Living on the 'Adge' in Jhande Walan Thompson

By Sunil Gupta

Living on the 'Adge' in Jhande Walan Thompson is a Bill-Bryson-esque tale of Sunil Gupta's twenty-three-year-long expedition Through the Looking Glass in the madcap wonderland of Indian advertising. A delightful and quirky narrative with a wonderful cast of characters and companies (a virtual who's who of advertising and marketing), inimitable descriptions and hilarious episodes, it presents a valuable and irreverent history of the growth and development of an increasingly important and yet largely unknown sector of the industry. Sunil's gift of observation and portraiture and his original use of language and metaphor are truly remarkable. Dig in and discover how Sunil likes his coffee without any sweetener. You won't find any aspartame in his writing either. And you'll find a lot to laugh about, admire and ponder over along the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Apr 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9788174369475

Book preview

Opening Gambit

1978-88

The Wonder Years

35 Rani Jhansi Road, JhandeWalan, New Delhi

1978-85

PAWN TO CENTRAL HALL, KHAN MARKET

3July 1978 is a date tattooed into my soul. As I walked up the short flight of stairs in Central Hall, Khan Market, to the HTA office located above a dry-cleaners’ shop (now the Fabindia shop), I felt a sense of homecoming, because exactly a year earlier, I’d done the same as a callow summer trainee from FMS, Delhi.

In the 1970s, advertising wasn’t a career of choice.

Actually, it wasn’t a career, period. It wasn’t anywhere on the career list for anyone because no one knew anything about it. (It’s another matter that there’s sufficient evidence to show that you don’t really need to know anything about advertising to survive, indeed thrive, in that industry, but more of that later!)

Actually, there was very little on the career menu in those days. Doctor, engineer, bankers, IAS/IFS, fauji, or any government sinecure were the usual suspects, with the private sector just about beginning to open up.

In 1975-77, my last year at college doing History Hons at St Stephen’s, complete with the mandatory long hair and ubiquitous cigarette, with theatre a constant passion, the careers available for said degree holders were limited to the UPSC.

In any case, I wasn’t really thinking about life after college. Like Micawber, I thought something would eventually turn up, and there was always the IAS/IFS to fall back upon. Feeble attempts were made by the fauji members of the extended family to consider the Forces as an option, but they withered away fairly quickly.

Then however, around the Christmas holidays in 1975, sitting on the terrace of a friend’s house, drinking rum and talking about life (i.e., girls), Mario asks: ‘Hey Sugu, have you heard of this Management thing?’

‘Management? Do you mean like Hotels?’ ‘Not really my scene. Can’t imagine togging up in tails and serving the janta soup-type meals.’

‘No, no, it’s like an exam you do, and then, if you get through, you do a two-year course in some institute, and then you’re sure of getting a cushy job,’ says Mario. (Quite a masterly summing up of the IIMs, etc.)

‘Not another exam, yaar’, I groan.

‘Look, it’s an objective type thing, and if you get through, there’s a group discussion, and bingo!’

That sounded OK. So off we go and send in the application forms with the required postal orders, twenty bucks per shot if I recall correctly, and forget all about it till the replies arrive with the dates for the exams. IIM-A, IIM-C, FMS, and Chandigarh are my chosen ones. Then, when the smoke clears, I am the chosen one for IIM-C and FMS. One of the few from Humanities, and the only one from History Hons. (The only other chap from Delhi University (DU) who gets selected for IIM-C is Kamal Malhotra, a university topper in Economics.)

I don’t even appear for the UPSC, now that the gravy train beckons, and though IIM-C initially gets my custom, Calcutta (specifically Joka) in 1976 is the ultimate embodiment of hell in a drowned nutshell (the semester starting in the monsoons), and I swiftly return to the relative refinement of DU. FMS is only a scrambled egg away from the red-bricked safe haven of St Stephen’s, so I know that it’s an easy getaway after the horrors of Quantitative Methods and the labyrinths of real vs personal accounting.

Year one passes in a blur. Actually it is slow death, given that one’s having to deal with things like ‘i’th rows and ‘j’th columns (my experience in algebra being limited to x and y in class 8), and balance sheets that never do, at least when I attempt them. That causes me to flee to the sanity of Stephen’s at the clank of a Markov Chain.

The only subject that seems to be written and discussed in English is Marketing, and specifically Advertising. Yup, I say to myself, this is something I can begin (barely) to understand, notwithstanding the tripwires of models and diagrams that regularly undo the unwary.

It is finally 1977, and summer training looms large. Do I really want to go to a paint company; or one that makes computer parts? Short answer, No. Someone tells me that there’s a company called HTA (Hindustan Thompson Associates) that’s coming for interviews. Its business? Advertising. Woof! There’s hope yet. Then after (gently) persuading the others in the race for that spot to take their custom elsewhere, I am hired at the exorbitant sum of Rs 150 per month.

I am going to work in an office!

Somehow, I cannot believe that within a year of graduating from college, and the laid-back lifestyle of youth, I am joining the world of sordid commerce. However, advertising seems to be the least of all the evils (and one of the very few that would have me, I must add!), and when I am told there are people there who have done English Literature in college, I feel it will not be so bad after all.

Thus it came to be that in May 1977, I entered HTA for the first time.

Three months at HTA are a blast. No, a Blast. There are PLU (People Like Us) all over the place, who smoke and drink and speak English (some fairly peculiarly, but English all the same), and nary a sniff of a coefficient of correlation. A good time is had, despite having to do things like consumer research, the lot of all summer trainees since time began, (do you like orange drinks or colas?) in the searing heat of a Delhi summer, and trying to get hold of props for shooting, and writing reports that sound good but aren’t really read by anyone.

I even get paid (oh bliss!!) to use my scooter on work (five bucks from Khan Market to Indian Airlines and back, a minor fortune), and one of the first things I learn is how to make petty cash expense vouchers, something they do not teach you at business school, but which is a critical component of one’s practical education.

I enjoy my training stint so much that I tell Ram Sehgal and Nikhil Nehru, my first bosses, that the only place where I want to work when I graduate from FMS is HTA (prophetic words indeed!). Although this takes a couple of months longer than I hope, on 3 July 1978 I join HTA as employee No. 0341.

