VADODARA: The big-eyed mascot– Amul Girl – dressed in red polka dots with a matching ribbon in her hair, red shoes, and a red-and-white bow, has once again taken centre stage. It is not because of any witty or innocent comment on any current event that usually appears on the billboards with cheeky one-liners in the longest-running outdoor advertising campaign in the world.Almost six decades after its ‘birth’, the iconic mascot is drawing attention after an Instagram video regarding her creation went viral, forcing her marketers to clarify the origins.This occurred after marketing consultant Dr Sanjay Arora shared a video suggesting that the Amul girl was inspired by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor‘s sister, Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan. The video, which starts with “what does this girl (Amul girl) and Shashi Tharoor have in common,” claims that “the face of India’s most famous butter girl – the cheeky blue-haired Amul mascot, was inspired by Shobha Tharoor, Shashi Tharoor’s young baby sister.”In the video, Arora claims that “the queen of puns came from the sister of the king of vocabulary.” The video shared by Arora, which racked up millions of views, even caught the attention of Shashi Tharoor’s sister, who responded to the video on ‘X’.“Received a charming reel posted by @chiefsanjay from so many asking whether I inspired the Utterly Butterly blue-haired cherub. Yes, I was the first Amul baby. Yes, #ShyamBenegal took the photos. My sister @SmitaTharoor was in the 2nd colour campaign. We may have. But we don’t know,” she shared on ‘X’.The marketers of the Amul brand, however, have debunked his claims. “We wish to clarify that the Amul Girl illustration is not influenced by Ms Shobha Tharoor. She was created by Mr Sylvester daCunha and illustrator Mr Eustace Fernandes,” the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), the Indian dairy major that markets brand Amul, said in a statement.Created by daCunha, the polka dot-dressed Amul girl was born in 1966 with three magic words – “utterly butterly delicious” 10 years after Amul butter was launched in 1956.DaCunha received inputs from Dr Verghese Kurien, who conceived Amul’s mascot. In June 2023, daCunha passed away.How Amul Girl was born! Vadodara: The story of how the Amul Girl was born has been vividly narrated by advertising legend late Sylvester daCunha in Amul’s India Book, the revised edition of which was launched by the GCMMF about a decade ago.“It was 1966. The advertising for Amul butter had come to our agency. The product was already a decade old, but its positioning as ‘processed from the purest milk under hygienic conditions by a Gujarat dairy co-operative’ wasn’t exciting enough. We needed fresh communication,” daCunha, who was then a manager at the agency, had recalled in the book.That’s when his wife Nisha casually suggested “Utterly Amul,” to which he added “Utterly Butterly Amul.” The slogan stuck, despite scepticism over the ungrammatical “butterly.” Amul’s then chief Dr Verghese Kurien backed it with the words: “It’s utterly mad; but if you think it’ll work, go ahead.”Next came the mascot. “What we now needed was a spokesman to voice it. But who? Instinctively, I sensed it should be a child, someone impish and loveable. I explained this to my then art director, Eustace Fernandes, a brilliant visualizer and cartoonist. After a few tries, he came up with this charming little poppet in a polka-dotted frock and a matching ribbon in her ponytail. She was licking her lips as though to say, “Utterly butterly delicious.““Yes, she had all the qualities I was groping for—naughty, cuddly, innocent, smart. I knew we had a winner,” mentioned the legend.
