Who Do You Think You Are

By Emmanuel Upputuru

At the age of 33, Emmanuel Upputuru, India’s hottest creative person,* finds himself frustrated by physical injuries that have begun to cage his body. He embarks on a journey of self-discovery that unveils a shocking truth about his very existence: his identity was stolen from him before he ever set foot on this earth. The probe leads him to a scene of robbery and murder in a garden and to a place of skull in Jerusalem, where a war was waged on his behalf by a lamb with a mission to restore his original identity.

But what was Emmanuel’s original identity? Are we just our bodies? How do we cope with physical pain? What are the three core fears of mankind? How can we be born again? These are some of the questions Emmanuel seeks to answer in his book, ‘Who Do You Think You Are’. Written over a period of eighteen years, using anecdotes from the advertising and cricket world, Emmanuel offers a radical take on the complex subject of Man’s Identity.

‘Who Do You Think You Are’ is an urgent book for a broken world. It can help us discover our true identity. Armed with this identity we can respond to conflicts better and conquer ourselves even as the world around us continues to trigger, troll, fight, divorce and threaten to nuke itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781664293328

Emmanuel Upputuru

Emmanuel Upputuru is a multiple Cannes Lion winning creative director who has spent close to three decades working on building the identities of Samsung, HCL Tech, Nestle, Motorola, American Express, Sprite and many other small and big brands. He is a born-again Christian living in Gurgaon, with his wife and two children. This is his debut book.

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Copyright © 2023 Emmanuel Upputuru.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

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except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author

and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of

the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of

people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

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www.westbowpress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

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views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are

models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Unless otherwise indicated, scripture quotations marked are taken

from the Holy Bible, King James Version. (Public Domain)

Scripture quotations marked ASV are taken from the

American Standard Version Bible. (Public Domain)

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American

Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973,

1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New

International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica,

Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-9331-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-9332-8 (e)

WestBow Press rev. date: 07/03/2023

Contents

PREFACE

Part One

9/11 HIJACKS 9/8

IDENTITY CRISIS

THE OTHER PART

MURDER IN THE GARDEN

Part Two

FIR

THE INVESTIGATION

THE LIAR

THE IDEA OF DISOBEDIENCE

PRIDE

COVERING SHAME

FIG LEAVES

CONTENTION

DEATH

Part Three

THE SILENT SPECTATOR

POTTER’S HOUSE

GOD HAS AN IDEA

JESUS CHRIST!

NAKED TRUTH

CLOTHED WITH HUMILITY

ANOTHER GARDEN

PLAN EXECUTED

THE THIRD ACT

Part Four

A PORTRAIT BY GOOGLE

THE CONNECTION

MY TESTIMONY

DEVIL ROARS

TRIGGERED

GLORY! GLORY!

THE ART OF MEDITATION

NOTHING

SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To

Everyone

that has breath

PREFACE

XXXX XXXX XXXX - is not just another number I have encrypted here. It is the number the government of my country knows me by. The number is linked to my basic demographic and biometric information like my passport size photograph, my ten fingerprints and scans of my two irises. These are stored in a centralized database. This 12-digit unique identification number can reveal to concerned authorities everything they may want to know about me. It can, for example, tell the banks if they can trust me with a loan or not. Thanks to this number the authorities know, or at least believe and sincerely hope, that there is no one else like me on this planet. I am unique.

While it is flattering to know that I have a unique identity, now proven by a unique number, a question threatens to ruin that knowledge: is my identity really unique? Don’t I share so many other identities? Am I not just like so many other individuals on so many counts? On the basis of my nationality I am one of the 1.4 billion people on this sub-continent called India. On the basis of my place of birth and my mother tongue, even though I am guilty of not being proficient in it, I am one of the 84 million Telugu-speaking people from Andhra Pradesh. On the basis of my current habitation, I am one of the 1.2 million residents of Gurgaon. On the basis of my gender, I am one of the 3.6 billion dudes on the planet. On the basis of my food choices I am like 90% of the world population that eats non-vegetarian food on this earth. On the basis of the way I earn that food, I am one of the half-a-million copywriters registered on LinkedIn. On the basis of my designation, I am one of the 20 odd Chief Creative Officers in the country. On the basis of the sports I follow I am one of the billion cricket fans globally. Even though I feel more in tune with the 440 million strong cohort of millennials, my children kid with me that I belong to the tribe of boomers. The truth is in the middle – I belong to 28% of the Indian population called Gen X.