(Ram Sehgal loses no opportunity to tell all and sundry, usually at crowded gatherings and in a loud voice, that he decided to hire me because I’d been the only one able to help him work his slide carousel when he’d come once to FMS to make a speech. Actually, all I’d done was to carry the thing up and down the stairs, but what the hell?!)

THE CHEQUERBOARD

As management trainee I was paid the kingly sum of Rs 850 per month (reduced by taxes to even less). My dad was mortified: not even a ‘four figure salary’ that would make up for the lack of an adequate explanation of what I was doing and what ‘advertising’ was all about when friends and family asked where I was employed. I think some of them even asked him whether ‘woh hoardings lagaata hai, kya? (does he put up billboards?)’ to which he mumbled something or the other and hastily changed the topic.

Why is an ad agency different from any other professional group activity that I can think of? The simple answer to a complex question is because in an agency, it all hangs out, it’s all happening all the time, in your face, everywhere. It’s like a goldfish bowl where there’s no hiding.

It’s like India’s roads and pathways, where people live, eat, play, fight, commune, forge relationships, display personalities, exist, even procreate: all in full public view.

Nothing exemplifies this Mad Hatteredness than our titles. Like the cuckoo bird (the unkind would call that an apt description) which doesn’t make its own nest, our titles are also borrowed in gay abandon from other professions, and used blithely in completely different contexts.

So from the boardroom, the term ‘director’ is used for some of the juniormost staff (art director), and ‘president’ and its variants are used so frequently and ubiquitously that you could be forgiven for thinking that there would be a Vice-President, Despatch; ‘supervisor’, from the factory floor, was instead, at least in the early years, reserved for the very senior staff. ‘Account’, symbolizing the client, is obviously from dreadful commerce, to make up for our naiveté in all things financial. Then, when we run into trouble, we turn to the legal profession, just add the prefix ‘associate’ to titles and barrel on. Also, in HTA, there are no ‘account executives’; they are instead called ‘account representatives’, thus equating these roles with those of foot-weary sales representatives from marketing companies, and rightly so.

There is no other profession and place of work that is so egalitarian that even the newest kid on the block calls his senior colleagues by their first names from the very first day.

However, what most of all distinguishes an ad agency is that there is no ‘right way’ or ‘only answer’ or black-and-white solution or mechanical function. Everything is open-ended and requires discussion, cajoling, persuasion, acceptance, and joint human effort, and this above all else allows people of all persuasions and personalities to exist as individuals rather than as components in an amorphous mass.

Agencies have always exhibited strong tribal characteristics, and in the 1970s and 80s, this was much more pronounced, because advertising people were greeted with the same form of curiosity as a new species or a stone age tribe that had recently surfaced, and also because there were truly no tools of the trade, bar the most basic art implements.

Like those stone age tribes, agencies used blades and scissors, cutters and drawing pins, erasers and rubber solution, lighter fluid, chart paper, and typewriter ribbons to get the work done. Computers (ha!) were things on space missions, and so it was all hands on deck to keep the ship afloat in this, the most ‘hunting and gathering’ of societies.

It was because of this that even the youngest member of the tribe could, was expected to, and did contribute to the affairs of the agency. You were into the thick of things from Day One, and it was 24x7x365. That’s what makes it a profession not for the faint-hearted. I have always maintained that this, and the interactions on a first-name basis almost immediately were two of the most significant differences between advertising and any other profession.

The office too wasn’t an ‘office’ in any conventional sense, but rather a cast of characters put together by some crazy impresario on a set that allowed them to play out all their wildest fantasies in a mad tandava, and be paid for that to boot.

I must now introduce the dramatis personae, of assorted shapes, personalities, and proclivities, with whom I will soon spend vast quantities of my life, and who, in their own ways, have embellished this book and my life.

Enter, in order of appearance:

The stars of the cast were four account supervisors (yes!), who at that time represented the highest echelons of management, and reported, like the four apostles, directly to the Manager (just that title, no more) of the office. These repositories of power had only one equal, the Creative Director (CD, just that title, no more). Production and art studio reported to the CD. Media was headed by a Supervisor too (a pale and anaemic version of an Account Supervisor though), but it was the Account Supervisors who were the monarchs of all they surveyed: Nikhil Nehru, suave, England-returned, deep-voiced (his deep and resonant ‘Nehr-uu’ when he answered his phone was the stuff of many a mimicry contest, though very few could approach its timbre), Sheila Sircar (chain-smoking workaholic, not as much fun as the rest, and I was secretly scared of her, but a true-blue professional to whose group I was initially attached ), Romi Chopra (‘Romeh’ said in true Oxbridge style, aristocratic, refined, urbane, and oh-so-so-plummy), and Deepak Varma (an ex-fauji, dapper, dashing, and a law unto himself, with a desk larger than Ram Sehgal’s), all characters in their own right, and with the powers of minor plenipotentiaries, or so it seemed to us trainees, exemplified by the fact that it was they who signed our petty cash vouchers.

(A word or two more about titles is warranted here, and how they exemplified the Alice in Wonderland aspect of the ad industry: ‘make up one impossible title before breakfast every day’ is what the Queen of Hearts might have said were she in this business.) Though the head of the office was then simply ‘Manager’, and very senior people were ‘Supervisors’ of various persuasions, but ironically, as mentioned earlier, the title ‘Art Director’ was for fairly junior personnel. Many stories have done the rounds in which unsuspecting clients have steeled themselves to meet a ‘director’, expecting a formally suited old codger, only to be presented with a young buck with long hair and little English attired in jeans and T-shirt. No wonder many clients never took their agencies seriously. I mean, in which other industry would you have this sort of Alice in Wonderland-ish titular scale?

However, titles have evolved over the years into major indicators of hierarchy and prestige, much like an inebriated caste system. Contrast the titles above to the triple-barrelled ones of today, e.g. ‘Associate Vice-President & Creative Supervisor-Ford Trucks TV’, and you will see a metaphor of how unnecessarily convoluted the industry has become, and in what absurdly grandiose terms it sees itself.

