City youth Bashshar Habibullah has launched an online campaign to bolster the image of the state.

The 25-year old, who has a management degree, has started a campaign - #IamBrandBihar - that aims to change the negative perception associated with Bihar.

Bashshar launched the campaign on his Facebook page - PatnaBeats - on May 27 and more than 17,000 people have already "liked" the page and around the same number of people have "shared" it.

The campaign tries to create a sense of pride in being a Bihari. It displays pictures of achievers in various professions from the state with the message - #IamBrandBihar. The campaign features people like IPS officer Vikas Vaibhav, Super 30 founder Anand Kumar, Miss India International Supriya Aiman among others. The page also shares positive news articles about Bihar. In a sense, it is similar to Humans of New York, the blog and social media campaign featuring short interviews collected on the Big Apple's streets by photographer Brandon Stanton that is now a best-selling book.

"We wanted to make people feel proud of their roots through this campaign," said Bashshar. "The word Bihari is still used in contempt outside the state. It is often used as a slang and people from other states look down upon us. I was motivated to start the campaign about a few months back when one of my acquaintances showed me a website where the word Bihari was shown as a slang. It said the word loosely translates to 'loser'. I was extremely unhappy decided to do something to break the notion."

He said the best thing to have happened with the launch of this campaign was that people started sharing their own pictures along with the message #IamBrandBihar on the Facebook page.

"This shows that people are relating to the campaign," he said. "More than 1,000 people have shared their own pictures along with the message #IamBrandBihar."

Bashshar said apart from including faces of achievers from different walks of life, he had also uploaded pictures of commoners such as a tea-seller and a porter.

"Biharis have respect for all professions," he said. "We also take pride in people like tea-sellers and porters . This is why we also included commoners in the campaign. A picture of a rickshaw-puller received around 1,300 likes."

Bashshar said he, along with his seven team members at PatnaBeats, have decided to launch more such campaigns to help spread the message.