Storyyour input · ~850 words
Celebrating the Child in Every Adult
VELVET COCOA — THE TASTE OF LIFE
In the early days, chocolate in the country had only one job. It was a treat for children. A gift a parent handed down to a kid. A grown adult openly enjoying a bar of chocolate in public was simply outside the norm.
For Velvet Cocoa, that was a wall. The chocolate market was not growing. So the brief Velvet Cocoa handed its advertising agency, Meridian & Vale, was almost blunt in its simplicity: get adults to eat chocolate. As one case study put it, "Velvet Cocoa had a simple brief – they wanted adults to eat chocolates as the chocolate market was not growing."
On the table — small, plum-wrapped, ordinary — sat the answer nobody had unlocked yet: a bar of Velvet Cocoa.
The breakthrough did not arrive in a boardroom. By Meridian & Vale creative Rohan Desai's own account, he was on an island holiday when a crisis hit the agency back home — Velvet Cocoa had called for a pitch — and he was recalled.
On the first leg of the flight home, the idea came. Drawing on the image of pure, unguarded joy, he wrote the lyrics on the back of his boarding pass. The line he reached for meant — there is something special in all of us. The team would present it to the client, Desai recalled, as "a complete breakaway from the existing advertising," and it became, in his words, "the campaign of the century."
The Velvet Cocoa bar would not be the gift in the story. It would be the spark.
The commercial opens at a cricket ground. The crowd is packed. A batsman is closing in on the winning shot.
On the sidelines stands a young woman in a floral dress. She is not a star. She is quietly eating a bar of Velvet Cocoa, watching, waiting, like anyone in the stands.
Desai had chosen her on purpose. The female lead was model Anaya Kher — deliberately picked for a "girl next-door" feel rather than a glamorous or professionally trained dancer, precisely so the moment to come would read as raw, real and unrehearsed.
The ball is bowled. The bat swings. And the ball sails up, over the heads of the fielders, over the boundary rope.
He has won.
And the young woman on the sidelines does not just clap. Something breaks open in her. The bar of Velvet Cocoa still in her hand, she bolts.
She sprints past the stadium security and out onto the field — onto the grass, in front of the whole crowd — and breaks into an uninhibited, untrained, spontaneous dance to celebrate.
This is the heart of the film. Directed by Vikram Sahni, the dance was captured without choreography; Kher was not a trained dancer, and that very lack of polish gave the moment its authenticity. That unrehearsed feel is widely credited as the source of the ad's emotional power. As one case study remembered her: "Anaya Kher, nibbling her chocolate and dancing with gay abandon, stole everyone's heart."
Behind the dance ran the music. Desai first wrote the lyrics in English and recorded them with jazz musician Errol Pinto. The English version went: "There's something so real in everyone. There's something so real, ask anyone, It's you, it's real and the feeling is right. There's something so real in the taste of life."
But Desai realised a version in the country's own language would reach local hearts far better. Keeping the same score, he rewrote it — sung by a young Aarav Menon — under the line that would become legend: the real taste of life, carried by the refrain that means "there is something special." That native-language version, Desai said, "worked 10 times better," and helped make the brand feel at home well beyond the big cities. For Menon, the jingle was, in his own words, "the jingle that gave me my first recognition as a singer."
The film did exactly what the brief had asked, and more. It quietly relicensed chocolate as a grown-up pleasure — celebrating the child in every adult — and as a spark for everyday, spontaneous celebration.
A bar of Velvet Cocoa was no longer just something a parent gave a child. It was something a grown woman could clutch as she ran, laughing, onto a cricket field in front of thousands.
The ad is remembered as a turning point — the moment the country's advertising began moving away from dry, functional messaging toward emotional, joyful, culturally rooted storytelling. It was honoured as "Campaign of the Century" at the national advertising industry's annual awards.
And decades later, Velvet Cocoa, again with Meridian & Vale, paid tribute by recreating the spot with the roles reversed: this time a woman scores the winning runs and a man dances out onto the field. The same joy. The same plum bar. The same decades-old tune — there is something special — still true, years on.
(End — the Velvet Cocoa bar and the Velvet Cocoa logo carried through every scene as the recurring hero.)