One story doing the rounds about how and why titles became so unwieldy is perhaps apocryphal. The title ‘Account Supervisor’ had an unexpected fallout. When Amber (Ambar Brahmachary, ‘Amber’ to all), first met his prospective in-laws, they apparently blanched when they heard he was a supervisor, likening him to a sort of foreman on a factory floor. It was not long after this that the title ‘account director’ (AD) made its appearance on the occasion of Amber’s promotion, and opened in its wake a whole Pandora’s box of whirling descriptions and decorations with which the industry has struggled unsuccessfully to cope ever since. All solutions have been attempted, from no titles at all in McCann, to semi-eulogies. Indeed, the whole issue reminds one of P.G. Wodehouse’s tongue-in-cheek dissection of Ruritanian decorations such as ‘Order of the Bonnet with Crossed Oak Leaves and Rampant Porcupines-Third Class’, which was roughly equal to the position of the third footman.

It is therefore no coincidence that I’ve mentioned their names before that of the manager, the inimitable, irrepressible, and incredible (make of them what you may) Ram Sehgal, who has gone down in legend and song as Sam Rehgal for his propensity to introduce malapropisms and spoonerisms at the hrop of a dat(!), the most famous one I personally heard being ‘Let me check my pocket copulator’, but the apocryphal one I heard about much later was ‘Clit Billton’ ….

Ram, however, made humorous history wherever he went. One day at a meeting at Nestlé (Mad Magazine story # 1) with Darius Ardeshir, who was then the marketing manager at Nestlé, Ram kept on calling him ‘Dara’. Mr Ardeshir was completely calm and didn’t even blink or correct him, but Ajay Banga, who was then in brand management, and I almost burst with pent up laughter. ‘I tell you, Dara’ became our personal joke, though I am told that at a party Ram even called Findbar J. Ryan, the then MD of Nestlé, ‘Finny’ instead of Barry, as he was known in Delhi circles.

Ram was a queer amalgam: a Punjabi who spoke Hindi like a Bengali, Bengali like a Bengali, English like a Bengali, and Punjabi like nothing on earth, as he’d been brought up in a Bengali milieu with the Aurobindo Ashram as his guiding force and was, in his earlier avatar, a flight purser with Air India. If that doesn’t make him (and Air India) come alive for you, I guess nothing will. (It also tells you what sort of flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shores of Indian advertising in those days.)

Ram had taken over as manager of the Delhi office from Mahinder Khanna, and was loved by his clients. The song ‘Climb the Furthest Mountain’ was written, I’m convinced, purely for him, and we all played Tenzing to his Hillary. Indian companies in those days were usually owner-managed and used to master-servant relationships, and Ram fitted in like the good flight purser he was. Hari Nanda of Escorts, M.S. Oberoi of Oberoi Hotels, the Dalmias and the Shri Rams were all assiduously cultivated by Ram, and to his credit, he built HTA into the monolith it became through his ability to cement relationships at the highest level. Our other major clients were Indian Airlines and HMM Ltd (now known as GlaxoSmithKline, but then known to all and sundry as the Horlicks company).

Just one more irresistible anecdote about Ram, and then I’ll move on, I promise. We were at a meeting at Indian Airlines, and along with us was Amit Mitra, who was the account rep. The client was a certain Matin Khan, and all those who will recall him will know what I mean when I say that Matin was like the ogre in Jack and the Beanstalk. There was some emergency as usual, which is why we were there in full force, and Matin gave us the tongue-lashing of a lifetime. Now, whether he was justified or not (usually not as their decision-making procedures were more Byzantine than those of the Borgias), Ram suddenly turned on a hapless Amit and said: ‘You’re sacked’ and then to Matin: ‘Sorry about this, Matin, but I’ll ensure that you won’t have this problem again’. Amit’s face was a picture resembling that of an orphaned baby, and it was hard not to giggle. Even Matin, who probably ate crushed artworks for lunch, stopped in his tracks.

We left his office, and Ram immediately turned to Amit, patted him on the back and said: ‘Don’t worry, it was only for effect and Matin’s benefit. Relax.’ That was that.

Ram had many endearing traits, chief of them being a complete disdain for public niceties. Picking his nose was a work of art for him, reminiscent of the effort and single-mindedness displayed in the story ‘Uncle Podger hangs a picture’ in Three Men in a Boat. He wore sandals with suits and was not put out in any way to go to a party with his toenails painted wearing the said sandals. This gaucherie he tried (and still does) to balance by smoking cigars at sundry times and places (even just after breakfast, so help us God), and by concerted attempts to prove that he knew everyone who was anyone.

Ram also exemplified what I later realized was the defining characteristic of an insecure leader. This defining characteristic, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is that of building one’s own power bases, much like the emperors of old. Ram had two: the aforesaid Ambar Brahmachary (soon to become my boss, and also to become husband of Ram’s secretary, the lovely and pleasantly stolid Vijay Chandel, thus ensuring that both the personal and professional hooks were solidly lodged in the body politic); and the enigmatic and saturnine creative director, Quentin Coelho.

In truth, however, he was the right man for the time in Delhi that was beginning to break away from its past as a purely babu city of petty traders, in that he had the street smarts needed to deal with the ‘syshtem’ comprising PSUs, the government, and the home-grown industrialists defining Delhi society and business.

This never-say-die trait lived on with him even when he took over at Contract and Rediffusion. Hearsay has it that he once took a large team with him on an absolutely cold call on a client. The client, though, taken aback when Ram descended upon him en masse, thanked him courteously for visiting, but said that he was perfectly happy with his current agency. After a few moments of small talk, Ram took his leave. At the elevator, he told his team: ‘What a terrific meeting! I think we’ll crack them soon!’ Viva Ram!

In many ways he was a decent soul with a kind heart. His manipulations were never selfishly cruel or egotistic; his manoeuvres were simplistic and easy to fathom, and I don’t think he was ever Machiavellian because both his heart and his intellect precluded that. If you’d sold a campaign, you were his blue-eyed boy, and if you hadn’t, you were in the doghouse. Best of all, if you were clever enough to get into Amber’s good books, it was paper hat and whistle time insofar as your stock with Ram was concerned. It’s easy to deal with such transparency.

As I’ve mentioned, in 1978 HTA-Delhi was located in Khan Market, above a drycleaner’s shop. In its 1500 sq. ft were crammed about 100 highly combustible and vocal people. (This tendency to be located above some other commercial enterprise was a hallmark of this office, because early in 1979 we moved to JhandeWalan, an area as far removed from civilized society as Buckingham Palace is from Chawri Bazaar, and perched ourselves grandly above a whole nest of shops selling ball bearings.)

