Eastern Sambar Masala: Ad review!

My experience watching the video:

The video starts with someone getting ready in a uniform (to my knowledge it looked like a Navy or pilot uniform.)  They show the belt being tucked and the badge being stiffened over the shoulder.  A male voice says in BG that it’s not okay to be late on the first day. A lady is shown amidst this with a magazine and a sigh. Hands are shown cutting vegetables. The guy urges saying ‘Make it quick’. I assumed that it was about a newly married couple, where the guy is getting ready to office and the girl cooks. The lady with the magazine, I conveniently assumed it to be the mother in law. Eastern masala packet is cut and sprinkled over the samabar with a background voice saying ‘It’s done. It’s ready.’ So we tend to think that it’s the girl who is cooking and the guy who is asking her to speed things up. That’s when they reveal the secret. It’s the dad who is cooking, mom reading the magazine and the girl, very proudly, places her cap over her head.

The dad, affectionately, says that the girl should eat her favourite Idli and Sambar on her first day to work. The family gathers in the kitchen and the dad feeds the girl a piece of idli dipped in Sambar made with Eastern Samabar powder. The girl gives him a thumbs up and that fills the dad’s face with a relief and glee. The girl then says that its best just like her mom and dad.

The end it with a tagline ‘If you love is pure then life is easy to live’.

         This Ad reminded me of my mornings when I run around and cook as fast as I can, when my husband gets ready to work. But as the secret in the video is revealed I am sure every daughter will get reminded of how their dads get excited cooking sambar for them, competing with their moms.

A very creative Ad. They have managed to maintain suspense and surprise us with the given 35 secs. A script that’s better than most movies today. I also love the way they have showcased women. Mom can relax too. It’s not just the woman’s duty to cook all the time. Also, I loved the way the girl’s parents encourage her to work. Job and passion are very important for girls of today, to be bold and face life themselves.

All of us are so used to see our mom or grandma cooking. But when they are not at home and when we are left with our fathers, home alone, we all get excited about the cooking experiments, don’t we? “A man who cooks is the sexiest of all” the saying goes. Though our fathers cook very rarely, we always say they are better cooks than our moms. They, sometimes, will follow the instructions given by our moms still manage to make the dish better than them. The main reason sometimes is that they are so lavish in using the ingredients, as they cook only once in a blue moon. When mom says oil they use ghee so obviously the food they make becomes richer with all the ingredients poured in abundance. Only the mothers understand the ration and amount to be used to manage the monthly provisions list.

There will be times in everyone’s life when the father promises to make our favourite sambar or rasam and we would have got thoroughly excited. We would have assisted them by all means we can; cutting vegetables, taking the spices from the shelf and what not. The excitement to eat the sambar that day would have been more than the excitement we would have got seeing a room full of chocolates. After a long wait and hunger pinching our stomach, we would settle down with our dads in the table to taste the steaming Sambar. It would turn out to be such a failure. As kids, not knowing what it would mean to a dad to cook so badly and disappoint the kid, we would tell him how mom’s sambar would have been so better. We will also remind him of our excitement, wait and the hunger we had to bear for the failed Samabar. Haven’t we all done that? That’s when the dad’s face shrinks. He would run to us telling he would take us to our favourite restaurant and get us whatever we want. But the pain of not being able to satisfy his kid by making a simple sambar will always pain him.

Eastern Sambar masala has cleverly used this situation in their advertisement.

‘A man who cooks is the sexiest man’ Oh ya! My dad is still young, dashing and sexy.