V-Guard and the Rangoli That Repaired Everything: The Story of #RishteJodLo

They are old. They are neighbours. And they have not spoken in what feels, to each of them, like a very long time.

The details of the original disagreement — what started it, who said what, when exactly the distance between two adjacent homes became a chasm — may have blurred over the years. That is the particular cruelty of a long-standing feud: the wound outlasts the memory of how it was inflicted. What remains is only the habit of not speaking, the wall of carefully maintained silence, the daily choreography of going about life close to someone you have decided not to see.

It is Diwali evening. The festival that has, for generations, been India's most powerful invitation to begin again. The diyas are being lit. And outside, in the space between two homes, two elderly neighbours are doing what they have perhaps always done on Diwali: making rangoli.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKIM-s5Few0

Their designs are different. Their tools are their own. But the ground they are working on is shared — and as the evening unfolds, as the light changes and the banter moves from guarded to real, something shifts. A revelation surfaces — not dramatic, not accusatory, but heartfelt. Something true is said, perhaps for the first time. And in the truth of it, empathy arrives. And from empathy, a gesture. And from the gesture, something that looks, improbably, like togetherness.

This was the story at the heart of V-Guard's Diwali 2024 campaign — Iss Diwali, Rishte Jod Lo — and it arrived with nearly a million views in just two days of its release, not because it was flashy or celebrity-led, but because it was honest.

A Brand That Believes Relationships Are the Foundation

V-Guard Industries Limited is one of India's most trusted consumer electrical brands — a company with deep roots in Kerala and a national presence built over five decades through products that have quietly held together the electrical infrastructure of Indian homes: stabilisers, switches, wiring cables, inverters, water heaters, fans. Products that work when they are supposed to and ask for nothing in return. Products that are, in their best expression, precisely like the most reliable relationships in a person's life.

This parallel was not lost on Nandagopal Nair, VP and Head of Brand and Communications at V-Guard Industries, who articulated the brand's philosophy with clarity: "At V-Guard, we believe relationships form the cornerstone of our existence. Our core brand values of trust, care, and reliability are rooted in nurturing these relationships. Diwali is a time to strengthen bonds and embark on new beginnings. The new Diwali film created embodies our philosophy of bringing home a better tomorrow with an inspiring and emotional narrative that we believe will touch a chord with our audience."

Trust. Care. Reliability. These are the words V-Guard uses to describe its products. They are also, not coincidentally, the words most commonly used to describe the best relationships a person can have. The campaign did not need to stretch to make this connection. It simply needed to tell a story that lived where the brand's values and human truth overlapped completely.

The Film: A Brief for the Ages

The #RishteJodLo campaign film was conceptualised and created by V-Guard's creative agency Ralph & Das. The brief, as described by Anil Ralph Thomas, Director and Chief Creative Officer of Ralph & Das, was clear in its intent and demanding in its execution: "The brief was to craft a narrative that embodies the essence of the brand — optimism and a desire for a better tomorrow — without the pressure of promoting a specific product. We aimed to tell a relevant and touching human story, which we believe we have successfully achieved."

No product placement. No specification list. No feature showcase. Just a story — told around two elderly neighbours, their rangolis, their history, and the Diwali evening that gave them the occasion to set something right.

The choice of elderly protagonists was deliberate and wise. In a Diwali advertising landscape that defaults to young families, children, and the aspirational imagery of a new generation lighting diyas for the first time, the two quirky elderly neighbours of the V-Guard film occupy a different emotional register entirely. They carry the weight of years. The gap between them is not new — it has been there long enough to have become a kind of furniture in their lives, something they have learned to move around without examining too closely.

This is a different kind of estrangement from the romantic reconciliations or parent-child reunions that populate most festive advertising. It is the estrangement of neighbours — people whose relationship is not obligatory, not biological, not professionally necessary. People who chose, at some point, to be friendly; and then chose, at some point, to stop. And who now, on a Diwali evening, are being given one more chance to choose differently.

Kaustav Das, COO of Ralph & Das, described the campaign's ambition: "Our endeavour has always been to rise above the category squabble and transactional conversation. Establish and garner affinity for the Brand's Point of View. The V-Guard Diwali film we think does justice to that, substantially."

The film was released across V-Guard's social media channels, and its reception was swift and warm: nearly a million views within two days, driven by the organic reach of a story that people recognised as true and wanted to share.

The Double Meaning in the Tagline

Rishte Jod Lo — forge relationships, or join the bonds. In Hindi, jodna carries two meanings that sit perfectly alongside each other in this campaign's context. To join in the sense of connecting two things. And to forge in the sense of creating or repairing something through deliberate effort.

For a brand that makes electrical connections — that, quite literally, joins circuits and ensures that power flows safely from one point to another — the phrase is a stroke of creative precision. The tagline operates simultaneously in the world of human relationships (strengthen your bonds this Diwali) and in the world of the brand's own product universe (we are in the business of making connections that work). The two meanings do not compete. They reinforce.