From 1979-99, 35 Rani Jhansi Road, JhandeWalan, New Delhi 110055 became HTA’s address. Indeed, it now seems no coincidence that HTA moved from Khan Market, within the upper class environs of Jor Bagh and the India International Centre, to the hard-core small garage business (‘bijhnish’) area of the Loha Mandi in JhandeWalan, within the petty shopkeeper environs of Karol Bagh and on the outskirts of Sadar Bazaar.

It was thus completely appropriate that we were now situated on the first floor of the ball bearing market because under Ram’s stewardship and in the embryonic Punjabi ‘jugaad’ mentality that exemplified mid-1970s and early- ‘80s North India, a day in the office was suggestive of being a ball in a pinball machine: one never knew what the morrow would bring, or indeed how it would be tackled … but tackled it was!

INTERREGNUM

Just after my personal Long March in HTA had begun, came an unusual interregnum, exemplifing just how fluid staffing and resource policies were, and how the system was like a goldfish bowl: no place to hide, but also replete with opportunities to be noticed and be put on the fast (or at least some) track.

One of the eagerly awaited features of the agency calendar was the annual cricket match with our premier client HMM, but as noted earlier more popularly known as the ‘Horlicks’ company (so much so that the telephone receptionist would greet callers with ‘Horlicks’ as the salutation).

Anyhow, though HTA lost the match, HMM sporting Darshan Lal, an ex-Ranji player in its ranks, a good time was had by all, but the point of this short aside is that there was also an unexpected twist in the tale for me: I wrote a ‘piece’ (as Bertie Wooster called it), on the match for our in-house magazine named, in a fit of extreme creativity, HTA Today, entitling it, if I recall correctly, ‘Boots for HTA’, thereby demonstrating our compulsive tendency to resort to puns as examples of wit and creativity.

The next thing I knew was that Ram called me into his room and said: ‘Sunil, I have an exciting offer for you. Mr Ghosal (Ram never ever referred to him by his first name) read your article in HTA Today and has written to me asking whether you’d like to do a stint in the Creative department as a copywriter.’

I was gobsmacked. Just four months into the agency, and the CEO himself was aware of me! I therefore duly grew my hair, de rigueur for the creative types, especially from DU, and took up quarters (a small desk) in the Creative department.

I shall pass quickly over the next few months. Suffice it to say that long hair, specs, and a dangling cigarette did nothing for my creative flowering. I soon discovered that, (a) writing an article and writing copy were two different things altogether, because; (b) the latter had elements like clients and account reps as editors and approvers; (c) writing brochures and the like was akin to a lifetime in a typographical hell and, (d) proofreading was the ultimate soul destroyer. Even though I did get out some snappy ads for Engineers India Ltd(!), when Amber popped up at my desk one day and said, ‘what are you doing wasting your time in Copy when you should be in Servicing’, I was up and out in a flash, my next port of call being an assistant account representative in his group, working on Boost (HMM’s new counter to Bournvita), Asbestos Cement, Haryana Tourism, and Dalima Biscuits.

HOISTING THE FLAG AT JHANDEWALAN (JW)

Accustomed to the comforts and gentility of Khan Market, the move to JhandeWalan was like a journey into a netherworld that comprised, in equal parts:

•  a fairly filthy pilgrimage spot (the Idgah and the JhandeWalan temple cheek-by-jowl in a rare display of littered oneness);

•  an oxyacetylene torchlit devil’s workshop, the area being full of welders’ garages;

•  a scrap metal market (for after all, the area was known as ‘Loha Mandi’);

•  and a jumble sale (Karol Bagh, the ultimate middle-class cornucopia; Paharganj, a maze of timber and building material shops; Panchkuian Road, goldmine the ultimate for cheap furniture; and Sadar Bazaar, Delhi’s wholesale market, holding the ball-bearing market in a vice-like grip of petty shopkeeping).

JhandeWalan was at the cusp of old and New Delhi, Connaught Place (CP) also being a ball-bearing’s throwaway, and was thus very much a metaphor for the twilight world of advertising and marketing; a world that was gradually emerging from the darkness of a quota-based, sales-driven, over-regulated economy. In those early days, however, all this was cold comfort, apart from the fact that the office was much larger than the Khan Market dormitory.

Romi’s directions to a client who was brave enough to visit us have gone down in legend and song:

Come down Panchkuian Road from CP; pass the cheapo furniture shops and you’ll come to a roundabout; take the right turn out from it and you’ll come to another roundabout; carry on straight, and you’ll pass the Loha Mandi and welding shops on your right; next, the JhandeWalan temple on your left; if you want to save your soul, stand in the queue, if not, take a right from the traffic light and you’ll see a big building on your right; that’s the ball-bearing market; if your balls need a bearing, you’ve come to the right place; however, if you still want to meet me, come to the first floor.

Perhaps nothing exemplified the change for us as the lack of eateries in the vicinity. After the variety and hygiene of Khan Market, the dirty dhabas and pushcarts of JW were decidedly infra dig. The solitary place offering anything remotely edible was a small restaurant in the building itself, called Gopa, which in a compelling display of national unity was owned by a Sikh and run by South Indians, and thus provided an eclectic menu comprising oily chhole-bhatures, samosas, and dosas. We used to wonder whether Romi ever ate in JW, or did he, like a camel, stock up before he trekked out to work.

I soon discovered that a subtle caste system operated in the office which manifested itself first in the seating plan, which by design formed itself into two wings. The one on the right, closest to Ram’s office, had the Brahmins, or HMM-based groups, and the other wing at a distance from Ram’s lair (which you might call on the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks!) had what might be called the ‘country cousin’ groups.

This distinction is material: working on HMM was almost mandatory for one to rise in the hierarchy; Nikhil (now grandly designated management supervisor, a sort of ersatz deputy manager, his cabin bedecked with an indigo carpet signalling the elevation), and Amber, both HMM veterans, were the presiding deities. Denis Joseph, a Stephanian and one of the nicest persons I ever had the fortune to work with was also there, along with Karan Ahluwalia (more on them and myself later).

The other wing had Romi Chopra and Deepak Varma in charge.