I can create new categories that can give me interesting, unique in-one-way-or-the-other identities. Like for example, I am the only bald CCO operating out of Gurgaon at the moment. Or for that matter I am probably the only South-Indian-Christian-creative-person-in-the-country-with-two-moles-on-the-face. I am one of the few who have won Cannes Lions without a drop of alcohol in my system. But I would be naïve to suggest that I take any of these identities seriously. Who do you think I am?

Ultimately the government, family, friends and followers create an image called Emmanuel Upputuru in their own heads based on the data available to them. Each one a slightly different one from the other.

But what is my true identity? I see myself playing out different identities at different settings in society. I am a father, a son, a husband, a brother, a citizen, an employee, a neighbour, a sports fan, a cricket fan, a test cricket fan – all at the same time.

Every once in a while, on the world’s stage, you see newer identities making an apperance, like South Sudan for example. It became the world’s youngest nation on July 9, 2011.

On one hand you have organisations which try to protect niche identities – like that of the Taushiro speaking community of one last person left named Amadeo Garcia in Peru. On the other hand, India’s largest community is made to feel threatened that their idea of India is getting hijacked by a minority community today.

Governments pretend to protect the image of certain identities. It’s called vote bank politics. During elections each political party makes promises to certain communities to protect their interests.

Identity has always been an important factor in the history of mankind. What are wars after all, if not different identities at each other’s throats? Today the identity of man is broken into more and more fragments, smaller, tinier with sharp edges that hurt when they rub shoulders with each other.

These days you can’t post anything on social media without offending anyone. Everyone has become very sensitive. Sometimes the platform even warns you: This contains sensitive content. It may offend you. It could be a casual post about the food you have eaten. Or a mother feeding her baby in public. Anyone can get offended. Anything can offend. It could be sports, education, jobs or an advertisement trying to sell jewellery or furniture. People threaten to unfriend those who disagree with them. I have decided to not follow that practice. I want to see how divergent people’s points of view can be from mine, even if it makes me cringe. I want to see where they are coming from.

On social media, you are very quickly stereotyped and trolled. "You eat paneer" suddenly becomes those who eat paneer are of a certain type. If you like ghazals from your neighbouring nation, you are judged that you are anti-national and sentenced to leave your country and go settle there.

Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Sir Terence David John Pratchett, discovered who is always to blame in the fantasy world: It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them who do the bad things.

Things are not very different in the real world.

Whenever a bomb explodes in some part of the earth or someone’s head gets separated from his body in another, the first thing everyone looks for is the names of the perpetrators of such deeds. These days invariably the names of the perpetrators are from a certain community. And we know how the script plays out from that moment of identification, don’t we? People from that particular community are targeted everywhere in the world by certain sections of the victims’ community – even when the people from the targeted community are against the actions of the suspected perpetrator. Such constant targeting, purely because they share a common identity, can create a newfound sense of belonging, loyalty and passion for their own community. They suddenly realise that they need to protect their own from them.

In 1984 my father took me to the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium in Delhi for the Asian games. We watched athletics. I don’t remember any Indian doing well that day. Around afternoon a cheer started gathering momentum and increased in volume. We found out, a Chinese athlete was about to beat a world record in high jump. So suddenly we were not just Indians, but Asians cheering for our Asian athlete about to win on our behalf. The same feeling we know very well whenever the Indian cricket team plays. Every time the team wins, it is we who win. Obviously. When the team loses, it is they who are losers, and their houses need to be burnt down. Obviously.