This is the kind of tagline that takes time to fully appreciate. On first encounter, it is warm and festive and slightly familiar — another Diwali ad asking people to connect with their loved ones. On reflection, it is quietly brilliant: a phrase that belongs to the brand's most fundamental identity and to the campaign's deepest emotional aspiration at the same time.

Five Lessons We Should Learn From This Campaign

1. The Best Brief Removes the Product and Tests What Remains

The brief given to Ralph & Das for the #RishteJodLo film was, in Anil Ralph Thomas's own words, to craft a narrative that embodies the brand's essence without the pressure of promoting a specific product. This is one of the most demanding and most revealing briefs a brand can give its agency. It asks: if we strip away the product entirely, what is our brand actually about? What story can we tell that is authentically ours, that no other brand could tell, that audiences will connect with and remember — without a product shot, a feature callout, or a price point anywhere in the frame?

The answer, for V-Guard, was trust, care, reliability, and the belief in a better tomorrow. Those values, given narrative form through two elderly neighbours and a Diwali rangoli, produced a film that earned nearly a million views in two days. The lesson: the brands willing to remove their product from the brief will discover the most enduring version of their story. And then they can put the product back — because now it belongs there.

2. Elderly Protagonists Are an Underused Creative Asset

Indian advertising's festival season tends to privilege the young — children lighting diyas for the first time, young couples sharing new homes, parents watching their children grow. These are powerful emotional beats. But the V-Guard film demonstrated that elderly protagonists carry something that younger characters structurally cannot: the weight of accumulated time. Their estrangement is not fresh. Their reconciliation is not easy. The fact that they choose, at the end of their lives, to extend the gesture of togetherness — that is the emotional event the film is actually about.

The lesson: the emotional territory available in stories about the elderly is deeper, more specific, and more affecting than most brands have yet explored. Audiences who have elderly parents or grandparents — who have watched the years narrow the window of opportunity for repair and reconciliation — will respond to these stories with a recognition that stories about younger characters simply cannot generate in the same way.

3. Specificity of Setting Makes Universal Themes Land Harder

The film is set specifically at the moment of rangoli-making on Diwali evening. Not a family dinner. Not the exchange of gifts. Not the lighting of diyas. The rangoli — a practice that is both creative and territorial, both individual and shared, both celebratory and competitive in the way of two neighbours who have been making rangolis side by side for decades — is the perfect arena for the film's drama. It puts the two characters in close physical proximity. It gives them something to do with their hands while they talk. It provides a visual metaphor for the act of creation and repair. And it is unmistakably, specifically Diwali.

The lesson: universal themes — reconciliation, empathy, the courage to begin again — need a specific container. The more precisely a campaign locates its story in a particular setting, a particular activity, a particular moment of the day or season, the more completely the audience inhabits it. Specificity is the enemy of generic. And Diwali advertising, more than almost any other category, needs to fight the generic with everything it has.

4. A Brand's Product Language and Its Human Language Should Be the Same Language

Trust. Care. Reliability. V-Guard's brand values describe electrical products and human relationships in exactly the same words. This alignment is not accidental — but it is rare. Many brands have product values that exist in entirely different registers from their human emotional aspirations, requiring creative teams to perform gymnastics to bridge the two. V-Guard's campaign worked as naturally as it did because the bridge had always been built. The words that describe what the brand's products do are also the words that describe what the brand's campaign is about.

The lesson: brands that invest time in identifying the words where their product truth and their human emotional aspiration overlap — where the engineering vocabulary and the relationship vocabulary converge — will find that their campaigns write themselves more easily, feel more authentic, and require less creative effort to connect product to purpose.

5. Social Media Velocity Is Earned, Not Bought

The #RishteJodLo film reached nearly a million views within two days of its release on V-Guard's social media channels. This velocity was not the result of a massive media spend or a celebrity endorsement or a manufactured controversy. It was the result of a story that people felt, recognised as true, and chose to share with someone else — someone they thought would also recognise it, someone they perhaps wanted to send it to as its own small gesture of the thing the film was advocating for.

The lesson: the most efficient social media distribution a brand can achieve is the kind where the audience does the distributing. And audiences will distribute content that makes them feel something they want someone else to feel — particularly during a season when the impulse to reach out to the people they love is already at its annual peak. The V-Guard film arrived with exactly the right emotional quality at exactly the right cultural moment and did not need to shout to be heard.

The Rangoli That Was Always Shared

In the end, the two elderly neighbours are making rangoli together. Not identically — their styles are their own, their histories are their own, the things that were said between them remain part of what they carry. But they are in the same space, doing the same thing, on the same Diwali evening, and the wall that had stood between them has found a door.

V-Guard did not build the wall. It did not claim to have built the door. It simply told the story of two people who found it — and reminded a country preparing for its most celebrated festival that the most meaningful thing you could do with the occasion was not to light a bigger diya, but to reach across the darkness between yourself and someone you had stopped seeing.

Iss Diwali, Rishte Jod Lo.

This Diwali, forge the bonds. Not just the electrical ones.