You know something has gone fully mainstream when they're commercialising it. For the Jawaharlal Nehru University movement, a response to heavy handed police action and sedition charges on its students, the first indication came when their protest slogan demanding "azaadi" started showing up on WhatsApp forwards and seedy SMS advertisements everywhere.

It also featured as the chorus on a fun remixed song that sampled directly from the protest chants. This was followed by the ever-opportunistic Delhi Government attempting to turn the call for freedom into something slightly more prosaic.

Where the JNU chants had been demanding freedom from Brahminical constructs, the Delhi government brought it to more ordinary matters, like electricity bills and meter readings. Never mind the central government (and Arnab Goswami's) furious fulmination, azaadi had gone mainstream.

And now there is even proof of JNU Student Union President Kanhaiya Kumar's iconic status. Kumar was the first person arrested by Delhi Police in the case, an incident that galvanised thousands of students to come out and protest both on and off campus, ensuring his elevation to household-name level.

And now the agency handling travel website Yatra.com's ad campaigns has waded into the game, by using a Kanhaiya Kumar knock-off to sell its app-based offerings. The advertisement shows a man who, when denied a window seat at the airport, takes to a mic and a crowd to demand freedom. It ends by telling people not to resort to sloganeering, and use the app instead.

Using, and in fact scorning, topical issues like this in an attempt to make a viral advertisement is always a gamble for agencies and brands. Pepsi discovered the same with its "Pepsi Thi Pi Gaya" campaign last year, which poked fun at the Film & Television Institute of India protests, showing a student unable to keep the hunger strike going because he had to drink a Pepsi.

The ad ended up getting viewed a lot – which of course would have been the intention – but also turned many students off of the brand because it chose to make fun of what they saw as a serious movement.

Play