Life In A Rectangle: The World Around 55B, Mirza Ghalib Street

By Sujit Sanyal

Author Sujit Sanyal rambles down the memory lane in his candid memoir and narrates some revealing, some intriguing and other wacky stories about the advertising world from his Clarion days, his first agency, which he joined as a trainee and whose Kolkata branch he later went on to head.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fingerprint Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9789358561388

Book preview

Shikha Sabharwal. The first name on my list. My publisher and a dear friend. Not just for agreeing to publish the book but also for shepherding me all the way during the process. Thank you, Shikha. Continue to keep the faith. And thanks for the cups and cups of coffee and the warm affection you always extend to me.

Subhojit Sanyal. Son, friend, comrade, colleague. Pushing me to complete the book and offering his services as a writer and a qualified editor. Standing by my style of narrative. Anyways, he knows me best.

Sonalini Chaudhuri, dear friend and a colleague, who first approved of the project in her role as the Editor of the publishing house and recommending to Shikha that the book could be published. She kept me going at all stages of the book.

Urmimala Chaudhuri, the only person with whom I share a common social and professional milieu, for filling in with names and other related information whenever I asked for it.

Suhel Seth and Madhukar Kamath, two very good friends, who have now turned celebrities, and whom I have known for decades, for immediately responding with their comments by reading the extracts I had mailed them.

Young Nisha Rawat, Editor at Fingerprint, who finally took the brunt of my bulldozing, but always responded with smileys (and lots of them) on seeing my point of view You will go places, my girl. :-)

To those hundreds who egged me on to write the stories I would tell them. They gave me the idea to put all this down. I hope you will like to read them as much as you had liked listening to them. My friends and ex-colleagues for cheering me all the way, offering me any help that I sought, and to those who kept interacting with me on the Facebook Page. Zuckerberg Zindabad! (And yes, thanking all of you in advance for buying the book!)

Jagganath Guha, Jogada, teacher, guru, role model, and all-time inspiration. Just don't give me a lecture after finding faults in my ingriji. I still remember your famous words: Don't try to be lackadaisical. Try to say something anti-dis polishment transcetically.

My kennel of hounds for keeping me amused, bursting the stress points and disturbing me by wanting to sit on my lap while I wrote. You all are a gift that I didn't deserve to receive. Now if you'll stop fighting amongst yourselves, I will play with all of you.

Finally, like the last sequence of A Beautiful Mind, my wife, Shila. Thanking you on this page loads me with emotion and perhaps, a tear drop. Thank you for being by my side when life slid down, for holding my hand, picking me up and making me stand up again. Thank you for the tiffin you packed for me every day and pushing me to the Palm Avenue house to complete the book, and not telling me anything when on days I sneaked out for a steak at Oly's and yet told you that I did have the tiffin you had packed (I did!). I hope this book will make some amends and at least you can say that your husband has written a book on Delhi, and another on the social and professional life of Kolkata. Wonder if this is the maverick you wanted in life! 30 years later you can't look back. Just wait for my next book.

For Sarbajeetda

I started writing this out on a whim. I had nothing to do and the laptop was staring at me. Why not recollect some of the stories of my professional career? Once the first few paragraphs were done, I realised this could be the book I wanted to write. The story of Clarion Advertising required documentation, not just for being an advertising agency, but also as an amazing story about the times and the people.

Why Life in a Rectangle? One of my mentors had told me that every form of advertising that we see is through a rectangular format. The newspaper ads, magazine ads, the TV, bill boards and even (this was in the days of the transistor radios) the radio jingles and spots came alive through a rectangular box. Not much of a difference today. The laptop, the mobile phone, the plasma TV and the screen at the cineplexes are all rectangles! (For the current generation, the once iconic agency ASP had their house journal called The Rectangle.)

Being a good Bengali, the book is full of das and dis, since we love to connect with anyone and everyone older to us, as a 'dada' or a 'didi'. Regarding the use of the word 'Calcutta' and 'Kolkata', I have been left thoroughly confused, bemused, and amused. Whatever be the spelling, the city remains the same.

This is not a story on advertising. Not even an autobiography. It is about the people and times in the advertising business in Kolkata from the mid-seventies to nineties. Like Naipaul's Miguel Street, which I once wanted to translate/adapt into Bangla. The scene starts from Clarion Advertising's Kolkata office at 55B, Mirza Ghalib Street. There are no set chapters and no linkages between one set of stories and the others. For me advertising has been a continuous journey, so the stories have spilled beyond Clarion as I came across more such illustrious characters and incidents outside of Clarion.

Plain story telling, more on the lines of Truman Capote's non-fiction fiction.