Have you heard this one? Why do we laugh at jokes? Because it makes us feel superior. That’s not a joke. That’s a theory. We laugh at jokes because we feel happy that we are not like the butt of that joke. Okay, ready for some real jokes? Here’s the first one, on gender:

Girl: Girls are better than boys.

Boy: Then why did God make boys first?

Girl: Duh, you have to have a rough draft before the

final copy.

You see this joke can make the girls laugh because it makes them cooler, smarter. And all girls will, invariably, like that. They are not like the boys, you see.

Here’s another one, on nationalities:

Why doesn’t Mexico have an Olympic team?

"Because everybody that can run, jump, and swim

are already in the U.S."

You know who will be happy to hear this one, right? The Americans of course. With one sweeping brush stroke all Mexicans have been painted as losers. Jokes are a big part of the identity wars.

I belong to the marketing, advertising and branding world. We get paid to create identities and images for products. Our job is to convert a product into a brand. This has become even more important these days because there is hardly any difference between one toothpaste and another. Or for that matter between one smartphone and another. The premium a certain brand can charge is because of the image it manages to create in the heads of the consumers. Brands keep offering new improved images to their audiences. Every new update is to help people look richer and younger. Every brand wants to talk to the young, the millennials, Gen Z. They pretend that the others don’t even exist. There is a famous saying, Advertising helps people buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like.

I have used, in this book, the words ‘identity’ and ‘image’ loosely and interchangeably. However just for clearing the air, ‘identity’ I feel is something I possess and an ‘image’ is something that is created in your head and could be very different from the actual identity.

This book is about the identity of man or shall I say of a person to be politically correct. What does identity mean? What constitutes your identity and mine?

We have seen there are so many ways to identify a person. Put another way, man is covered in so many layers of identities. But when you peel off each of these layers, what’s left of him? What lies beneath?

Involuntarily, unconsciously I started seeing in every story, in every conversation, every argument, every debate on prime-time television channels and on the timelines of social media, in every person, a connection with these questions. I see an identity crisis playing out, streaming for attention.

At this point I must confess, you will notice very soon anyway, that the lens I have used for this investigation is a biblical one. I am no expert in theology. If you carefully notice, you will find that I often hide behind ‘probably’, ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’, ‘could have been’ and those cute little question marks. Because I am ‘definitely not’ an authority on the subject.

Writing this book has been a personal journey for me to discover my true identity. I hope that my story will inspire you to find or rediscover your own.

EMMANUEL UPPUTURU.

GURGAON, June, 2023.

Part One

As you know Jaana, our ID cards are more important than we ourselves are now. That card is the most valuable thing anyone can have. It is more valuable than the most beautifully woven carpet, or the softest, warmest shawl, or the biggest garden, or all the cherries and all the walnuts from all the orchards in our Valley. Can you imagine that?

ARUNDHATI ROY

9/11 HIJACKS 9/8

I KNOW 9/8 doesn’t have the same ring as 9/11. But 9/8 changed my life as much as 9/11 changed life for every American.

On the eighth of September 2001, while Osama Bin Laden and his colleagues were giving finishing touches to an attack on a country that had never been attacked in history, I was ambushed by a thirty-five-year-old suit on a soccer ground in Mumbai. He crashed into my knees – my twin towers.

I always considered my legs to be the strongest part of my body. When I say that, blurry images of an evening come to mind, when six-year-old Emmanuel was coming home with his dad and elder sister in an auto-rickshaw, with new books for their new classes. His home was still some yards away and the auto-rickshaw was yet to stop. But that didn’t stop an over-excited Emmanuel from jumping out of the running auto. I don’t remember how, but the next thing I remember was seeing the world from under the tyres of the auto-rickshaw. My six-year old legs were bearing the collective weight of my healthy father, my sister, the auto-rickshaw driver and of course the auto-rickshaw itself weighing approximately 600 kilogrammes.