I believe this arrangement suited them perfectly as neither had any love lost for Ram and vice-versa. This also gave Deepak’s group ample opportunity to remain away from the office and JW most of the time, in areas far afield, with no one to look askance at them. The Escorts group was indeed another self-sustaining biosystem in itself, with a dedicated Creative (the redoubtable Sam Mathews) and production team that worked with cabalistic secrecy and almost perfect independence. We newcomers laid small wagers as to which member of Deepak’s extended group (Creative, Production, and Account Management) would be spotted in the office on any given day. To spot Deepak was like spotting a tiger in the wild.

The art studio, that selfsame place where the stone age implements alluded to were wielded, was also in this wing.

However, as a token of Ram’s impartiality, this wing also had the aforementioned Quentin Coelho, the creative director and, in a sense, the grand panjandrum of the entire office. (All I really remember of Quentin is that he once made a film for Double Seven Orange in which the crowning moment was the screen being suffused with an orange mist to highlight its intense orange flavour; this was greeted with screams of delight and even released when suddenly realization dawned that all TV sets in India were b&w, and so the suffusion of orange resembled a puff of smoke from a particularly asthmatic train engine.)

The rest of the Creative department was strung around the studio, and Quentin’s cabin like an overpopulated cricket field, and though there was a sort of primitive intercom system, the fact that one had to go through the operator to reach anyone inside or outside meant that the usual way of speaking to anyone was to stand up and holler.

Uniquely, Quentin never worked on our largest client, HMM. It was an interesting manifestation of group alignments and political manoeuvring, because for Quentin to have worked personally on HMM would have in a sense meant ‘reporting’ to Amber, and of course this was out of the question. HMM was under the benign convent-schooled wings of Vandana Narain, who in a sense therefore personified the famous ‘Horlicks Mother’. This specific aspect of politics in the organization was displayed time and time again in other offices, and most of all in Head Office (HO), where Ivan Arthur played Darby to Mahinder Khanna’s Joan (or, as the unkind would say, Judy to his Punch), and brought this alive in magnificent ways. More on this later, but it is important to understand how much personalities and politics formed the daily backdrop and influenced the way in which the agency functioned.

The second manifestation was in the clients handled by the two wings. The right wing had, besides all the HMM brands, Dalima Biscuits, Haryana Tourism, Modern Bakeries (they of the infamous Double Seven cola), Indian Airlines, Oberoi Hotels, and a smattering of others. The left wing had Escorts and its various divisions, Amrit Banaspati (ABC), Ranbaxy, and DCM Data Products. The perceptive reader will immediately notice that the right had most of the exciting FMCG clients, and the left had clients engaged in manufacturing construction equipment, motorcycles (not the exciting category it is today because the 1970s and ‘80s were still licence-raj years), and downmarket categories like vanaspati and mustard oil, and were located in the mofussil areas, Escorts in Faridabad in Haryana, and ABC in Ghaziabad (UP) and Rajpura (Punjab).

However, the focal point on this floor was the table-tennis table and, to a certain degree, the library. Unlike Khan Market, where eateries and drinkeries provided plentiful channels of amusement, JW was, as PGW would have said, a maiden aunt. Consequently, we had to find ways and means to entertain ourselves, so come 12.55 p.m., and there was a concerted oozing of people towards the TT table that ended in a mad rush to grab the rackets around 12.59. The less fortunate ended up at the carom boards, which were seen to be more infra dig and consequently the haunt of the studio/media/production types. Some intrepid souls played chess, and of course, there was the ‘rummy or paploo room’, usually Nikhil’s or Denis’s, where minor and some major fortunes were made and lost (self of course being in the latter category). The same movement, though less concentrated, was noticeable at 5.25 p.m., and games then lasted well into the evening. After a while, a bridge group was also formed, and so the image of an ad agency being a place where occasional work was conducted between playing hours was dutifully sustained.

ENVIRONMENT, WORK ETHIC, AND OTHER UNUSUAL ANIMALS

It’s been quite fashionable to think of us ‘advertising types’ as good-time guys, with a hard-drinking, glitzy lifestyle, spiced up with infinite dalliances with models and suchlike, interspersed with long lunches charged to the company account, and flexible working (if you could call it that) hours. One long holiday, you might think. This is the net result of what people see in the adverts, and who then think: ‘how difficult could it be for those guys to make these ads? Just string a few words together, shoot a few pictures in a swell location, and laugh all the way to the bar!’

And that’s the truth! but regretfully it happens only about 5 per cent of the time in an average advertising exec’s life. The rest is, like the iceberg, all hidden away beneath the surface. The actual facts are somewhat different, and dare I say it, much more of a roller coaster (a rather grotty one in HTA) ride, where you have your heart in your mouth most of the time, endure sudden twists and turns, plunge down steep descents, but also feel the thrill of sweeping to the top and experience the headiness of speed.

This was what a day in the life of a young executive was like:

9.30-10 a.m.: trickle in to work, or at least try to, depending on what time one wound up the night before;

10 a.m.: the first ‘breakfast snack’ and a cup of coffee;

10.05 a.m.: electricity fails; hair-tearing commences: how will the artwork get ready, not so much because of gadget requirement, but the artist cannot really work without a fan and a light; mad rush to the studio;

10.10 a.m.: artist designs to commence work fortified by a promise of tea and samosa;

10.15 a.m.: collection meeting; more hair-tearing as collections are only 25 per cent; Manager fumes and mutters dire threats about losing accreditation with the media (the other guys who rule our lives along with the clients and the Creative dept). As we have to pay the media 85 per cent of the media cost irrespective of whether the client has shelled out, life is always on the edge in the agency. Losing accreditation is almost as bad as losing a client. (Seems as if we were the collection agents for the media as well as advertising agents for our clients.) Various wild promises are made, more to keep up the morale than with any real conviction. Contingency plans are made, the usual being to ask HMM (our saviours on more than one occasion) if they’ll pay ahead of time. Various bodies are told to get their butts to the client’s office pronto and suck up to the finance guys. Various incentives are promised, such as whisky bottles for the group if the cheques come in.

I remember riding all the way on my two-wheeler, no taxi being available, to a client called Universal Electrics in Faridabad, in the peak of summer, to collect a long overdue payment of Rs 45,500. On arrival, though I had been told the cheque was ready, I was made to wait for over two hours, and even then I found it had been made out for Rs 45,400. Holding out for the extra Rs 100 would have meant another few hours as the signatory wasn’t available, so I did the sensible thing. That however was how tough it sometimes was to collect our dues.