Kishori Mohan Das took great offence if any one called his pet dog a dog. But it was a dog since he never told us the name of his pet! Every day he would tell us stories of how his dog played with a wooden ball and obediently listened to go and come commands. Kishorida was also a member of Civil Defence, and many of his colleagues had seen him doing mock drills wearing khaki half pants on Sunday mornings. For a living, he kept the records of the Production Department of Clarion Advertising.

If Kishorida was a dog lover, Maitra mashai was a pen lover. Every day he would walk in wearing a white shirt, properly starched, neatly tucked into his trousers, sleeves rolled up. He had an amazing collection of pens — Parker 51, Blackbird, Swan, Waterman — all of '40s and '50s vintage. He regularly washed and maintained them, and every day he had a different pen to write with. He also knew tales of many celebrity elopements, though he never divulged their names. Once, when we were having tea and rotten singaras from the tea shop at the entrance of Clarion office (I always felt that his garam singaras were stuffed with leftover stuffing which, thanks to too much of potatoes, had a rotten smell. We loved them nevertheless!), he kicked off a conversation with that do you want to know? look and since he had the look of I am dying to tell you, please ask me to spill the beans on his face, we had to play along. The names of the real time characters cannot be divulged, simply because most of them are dead and gone, but here is a sampler:

"He then met the lady at the crossing of Amherst Street, hopped in to a rickshaw, got the rickshawwallah to pull down the hood, drop the screen (all hand-pulled rickshaws had a tarpaulin cover to save the passengers from getting wet in the rains), and told the driver, 'Chalo, chalo . . .'"

But who were these people?

Well, one of them still works here; the other is now married to a leading barrister!

They never got married? Then what happened with all the eloping?

That's not the story. This happened in 1952. The man then had an affair with a photographer's wife and one day the photographer got the man beaten up. His friends covered up by saying that he had fallen from the tram car.

Even though he officially refused to name the names, it was not difficult to catch on since we all had enough hints as to who they were. The script was enjoyable, listening to amorous stories of our seniors, some legends!

The Clarion office at Kolkata's Mirza Ghalib Street was an amazing place, not just because it was the second largest agency in India when I joined it in the mid-'70s, but also because it was full of characters who reminded me of Naipaul's Miguel Street. Most of them were one time card holding members of the Communist Party of India and almost all of them had quit the Communist Movement after the party split in 1964. I was even given to understand that our Vice Chairman and Managing Director, who was perhaps the first President of the Student's Federation of India (SFI), and the first editor of The Student magazine in the '40s, was once apparently considered the perfect successor to P C Joshi as the Secretary of the undivided Communist Party of India.

Prasanta Sanyal was an amazing person. Even though he headed an advertising agency and was the first Indian recipient of the H K McCann Award, he was anything but an ad man. He was a PR guru, and above all, a visionary, a leader of men. He was at ease either staying at Delhi's YMCA (would calmly inform, Have come to meet Bhupesh), or offering Cutty Sark to the white skin head of Dunlop. From Indira Gandhi to Arunadi, he knew everyone, rather, everyone knew him. It was quite difficult to follow whom he was talking about when he referred to such people. (Bhupesh was Bhupesh Gupta, the Communist stalwart and a five term member of the Rajya Sabha, while Arunadi was Aruna Asaf Ali, the freedom fighter.) Once I had mildly suggested to him that he should give us a ready reckoner, so that we could know the people he was talking about. This was after he had casually mentioned to me that Nripen was his secretary in the party days, and the same Nripen was then the Chief Minister of Tripura! Even Pramod, who by then was the Chairman of the Left Front in Bengal, was also a part of his staff at some point of time. When Mrs Indira Gandhi was the Minister of Information & Broadcasting, Mr Sanyal was the advisor to the Minister and had done the blueprint of forming the Directorate of Advertising & Visual Publicity (DAVP). He later became Chief of Bureau of The Times of India in London, and, on returning to India, set up the PR Department of Indian Oxygen, then a BOC subsidiary.

His coming to advertising was equally dramatic. The story, told to us by Mister Ghosal, the God of Indian Advertising, ran thus:

Sometime in the late '50s, Mister Ghosal met Mr Sanyal during a break of a whole night musical soiree which was held at the Maidan (the green lungs of Kolkata, once the venue to musical soirees and book fairs). As they had tea in between an artiste change, Ghosal asked Sanyal what he was doing. On being told that he was not doing anything much, rather he had no work, Ghosal offered him a job in advertising, to which Sanyal had tentatively asked, Ami ki parbo? (Can I do it?)

Ekhane kichu partey hoye na, chole elei hoye, Ghosal thundered. In advertising you don't have to know anything, you just have to come and join!

