Brand India at 80: What the world tells me in Dubai

Ritu Kant Ojha, CEO of Proact Luxury Real Estate, writes that Brand India has shifted from seeking global attention to attracting global interest

by Ritu Kant Ojha
Published: Aug 15, 2026 2:14 PM | 4 min read

A fifteen-second video of the Indian and Italian Prime Ministers at a summit, dubbed "Melodi," became a viral sensation, highlighting the organic brand-building of India without any paid promotion or agency involvement.
Over the past seven years, perceptions of India among global investors have shifted from concerns about bureaucracy to interest in specific cities and sectors, largely due to the Prime Minister's extensive diplomatic efforts.
Significant developments, such as India's growing defense exports and the establishment of Bharat Mart in Dubai, reflect the increasing economic ties between India and the UAE, with trade exceeding $100 billion this year.
The changing demographics of Indian property buyers in Dubai indicate a shift towards younger, affluent professionals, as the UAE becomes a favored second home for India's upper middle class, despite ongoing concerns about the rupee and infrastructure.

For a media platform that lives and breathes brand-building, let me offer a confession from Dubai. The most successful brand campaign I have watched in the last decade had no agency behind it, no media plan, no brief, no launch film. It was a fifteen-second clip of the Indian Prime Minister and the Italian PM smiling at a summit, which the internet named Melodi and carried to a few hundred million screens without a rupee of paid amplification. Somewhere in that clip is a lesson every CMO reading this already suspects: the world now circulates Brand India on its own, free of cost, and often better than we market it ourselves.

In my earlier avatar I was a financial journalist in Mumbai and Delhi, covering an India that was forever explaining itself. For the last seven years I have lived in Dubai, advising global investors on real estate, and much of my work is simply listening to what wealthy people across nationalities genuinely think of countries. On India, the talk has changed beyond recognition. Seven years ago the first question was about bureaucracy. Today it is about which city, which sector, which fund, and increasingly, how soon.

Some of this shift is diplomacy achieving what advertising cannot. Say what you will about the current state of politics in India, the Prime Minister's relentless foreign itinerary has worked as the longest-running brand activation in the country's history. A G20 hosted across sixty cities. Yoga Day in Times Square. Stadium diaspora events from Sydney to Abu Dhabi.

My Emirati and European contacts may not follow Indian policy closely, but they have absorbed the imagery, and imagery is where brands live. When the UAE leadership granted land for a Hindu temple in Abu Dhabi, it lifted India's standing in Gulf drawing rooms more than any tourism campaign I can recall.

Then the product started backing the promotion, and that is when this story turned serious. UPI now processes 50 per cent of global real-time payment transactions. Defence exports that stood under seven hundred crore rupees a decade ago have crossed thirty-eight thousand crore. India-UAE trade crossed a hundred billion dollars this year.

And in Jebel Ali, barely twenty minutes from my office, a 2.7 million square foot complex called Bharat Mart is coming up with fifteen hundred showrooms, built to plug Indian SMEs directly into shipping lanes serving a hundred and fifty destinations. For twenty years this region shopped China at Dragon Mart. I now drive past the Grade-A Indian answer to it on Sheikh Zayed Road.

I see the change most intimately in my own practice. The Indians buying property in Dubai today are different people from the ones I met when I arrived. They are younger, often founders or professionals with global income, and they speak of a Dubai home the way their parents once spoke of a Mumbai apartment, as the natural second base for the family. The Golden Visa has quietly made the UAE the favourite second address of India's upper middle class.

In my advisory conversations, nobody asks anymore whether Dubai is affordable. They ask about which community, about what the investment does for the family over twenty years and how they can build a portfolio of properties. When a nation's citizens are received around the world as prized customers rather than visa risks, that is brand equity of the hardest kind.

My old newsroom training insists on the caveats, so here they are. The rupee's long slide bothers every NRI I meet, me included. The infrastructure in cities needs to improve at a faster pace. Indian factories still need to win the world's confidence the way Indian software did, and that proof is a work in progress. And the test now is a simple one: the world already admires India. It should find it just as easy to invest in India. That last mile is where the next decade will be won.

This Independence Day, my report from Dubai is a short one. I spent years covering an India that sought the world's attention. I now spend my days with a world that seeks India's. That reversal took seventy-nine years, and it is the finest piece of brand-building I expect to witness in my lifetime.