Every year, Mother’s Day arrives with flowers, cards, and tributes to the women who raised us. This year, Voltas Beko, a joint venture between Tata’s Voltas and global appliances company Arçelik, decided to sit with a harder question before offering any answer: Maa kaun hoti hai?
That question, who is a mother? – is where the brand’s 2026 Mother’s Day digital campaign, #KarmSeMaa, began.
The campaign opened with a vox pop that put the question directly to ordinary people, no script, no prompts. The answers that come back are as varied as the people giving them. Some spoke of birth, some spoke of sacrifice, and some paused before they answered at all. It is in that pause that the campaign found its footing.
The brand released an ad film on Mother’s Day, and asked, what does it actually take to earn the title of mother?
The film did not answer in words; it instead followed a day in the life of a woman who woke before the rest of the world did. She fed people who had nowhere else to go and sat with those who needed someone to sit with them. She kept moving long after most people would have stopped. Her washing machine, her refrigerator, her microwave, her dishwasher, they ran alongside her. Not as symbols of ease, but as quiet participants in the work she did.
The film closed with three lines that revealed who she was and what she had built.
“Karam se – Petitioner to the Supreme Court for equal adoption rights, Karam se – Founder of Sakhi Char Chowghi Trust for Transwomen, and Karam se – Maa.”
The word karam means deed, action, work. The campaign’s argument was simple: that the title of mother is not inherited, not assigned at birth, not reserved for any one kind of person. It is earned through the daily, unglamorous, ongoing work of showing up for someone who needs you.
This is not a new conversation, but it is one that rarely gets said plainly. Motherhood, as most people live it and witness it, has never really been about biology alone. It is the neighbour who checks in every evening, the teacher who stays after school, the stranger who steps in when no one else does. A mother is the woman who goes to court for children she did not carry, who builds a home for those the world turned away.
A mother does not choose which child to love; she does not weigh one against another. Love is not rationed, and it does not run out.
#KarmSeMaa sat within a longer thread of campaigns from Voltas Beko that have looked at who runs a home and who carries the weight of care, from #TestedByRealMoms to #TheStrongerDads to #ItIsHer. Each one has tried to push the frame a little wider.
This campaign pushed the thought that gender did not make a mother, and biology did not define a mother. What made a mother was the doing, the returning, the feeding, the staying, the choosing, day after day, to give what you have to someone who needed it, simply unconditional love and care.