Sanyal and Ghosal had known each other from Sanyal's Student Federation days, when both of them worked in Mumbai in the '40s, and subsequently, in the '70s, Sanyal headed Clarion for almost a decade and led the agency to become India's number 2 agency after JWT in the mid-seventies. In 1977, Clarion, under Sanyal, was offered by Mrs Indira Gandhi to create and run India's first advertising campaign for a political party and though it was an excellent creative campaign (You vote for Yourself when you vote for Congress), it achieved little as Mrs Gandhi was routed in the 1977 hustling. I believe the total ad spend was just 25 lakhs, which in any case was a big amount at that time. No money was paid by the Party directly to the agency, but some corporates were advised to put in a specified amount to Clarion.

Sanyal had the ability to talk to anyone at the other person's level. He had muri badam (puffed rice with peanuts, a very common Bengali munch with evening tea) with his secretary every evening at tea time and later, the same evening, hosted cocktail parties at Kolkata's elitist The Calcutta Club. He would invite all his Bengali clients to tea with "Arunadi" and I believe they came dressed in their ethnic finery to partake the best of singaras (samosas) and shondesh, and felt elated to be in the company of the great Bengali revolutionary. He unofficially instructed all his managers to secure ads for Nikhil Chakrabarty's Mainstream, even during the Emergency, and had once suggested to a Kolkata-based company (CESC) to adopt Kolkata and start celebrating the city's birthday. We had then laughed at the idea, but later, when the city celebrated 300 Years in 1990, many of us felt ashamed and realised his idea was way before his time. He was the first to engineer the concept of a second agency by forming a 100% subsidiary to take on competitive business and was probably the first one to foresee that the 15% commission earning of the agency business was soon going to be a thing of the past. To that extent he was India's Marion Harper and the first Media buyer rolled into one.

Sanyal's exit from Clarion on his retirement was rather inglorious, but he had the ability to rub off the humiliation that was meted out to him by his once best friend and his deputy in Clarion, Subroto Sengupta. Sanyal then went on to head the Marketing Department of the Ananda Bazar Group. The Marketing Department was just a facade, he was the chief advisor to Ashok Sarkar, the owner of ABP Group, and it is believed that the growth of ABP Group, from being a single product company to becoming a publishing conglomerate, was his handiwork.

On finishing his tenure he hung up his boots and was on the Board of a few companies. If memory serves me right, he passed away in 1990. I used to drop by to meet him once in a while since he stayed close to my house, and over tea, used to listen to stories of his days with Mrs Gandhi and going back in time, the story of the communist movement.

He was an atheist and his family did not hold any sraddh ceremony for him. Some of us got the feeling that he was being given an unsung farewell and so the Advertising Club Calcutta, of which I was the General Secretary, organised a memorial meeting for him at short notice. All his contemporaries were invited, and I remember going over to invite many of them personally. The tricky part was to invite Prof Sengupta, but I told him that now that he was dead, all issues they had have been buried and that he should make it. He did.

Mister Subhas Ghosal spoke at length in Bangla, so did Prof Sengupta who talked about their days at Scottish Church College. Nari Narayan, then Vice Chairman of ITC, could not make it but had sent a message. Jolly Kaul, an old comrade and colleague of Mr Sanyal, P K Roy, formerly publisher of The Times of India and others who knew him for years fondly remembered him. Mr Sanyal's family was there and the atmosphere of the meeting was quite heavy. Indrani Sen, who was the Media Director of HTA, and whom we fondly called Bardi (elder sister), conducted the meeting. It was proposed that the Annual Ad Club Debate would be named after him. I don't know if the debate still happens, or if they did get to naming it after him.

As we were seeing off the guests, Mister Ghosal took me aside and told me that when he dies, I should not hold a similar meeting for him. He was very emotional. I held his hand and told him to stop thinking of death.

Subhas Ghosal had the tag of being the first Indian to pay for his training in advertising with JWT London, and remained with that institution till his death. He was Mister Ghosal to any one and everyone in the business. Other than being instrumental in the great JWT turnaround in the early '70s, he had also fostered many a talent and was a bigger-than-life legend. He was, undoubtedly, the doyen and the Don of the business. He also had a hand in despatching Pather Panchali to New York for the historical screening, which proved to be the turning point in Indian cinema.

When Mister Ghosal died, I was in a train, travelling to Kolkata. The Ad Club did hold a memorial meeting for him at The Calcutta Club. I did attend the meeting, but halfway through was shown the door, along with a number of JWT old timers, who were Mister Ghosal's colleagues at Thompson, as like me, many of them had come wearing kurta pyajamas. We had to go out through the kitchen, lest the elite noticed the natives. I am sure Mister Ghosal must have had a good laugh.

Advertising had a lot of class and value in the '70s. No respectable agency would poach on another respectable agency's business. The Advertising Club of Calcutta regularly held one meeting a month, which was