripping the traditional symbolism those festivals are made of. A Diwali campaign will take the season's commercial weight and leave out the bindi. Naming that pattern publicly, without the argument collapsing into grievance, needed a piece of work sharp enough to travel and precise enough to be unanswerable.
The masterclass carried a different problem. Traditional attire is easy to present as fashion or heritage nostalgia. Framing it instead as a living connection to ancestors — a civilisation legible through its textiles — meant building something with real depth behind it.
What We Made
The #NoBindiNoBusiness campaign. A viral video initiative addressing brands that advertise during Hindu festivals while avoiding traditional symbolism like the bindi. The campaign posed a simple question: if a brand is selling products for Diwali but cannot show a bindi, what is it even celebrating?
We built the film hard-hitting and built it around Vaidya herself, so the argument came from a cultural commentator rather than from a brand.
Indie Class: the saree masterclass. Launched through Prachyam OTT, the programme has Vaidya share her expertise on Indian saree traditions, regional weaving styles and textile heritage. It treats the subject as a way of understanding the civilisation rather than as fashion, exploring how each region's weaving techniques tell stories of local culture, climate and creativity.
Where It Landed
The #NoBindiNoBusiness video resonated widely across social media and prompted brands to reconsider their cultural representation in advertising.
The saree masterclass continues on Prachyam OTT, framing traditional attire as a living connection to the ancestors who wore it.