Celebrating " Vocal for Local"

 Celebrating "Vocal for Local"

It all started with an assignment from our business communication professor. We were told to prepare a poster and a video for the upcoming "Mahamandi Event", 2020 at NITIE on the theme " Vocal for Local".

The poster and the video had to be about a local product in our area which we wanted to make global by being vocal about it. The idea was to advertise a product which was only well known in our local area and not known globally.

It was a unique assignment and I was in a dilemma on what product to choose. I am from Gujarat and was thinking about unique things from my state. Since I am a foodie, I decided to choose a food item for the assignment. Many tasty delicacies of Gujarat came to my mind, " Chatni Gathiya" from Bhavnagar, " "Locho" from Surat, "Sevasar" from Vadodara, Surendranagar's special Samosa and many others but I decided to promote Surat's special "Undhiyu", a lip smacking Gujarati mixed vegetable dish with authentic Gujarati spices normally prepared during Winter and a must-have dish for every Gujarati especially during "Utarayan", the festival of kites.

The main reason for choosing "Undhiyu" was the rich history behind it. Undhiyu gets it name from the Gujarati words ‘matlu’ meaning earthen pot and ‘undhiyu’ meaning upside down since it was traditionally cooked upside down in an underground space in earthen pots fired from above. This regional favourite can trace its origins back to pre-industrial India, when food was cooked on wooden fires. According to Kamlesh Barot of Revival Indian Thali “Even today, deep in the heart of Gujarat, it is still made the traditional way. It is the flavours from the sheer freshness of the veggies, the smokiness of the earthen pot and the bio-fuel that combine to give it the seasonal punch.”

Also, I believe that this Gujarati dish has a great potential for markets outside Gujarat if advertised properly and I could get no better opportunity than Mahamandi, a well known marketing event in one of India's top college to promote it.

After choosing the product the next step was to make an eye catching poster. Since I being a typical engineering student, had no prior experience in making posters. I started with reading on quora and blogs about how to make good posters. The tool I chose for preparing the poster was Adobe Spark as it had good templates and an easy interface especially for a novice at creating posters like me. The focus was that the poster should be able to convey my ideas effectively and should be eye catchy so as to tempt people from across the globe to try this delicious product once.

The poster had to be completed in 2 days and I had to find time for this task among all the regular academic classes and Summer Internship Preparations. Fortunately, I had an amazing team mate to work with and we started working on the poster on whatever free time we got. We carefully selected attractive fonts and added the specialties of the product in our poster along with some catchy quotes after brainstorming them. 

The result was an amazing poster depicting our special product! The next task is to prepare an informative video to advertise our Undhiyu and I will be writing about it soon.