(This issue of delayed payment also had its own pecking order and cascading effect. As media settlements came first, always and every time, much like the army officer’s motto in reverse, we had perforce to delay payments to our downstream business associates such as printers and photographers. Often management salaries were delayed too, because after the media, the unionized staff had to be paid on time. As studio artists, Media dept clerks, mailroom staff, and secretaries belonged to this bunch, not doing so would result in work coming to a standstill. Delayed payments to printers, etc. meant chances of them stalling work, though to their credit, they were extremely cooperative and didn’t normally cut up rough. Still, it was another pressure point, and juggling finances was an everyday occurrence.)

11.02 a.m.: a fag and a coffee while trying to sweet talk the copywriter into yet another alternative approach;

11.34 a.m.: stentorian call of bossman: why is service report not ready? Service report: another millstone around the overloaded neck; simply minutes of meeting with client which should go out in 48 hrs (don’t forget there were no computers or email: all had to be typed up and posted or hand-delivered, as was the case with all correspondence, estimates, and bills);

11.36 a.m.: feverish activity with stenotypist;

11.55 a.m.: call from client a asking where the **** was the layout;

11.56 a.m.: emphatic assurances given that it was being finished in studio; layout actually still in Creative dept (ref 11.02 a.m.); say it’ll knock his socks off when he sees it and that I’ll be there by 4 p.m.;

12 noon: back to Creative; no luck;

12.10 p.m.: a fag;

12.15 p.m.: check on artwork/s in studio; electricity returns; try to start getting old papers filed.

12.22 p.m.: stentorian call from bossman: why is media estimate not signed (No media releases possible without estimate approval). Anguished attempt to phone client X, but lines down, or no response;

12.34 p.m.: contemplate suicide; then contemplate mass murder of various parties;

12.56 p.m.: edge towards TT table;

12.59:50 p.m.: mad rush to grab racquets and ball;

2.01p.m.: cold looks from bossman for overstaying lunch hour at TT table;

2.02-2.05 p.m.: gobble down cold lunch while trying to get production on the line to check on proofs of promo poster; production not there as they haven’t surfaced after lunch.

2.06 p.m.: rush upstairs to try and physically abduct production guy from loo/carom board/card table;

2.11 p.m.: Production guy surfaces with a ‘why are you bothering me’ expression;

2.12 p.m.: swallow various words that come to mind and gritting teeth sweetly ask where proof is (proof actually supposed to come last evening);

2.13 p.m.: shifty look from prod. guy; ‘proof only tomorrow’ he mumbles; ask why: ‘colours not dry’; then with flash of righteous indignation ‘how I can help it if it rains and colours don’t dry?’; don’t have heart to tell him it hadn’t rained since last week;

2.15 p.m.: call from client Y asking about said proof; pretend line is bad and I can’t hear (very possible in those days) by saying ‘hello hello hello’ at top of voice and then cursing telephone lines at top of voice, knowing he can hear me but hopefully thinks I can’t hear him; bang down receiver;

2.17 p.m.: tell Pam (the telephone operator and an institution in herself) that should he call again, say I’ve gone out;

2.18 p.m.: spend pleasant minute thinking of ways of strangling prod. guy;

2.19 p.m.: remember that media estimates for promo haven’t come; rush upstairs again to Media dept; am told typist has not come today; sweet talk prod. typist into typing estimates;

2.45 p.m.: rush with estimates to mailroom to send them to client Z; am told all dispatch couriers are away and mail will go only tomorrow; rush to bossman’s secy; sweet talk him into taking auto and ferrying estimates to client; say I will handle it with bossman;

2.51 p.m.: bossman emerges from cabin looking for secy to type ‘important’ letter; tell him that I have sent secy on ‘most urgent errand, matter of media estimates, etc.’; bossman gives me dirty look but withdraws (good man, understands emergency: emergency because if estimates not approved, media bookings will not be made, and promo is time-barred so if we miss dates we will be smeared by client who will be smeared by his regional sales manager; issue may reach manager, dudgeon all around, but most importantly billings will be foregone, which means his ass will be in sling);

2.55 p.m.: coffee and fag with deep contemplation of life;

2.59 p.m.: someone cracks joke; life seems better;

3.01 p.m.: introduced to new female trainee: life is definitely looking up; however, told that she will be training in Media; hmmm;

3.06 p.m.: back to studio only to find artwork looking forlorn and uncared for as artist absconding; relief to see him wandering back from pleasant sojourn in loo;

3.08 p.m.: minor heart attack as I find wrong picture being ‘finished’; argument with studio manager and art director; remind them client approved pose with kid looking up: this one is with kid looking straight; both look disdainfully at me as if to say ‘what your client know??’; art director says he took decision to change pose because he felt that ‘artistically’ it was better; I tell him where to put ‘artistically’ but no dice; stalemate; artist looks on with supreme nonchalance; try another tack: plead, and say client will screw me; no dice; pull out last weapon: say client may call Amber/bossman; silence; grudging acceptance with art director insinuating that it’s not his fault if the philistines can’t appreciate the ‘artistic’ view; new picture ordered; studio manager asks what will happen to time and cost spent on finishing previous pic.; say we’ll ‘adjust’ it (lovely word ‘adjust’: lifeline in agency job);

3.33 p.m.: coffee and fag;

3.38 p.m.: back to Creative re copy and layout; find three words have been changed; major insistence by copywriter that this has wholly elevated concept; give up; take copy and layout and go to get it ‘mounted’ on stiff-board in studio; mounting artist AWOL; sweet talk friendly artist who is lazily contemplating navel into doing needful;

3.50 p.m.: grab bag and rush downstairs to find my scooter wedged between two handcarts loaded with ball-bearings, and no one around to shift them;

3.55 p.m.: making rounds of ball-bearings shops to inquire to whom the handcarts belong;

4.02 p.m.: finally locate burly sardar whose shipment it is; slowly levers himself out of chair as if doing me an enormous favour and hollers for flunkeys;

4.10 p.m.: handcarts finally moved, self speeds off;

4.30 p.m.: arrive at client; am late so am kept waiting (actually even if we weren’t late, we were often kept waiting;

4.45 p.m.: meeting starts; animated discussion; layout finally approved (bliss); pat on back from client, and then back at the office from bossman too (double bliss); copywriter gives ‘I told you so’ look, which quickly changes into dudgeon when I tell him the client has asked for the original three words to be restored;

5.29 p.m.: edge towards TT table;

5.45 p.m.: action artwork and shoot breeze with fellow travellers;

6.30 p.m.: pulled into game of rummy by bossman;

8.35 p.m.: drag oneself home.

