Brands
From pandals to pages Sunrise takes Durga Puja stories to lit fest
MUMBAI: When the drums fade and the lights dim, the stories linger and this year, they found a literary home. ITC Sunrise Spices took Bengal’s biggest festival beyond the pandal and onto the page at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival 2026, showcasing its landmark grassroots initiative Sunrise Pujor Saatkahon. The project, launched during Durga Puja 2025, captured the festival not as spectacle alone, but as a living archive of emotion, artistry and community memory.
At the heart of the initiative are 250 unique Durga Puja stories, documented from across West Bengal far beyond Kolkata reflecting neighbourhood traditions, local creativity and the diverse regional voices that define the state’s Puja culture. In bringing Pujor Saatkahon to one of India’s most respected literary platforms, Sunrise positioned Durga Puja as a narrative tradition worthy of preservation and discussion.
A key highlight of the festival was a panel discussion titled “Pujo Special: Celebrating the Durga Pujos of Bengal”, held on 11 January 2026 at the Alipore Museum. The session explored how Durga Puja has evolved into a powerful cultural narrative shaped by para-level participation, visual artistry, social themes and collective memory drawing extensively from stories featured in the Sunrise Pujor Saatkahon coffee-table book.
The panel brought together voices from Bengal’s cultural and creative landscape, including Sayantan Maitra, Ushoshi Sengupta, Moon Moon Sen and Tonmoy Roychoudhury. The discussion acknowledged Sunrise Pujor Saatkahon as one of the most expansive grassroots cultural movements around Durga Puja in recent years, notable for documenting the festival beyond visual grandeur and capturing its people-led storytelling core.
The initiative itself involved over 1,500 Durga Puja committees, spanning multiple phases of community participation, voting, on-ground audits and celebrations. These efforts culminated in the release of the Sunrise Pujor Saatkahon book, a lasting tribute to 250 Puja narratives, designed to preserve the festival’s cultural significance long after the idols return home.
Alongside the panel, Sunrise hosted a dedicated stall at the festival, where visitors accessed both physical and digital editions of the book, extending the life of the stories beyond the festive season.
By taking Puja from streets to sentences, Sunrise demonstrated how brands can participate in culture not by amplifying noise, but by archiving meaning turning Bengal’s most beloved celebration into a story that continues to be read, discussed and remembered.
Brands
Godrej clarifies ‘GI’ identifier after logo similarity debate
Says GI is not a logo, will not replace Godrej signature across products.
MUMBAI: In a branding storm where shapes did the talking, Godrej is now spelling things out. Godrej Industries Group (GIG) has issued a clarification on its newly introduced ‘GI’ identifier, addressing questions around its purpose and design following a wave of online criticism. At the centre of the debate were two concerns: whether the new mark replaces the long-standing Godrej logo, and whether its geometric design mirrors other corporate identities.
The company has drawn a clear line. The Godrej signature logo, it said, remains unchanged and continues to be the sole logo across all consumer-facing products and services. The ‘GI’ mark, by contrast, is not a logo but a corporate group identifier intended for use alongside the Godrej signature or company name, and aimed at stakeholders such as investors, media and talent rather than consumers.
The need for such a distinction stems from the 2024 restructuring of the broader Godrej Group into two separate business entities. With both continuing to operate under the same Godrej name and signature, the identifier is positioned as a way to differentiate the Godrej Industries Group at a corporate level.
The rollout, however, triggered a broader conversation on design originality. Critics pointed to similarities between the GI mark’s geometric composition and logos used by companies globally, raising questions about distinctiveness.
Responding to this, GIG said its intellectual property and legal review found that such overlaps are common in minimalist, geometry-led design systems. Basic forms such as circles and rectangles appear across dozens of brand identities worldwide, the company noted.
It added that the identifier emerged from an extensive design process and was chosen for its simplicity, allowing it to sit alongside the Godrej signature without competing visually. While acknowledging that elemental shapes may appear less distinctive in isolation, the group emphasised that the mark is part of a broader identity system that includes a custom typeface, sonic branding and other proprietary elements.
Following legal and ethical assessments, the company said it found no impediment to using the identifier, reiterating that the GI mark is a corporate tool not a consumer-facing symbol.
In short, the logo isn’t changing but the conversation around it certainly has.
