WHEN ‘Baaji’ debuted in August as part of Coke Studio Bangla’s third season, it was introduced as a celebration of Bangladesh’s cultural richness. Written by poet Hashim Mahmud and composed by Emon Chowdhury, the song draws on Tangail’s ‘Dhua Gaan Dal’, Marma ‘Kapya’ poetry, the bamboo dance of the Bawm community and Manipuri choreography. On the surface, it presents itself as a tribute to the country’s diversity, weaving together landscapes and folk traditions into a love story.
Yet the reception has been divided. Rights activists argue that the song exoticises Indigenous cultures while erasing the realities of displacement, marginalisation and land loss. The music video features Indigenous women and rituals as vibrant motifs but avoids highlighting the political and material struggles these communities endure. In this framing, culture becomes backdrop, stripped of context, to serve a corporate-sponsored spectacle.
What stands out even more is the direct presence of Coca-Cola. The company’s iconic bottle is etched into the set design, and the phrase ‘real magic’ flashes throughout the video. Many viewers may see this as mere product placement, but a closer look through the lens of symbolism suggests that ‘magic’ is not just a slogan. It invites us to consider whether ‘Baaji’ functions as a form of corporate spellcasting, a narrative that merges love culture, and brand into a single emotional current.
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Sigil magic and branding
GROWING up, I had a Marma neighbour who practised esoteric rituals. Villagers and Bengali clients from surrounding areas sought him out for relief from illness, misfortune, or disputes. His methods — ritual symbols, meditative states and magic squares — were designed to bypass ordinary awareness and influence reality directly. Years later, I realised these practices bore a striking resemblance to Western traditions of sigil magic.
In the early 20th century, English artist and magician Austin Osman Spare popularised sigil magic. The process begins with a clear statement of desire, expressed as a positive affirmation. This statement is transformed into an abstract sigil by removing vowels and repeated letters, concealing it from the rational mind. To activate the sigil, practitioners enter a state of ‘Gnosis’, a mental emptiness achieved through meditation, exhaustion, orgasm, or intense emotion. In that state, they focus on the sigil and then consciously forget it, allowing the desire to manifest without interference from the conscious mind.
Today, cultural critics suggest that corporations have perfected this art. Logos function as viral sigils. Comic-book writer and chaos magician Grant Morrison argues that modern corporate logos — McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s swoosh, Virgin’s signature — act as super-breeders, spreading into imaginative spaces and subtly shaping culture. These symbols do not merely identify companies; they infiltrate collective consciousness, carried on clothing, devices and billboards, turning individuals into walking advertisements. Morrison suggests that a logo encapsulates a company’s aspirations and cultivated identity, persisting even long after its founders are gone.
By this account, corporate branding is not just design but a form of magic: it shapes perception, encodes desire and silently directs behaviour. What Spare envisioned as esoteric ritual has seamlessly infiltrated everyday marketing.
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Enter the hypersigil
GRANT Morrison extended the sigil concept with what he calls the hypersigil. In his words, it is ‘a sigil extended through the fourth dimension’ — a narrative artwork that incorporates plot, characterisation and drama, functioning as a living spell. Unlike a static symbol, the hypersigil is dynamic: a miniature model of the magician’s universe, akin to a hologram or ‘voodoo doll.’ It can be manipulated in art to create real-world effects. Morrison’s own comic series, The Invisibles, was conceived as a six-year-long hypersigil.
Morrison later recounted how events he wrote into the story bled into his own life with startling precision. After subjecting his protagonist, King Mob, a semi-autobiographical figure, to a brutal sequence of torture, Morrison himself suffered a medical crisis, landing in the hospital with burst lungs and blood poisoning. Shaken, he altered the character’s trajectory toward healing and positive outcomes, only to witness corresponding improvements in his own life. He also created a sigil to attract a partner resembling one of his fictional heroines, and shortly thereafter encountered women who mirrored the character almost exactly.
For Morrison, these experiences confirmed that creative works could function as powerful engines of intent. Words, he argued at the 2000 Disinformation Conference, are not merely passive signs but an ‘operating system’ capable of rewriting reality. From the cave paintings of early humans, depictions of animals drawn to ensure a successful hunt, to modern novels, poems, and songs, artistic expression has always carried magical force. Influenced by Spare and Aleister Crowley, Morrison sought to elevate this tradition beyond mere wish fulfillment, exploring how narrative art could shape deeper cultural and personal realities.
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Baaji as hypersigil
BY THIS definition, ‘Baaji’ fits the mould of a hypersigil. It is not only a song but a narrative spell, charging its symbols with intent and releasing them into the collective imagination. A Bengali protagonist traverses landscapes — hills, rivers, coasts — in search of his beloved. Folk songs, Marma poems, the Bawm bamboo dance and Manipuri choreography are stitched into the storyline, embedding symbols that resonate within national identity.
Subtly embedded in the same frame is the Coke bottle—the so-called ‘real magic.’ Within the hypersigil framework, this functions as the ultimate symbol of desire. The song’s music, visuals, and choreography converge to create an emotional state where the brand is inseparable from the story. The love story can be read as a metaphor for consumer longing: a perpetual search for fulfilment that remains unattainable, with Coca-Cola positioned as the beloved that is always out of reach yet omnipresent.
For urban audiences, Indigenous culture amplifies the emotional impact by conveying authenticity and a sense of rootedness. For Indigenous communities themselves, however, these traditions are not motifs but fragile practices bound to land and survival. In ‘Baaji’, they are used as decoration to intensify corporate storytelling. Hypnotic rhythms and landscapes converge to pull viewers into an evocative space, in which Coke’s branding lodges itself below the level of conscious awareness.
This is how the hypersigil works: it packages desire, narrative, and culture into a symbolic whole that bypasses rational scrutiny. It is at once a story, a ritual and a commercial engine.
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Celebration or exploitation?
THERE is no evidence that Coca-Cola executives studied occult theory to produce ‘Baaji’. But intent is secondary to effect. Branding operates like magic whether or not its makers believe in magic: it shapes symbols, bypasses rational thought, and embeds desire unconsciously. Viewed through this lens, ‘Baaji’ is less a celebration of cultural diversity than an instrument of corporate mythmaking. It takes folk traditions, Indigenous imagery, and the universal theme of love and folds them under the Coca-Cola banner.
This raises urgent questions. Whose culture is being represented, and who benefits from it? Indigenous communities have long struggled for recognition, land rights and political inclusion. Their traditions are not props but parts of ongoing struggles for survival. To use them as advertising symbols without acknowledging structural inequities risks erasing the communities themselves.
Audiences also face a subtler challenge. Corporations now shape not only what we consume but how we imagine, how we dream, how we narrate ourselves. If even a love song can function as advertising, what areas of culture remain free from branding?
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Real magic?
COCA-COLA’S global slogan ‘real magic’ resonates uncomfortably in this context. The ‘magic’ in ‘Baaji’ is not folk enchantment but corporate storytelling. Symbols of Indigenous resilience, woven into narrative and choreography, are reconstituted as assets within a marketing campaign.
Ultimately, Baaji is not just another Coke Studio track. It is a case study in how multinational corporations co-opt culture, embedding desire in song and spectacle. It exploits fragile traditions, aestheticises marginalised communities and binds emotion to a product. That is its real magic, not the poetry of the hills and rivers, but the spell of the brand.
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Milinda Marma is an an indigenous writer and activist.