So it goes on. All right, there’s been a wee bit of pumping up, but you get the drift; and note that sitting down at one’s desk accounted for only about 22 minutes during the day.

At least that’s how it was in HTA, and as I spent half my life in that one organization, I can claim to know all about went on there, but not very much about life in other agencies. However, even though it always seemed that guys from other agencies were more relaxed and in control, I’d bet that most of what I’m going to say and have said will resonate equally with them. I must, however, add that working in an agency equipped us with the wherewithal and toughened us up sufficiently to enable us to survive in most other places, and that one must grant the system.

OK, roller coaster ride accounted for, and let me add immediately that this life was, as one wag put it, ‘the most exciting time you could have with your clothes on’! Once you got into the whirligig of this business, it was like an addiction; it got into your blood, and nothing and no other life could remotely approximate this experience. On occasion, I must admit, deep conversations were had by self and bosses saying things like ’this can’t go on this way, and enough is enough’, which resulted in a beer and life back to normal the following morning. In hindsight, perhaps the best HR therapy!

There were times when I received offers from other agencies and marketing organizations, and I even met them, but it was more to reassure myself that the frenetic factor in HTA was what I really craved. HTA was an addiction. The cliché that ‘it’s like a family’ was absolutely true, except (or perhaps because) this family consisted of the entire spectrum of the human species known to man, and some beyond. As in a family, one forgives, rather enjoys, foibles, revels in success, seeks challenges, and lives all the time with ‘persons’, not ‘people’. It’s another cliché that this industry relies only and solely on people and their capabilities. You can make soap in a machine by putting in the right ingredients in the right proportion, and that soap will be identical every time, but if you gave the same brief even to the same people, there’d be no guarantee you’d get the same output on any two days, or indeed any output at all!

There could therefore be no other place that remotely approximated the variety it provided, and in reality, there was never a dull moment. One never knew which crisis would strike the next moment, which made the overcoming of it even sweeter. Seeing client organizations up close made this frenetic factor even more starkly defined, and it was no surprise then that one often found oneself spending one’s free time solely with office colleagues.

But why grotty? Well, here’s some chapter and verse, and you make up your own mind. In this day and age of glass-clad buildings, with central air-conditioning and full generator backup, and with coffee bars and food courts a latte’s splash away, it would perhaps be difficult for people to believe the conditions in which we worked in HTA, not just in the 1970s and ’80s, but till the turn of the millennium and beyond. However, more than the lacunae in the physical environment, which in a few (very few!) ways could be ascribed to the relative lack of availability of modern working facilities till about a decade ago, it was the complete disregard for people and their comforts by the powers-that-be that defined HTA offices. Initially, of course, we didn’t think about such things, and certainly not us callow assistant account representatives; in some ways, I suppose it was a sort of self-imposed asceticism brought about by our good old Hindu karma and not knowing any better, believing aircons to be only for the abodes of the gods, and clean, gender-sensitive toilets to be only for guests of 5-star hotels.

I suppose top management thought that having the Delhi office atop a ball-bearing market, the Calcutta office in a dilapidated liquor warehouse, and the flagship Bombay office in the seedy heart of the Fort area in a building noted for its rabbit warren of offices, with paan-stained stairwells and ancient lifts that dated back to 1932, made it incumbent upon them to make the micro-environment match the macro with a sort of self-fulfilling masterly inactivity.

If the locations weren’t sufficiently expressive, there was the added rigour of hurdles such as electricity and water shortages resulting in the piquant odour of sweaty bodies and clogged toilets forming a sort of benedictive miasma in which we were supposed to ideate and create. In JW, for example, for about 100 people when we began, we had the aggregate sum of two toilets for ladies, and the same number for the men, housed in the same space with a common entry. Yes.

Also, as the ladies toilets were next to the entrance, a fair bit of I Spy was conducted. I hasten to add that the gents’ facilities were also easy to view from where the ladies exited, so no one can say we were gender-biased in any way. Perhaps we were the first company to introduce gender equality in India!

These remained the sum number of toilets even when our staff strength reached 200 people, and with the normal shortage of water, using buckets for flushing and other necessities was commonplace. A charitable explanation for all this could, I suppose, be that it was an attempt to bring us closer to the consumers’ daily lives. I know of people who, when the urge came, hared off to Connaught Place restaurants/hotels for relief (and in all probability put in a voucher claiming taxi fare for a meeting).

Electricity was, as may have been imagined, our greatest waterloo. As Delhi reaches 45°C in the summer, coolth was our El Dorado. Initially, Ram had what he thought was a brilliant idea in having huge ducts with vents pass across the office, with these connected to huge ‘desert coolers’. These contraptions are peculiar to the hot and dry north of India, and are shells made of aluminium housing large exhaust fans, and the sides of the shells lined with wood wool. Water is continually pumped on to the wood wool , and this cools the air that the fans throw out. These contraptions are, in fact, more effective than air conditioners during the hottest months because of the cool humidity they provide and the fact that they can cool larger and more open areas than can air conditioners. Ram’s windmills were therefore designed, or so he thought, to cool the large central hall of the office, as well as the cabins.

I am sure the more perceptive readers will by now have guessed the outcome. When they worked, which was about 25 per cent of the time in May and June, they were very, very effective, but when they didn’t, they were horrid. They ran into the twin brick walls of electricity and water shortages, which, coupled with the fact that the monsoons rendered them completely ineffective, meant that we were soon acquainted with the principle of a sauna, well ahead of the time they became fashionable.

Ram then tried to distract our minds from these physical contretemps by installing perhaps the first piped music system outside of a hotel, which played (or tried to) incredibly putrid muzak. (Perhaps his thoughts were coloured by his reading somewhere that cows yielded more milk when they listened to music.) Sadly for him and for us, this plan too was soon dashed for two reasons: that everyone wanted to influence which music was played, but more obviously (as may have been guessed) because he forgot that the music system too ran on electricity.