I saw what seemed like the whole neighbourhood rushing and crowding around the auto-rickshaw. They helped my dad lift the vehicle off my young legs. Someone massaged my legs. Someone else took me to the bushes and made me pee. I don’t know if that helped, but my legs took the accident in their stride.

I wouldn’t call 9/8 an accident. As I writhed in pain outside the playing field, I realized my foolishness. I was taking the ball into my own goal. I had found the football at my feet. I started running madly at a furious pace, when I saw a player from own my team, the suit, running at me from the opposite direction. One of us had the wrong goal in mind. He crashed into me. Four legs hit each other. All four legs with the rest of our bodies fell. I thought it was the end. I could almost hear the fat lady clearing her throat to sing. I saw stars. Literally. Don’t ask me how many there were, it was too painful to count.

What I was doing on a soccer field is a good question. I never possessed the fine art of either bending it or even simply sending it to any one of my ten colleagues begging for the ball. What I could do well was take the football and run straight, sometimes even past the goal post. It is not funny. I never claimed to play football, honestly. My feet were always more at home chasing a smaller, redder version of a ball, the cricket ball.

I just went to give moral support to my team at Leo Burnett, an advertising agency I was working at that year, while they were practicing for a corporate tournament. The agency had hired Geoffrey (not Boycott, of course) as a coach. He was tall, lean and walked around with a bag slung behind his shoulders. A little black moustache made him an odd-looking athlete. He was in charge of helping our team with practice and strategy. He found me running around the field, and said, You run like a bull. I think I met his expectations. I ran with as much talent as a bull would on a soccer field.

After some perfunctory sympathy and inspection of my legs, my colleagues went back to play. After some time, I wanted to see how bad the injury was and entered the field to play. Bad idea. The knee started swelling. And that was the first sign of the end of my less than short-lived soccer career. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I believe this book was conceived on that very ground, on that day.

It was diagnosed as cartilage tear and a surgical strike was prescribed to remove the tear. The operation was finally accomplished in the month of May 2002 by

Dr. Ashok Rajgopal, a famous knee surgeon at a hospital in Greater Kailash, in New Delhi. It lasted for an hour. I think I saw the torn cartilage that was extracted from the knee. I forgot to ask if I could keep the extracted cartilage as a souvenir. I also neglected to follow the physiotherapy protocol as advised by the doctor. So when I came back after the surgery a few weeks later with the knee cap still on, the doctor said, Your knee cap is an embarrassment to me.

After three years, many physiotherapists, massages, icepacks, wax baths, infrared heat therapies, my left knee still hurt. I used a kneecap even to answer the doorbell in the morning, the way a severely myopic person automatically reaches for his glasses to read anything. It had become part of my left knee. Thank you, Mr. Knee-Cap Inventor, here’s a Diet Coke for you.

Then one day I discovered a pain in the left side of my neck. The pain in my neck was a pain in the neck. It became so painful that eventually I couldn’t bear it. My neck couldn’t shoulder the responsibility of holding my big head high. The word precarious comes to my mind. The condition deteriorated slowly. If I wanted to lie down on the bed, I couldn’t. I remember one day standing next to the bed and trying to figure out the physics that would let me transfer my body from a standing position to a horizontal one on the bed. Finally I sat down next to the bed, put my head sideways on it first, rested it and Joyce, my dear wife lifted the rest of my body and slid it onto the bed. I called my physiotherapist Dr. Gita Tekchand. She suggested I take an MRI. I was asked to lie down on a stretcher-like machine. I was told it will take about half an hour. For someone like me who can hardly sit in a place for a minute, the thought of being in this position for half an hour was like torture. Half an hour is 1800 seconds I calculated in my head. Half an hour will start after they switch something on. Meanwhile I lay down still and tried to figure out a solution to the challenge: how am I going to survive half an hour of being still in a round metallic machine that almost caged me.

The stretcher-like machine slid inside a larger unit which covered half of my upper body. It was like being in a fancy coffin. Suddenly the fancy coffin started vibrating. There was hardly a foot’s distance between my nose and the surface above. I had to keep my