In later years, cabins received air conditioners, but as the electricity supply wasn’t up to coping with individual ones for each, one aircon was shared by two cabins. Waiting for our neighbour to go out so that we could turn their vent towards our cabin became a regular pastime. Indeed, in Calcutta we had to impose an internal loadshedding schedule in the office so that only 50 per cent of the aircons ran at any one time, or otherwise everything would have collapsed. Of course, this happy state of affairs was when there actually was electricity, otherwise we had to depend on an ancient generator that regularly died on us. Calcutta (1988–92) thus reminded me of Delhi and ensured I wasn’t homesick, but in terms of electricity Delhi was, in comparison to Calcutta, like London. In Bombay, with the lifts regularly out of order, the trudge up the six floors of smelly darkness to the office was presumably intended to make us fitter.

During the monsoons the roads outside the offices in all the three cities I worked in became raging torrents, preventing anyone, barring the most intrepid (read those with a freelance assignment), from leaving, which hindsight shows was a masterly ploy to get people to work longer hours in the office. Chunks of ceiling falling down on unsuspecting toilers was not unknown, and indeed in Calcutta this, interspersed with leaking roofs, became a leitmotif calculated, you could assume, to gauge the alertness of the staff.

If you’re beginning to think that the agency offices were suspiciously like Marine boot camps, who can blame you! I’m certain however that you’ll wonder why such conditions were de rigeur, and more importantly, why we meekly accepted them?

An explanation that appeals is that top management grew up in times of shortages, many of them in pre-Independent India, and this gave rise to a mindset of austerity and of thrift (for others, natch!). This was also because Bombay, where they lived, didn’t suffer from power cuts and suchlike country-cousin maladies, so they didn’t really know what it meant to work in sweatshop conditions. (Seems to me that we pioneered the concept of sweatshops, well before they came to public focus in the 1990s!)

This was coupled with a deep reverence, bordering on an almost fawning obsequiousness, for the white-skins who were technically our masters, and to whom we were a sort of amusing diversion on their global jaunts.

It was no surprise therefore that we were hardly visited by our clients, which I again suppose was part of the plan. In fact, many of us preferred to go out for meetings because we’d at least get to sit in an air-conditioned client office.

Don’t get me wrong: the agency was also great fun. Adversity makes for unusual companions, and creates bonding that’s stronger because of that very adversity. Humour was never in short supply, and we needed all we could get. There was always mischief afoot, whether it was due to the eccentricities of the various specimens that inhabited JW, or pulling people’s legs and playing practical jokes. That we were quite eclectic in choosing the targets for these showed the true egalitarianism of the office.

I hold as one of my finest moments the practical joke that we played on Amber in 1982. Was it due to the intrepidity of youth or too many beers the night before? Remember, I was only three years into the job, and the very fact that we chose to beard the lion himself could be put down either to the bravado of youth or the very real need to get him down a peg. In HTA, he was the equivalent of Caesar’s wife, and lost no opportunity in reminding us all of this.

Cleverly, we chose All Fools’ Day as insurance against things going awry and Amber venting the wrath of the Brahmacharys upon us. What could be done that would take a bit of wind out of his sails? We finally hit upon a simple scam, and ironically, the lack of telecom technology actually helped.

The plot was based on what Hercule Poirot called the ‘psychology of the individual’. Two factors were taken into account, the first that Amber would never consider a job in any other Indian agency, and the second that, like all of us, even he would be susceptible to the lure of a foreign posting.

I took the group into confidence, along with Pam, the telephone operator. She was pivotal to the cause, because all phone lines looped into her PBX board, and even intra-office calls had to be made through her. Also, as all call switching was mechanical, using the levers on the board, they used to make satisfying clicking sounds and provide an electrifying amount of static. (Static was infinitely preferable to silence on a phone line, because it indicated that the line was live; silence meant death).

It proceeds as follows:

One of the guys tells Amber, who isn’t in his cabin, that there’s a call awaiting him.

Amber goes back to his room and is told by Pam that there’s a foreign gentleman by the name of John Barclay who’s called for him, and has asked that he be called back at Hotel Oberoi Intercontinental.

Amber asks her to connect him.

Pam pretends to call the Oberoi, but instead, with a lot of clicks and other relevant sounds, puts the line through to Ambika (Srivastava, now MD of Zenith Optimedia, but then, like myself, just starting out on her career), who is to act as the hotel operator. This is important as Amber is on the line and can hear every word.

Ambika puts on best hotel operator voice (bright, enthusiastic but very Indian).

Pam tells her that Mr Brahmachary is calling and asks her to put the call through to Mr John Barclay (a Freudian allusion, I think, to Berkeley Square where JWT London was based) in Room 224.

‘Connecting you, ma’am,’ says Ambika, and with a flurry of clicks, Pam puts the line through to me, holed up in my cubicle with the members of the group, awaiting the next step with bated breath.

‘Sir,’ says Ambika, ‘a call for you from a Mr Brahmachary’.

I put on my best Brit accent (not difficult, as those who know me will say): ‘Mr Brahmachary, this is John Barclay. Thank you for calling back. Do you have the leisure to talk now? The matter I’m about to take up is very confidential and may take some time.’

Amber: ‘Certainly, certainly,’ he coos (the first time I’ve heard him speak in this way. Oh, the effect a Brit accent can have on even the most self-assured of us!)

Amber shuts door, which is a sure sign that he is hooked.

‘Tell me, sir’ (Sir!!!), he says, ‘what can I do for you?’

‘Mr Brahmachary, I represent one of England’s leading agencies, and I am here to scout for talent for our London office to look after our Asian interests. I have heard so much about you and your talents, and I am very keen to meet you and explore this opportunity, if you are interested.’ (Group around me in silent splits.)

Silence from Amber. Just as I think I’ve lost him, he says in a voice so soft and warm that if I hadn’t known it was definitely him on the line, I’d never have believed he could speak in that way: ‘Yes, sir (Sir!!!), I’m definitely interested. When can I meet you?’

Gotcha!

‘Could you come immediately to Room 224 at the Oberoi Intercontinental?’ I ask. ‘I have to leave tomorrow, so I’d like to meet as soon as possible.’

‘I have a meeting, but I’ll cancel it and be there in an hour,’ says Amber. (Cancel a meeting! Oho! Is this the Amber of over and above the call of