Hi, welcome back.
And I have another guest, another profession.
And today is someone from my edge of the woods, advertising.
Narayan is a copywriter.
At least that's what he started out as.
And like most writers have seen, there
is no course that gets you into copywriting.
So without further ado, let me bring Narayan on board.
Hi, Narayan.
Hi, hi.
Yeah, it's been quite a journey for you.
And it's only over the past couple of conversations
that we had that I realized that your interests extend not just
to writing and to audio.
Guitars as well.
Web design is, of course, something
that you completely blew me away with.
Because when you look at it, writers are not
supposed to become geeks.
Another one of the unconventional choices
you've made.
Yeah, maybe my choice of advertising as a profession
itself may be a good starting point.
Great place to start, absolutely.
So like you said, I was doing my MA in economics.
And at the end of it, I surprised myself
by being the second in the university.
But that's a different story.
But while after I had finished giving the exam and all that,
I was not at all clear what I was going to do.
I knew that everybody got a job doing something or the other
and therefore I would be doing some job.
But I had no clue.
In fact, the very reason for doing MA
was because I'd finished BA and I had the same problem.
And I said, let me study more.
And therefore I thought it was OK.
I think a lot of us have that problem.
Yeah.
So I mean, these days, of course, people
are very different and probably from the 10th standard
onwards, people seem to know why I'm
going to become an interior designer or a dentist
or whatever it is.
They seem to be pretty clear.
And that's a nice thing.
But in my time, at least, I wasn't that kind.
And I had no clue, absolutely, what
I was going to do with myself.
A visit to the Connemara Library,
it's one of those ancient libraries.
And I was walking past some, I don't know,
it was a legal section or something
like that with all those leather bound tomes
and gathering dust and something like that.
I was on my way to somewhere else.
But as I was passing by, something caught my eye.
And there was this very attractive book hid
between those cobwebbed kind of old tomes.
And naturally, I saw them and said,
what is that doing there?
Because it seems some oddball thing standing out.
So I pulled it out.
And it was a book called The Craft of Copywriting
by Alastair Compton.
I remember that.
I haven't seen that book later.
I haven't heard anybody mention that book.
So I don't think it's a great book.
I don't know what it is.
But it is not a recognition.
It's not certainly David Ogilvie's Confessions
or Bernbach's book or anything like that.
So it was some random book.
But it was very actively produced.
And it was a Britisher.
And obviously, somebody had put it
in the deliberately wrong section of the library
because they must have used up their tickets.
And they must have said, I'll hide it here
so that the next time I come, I'll
take it from this unlikely place.
But unfortunately for them, I was walking at that time.
And that very incongruity of that setting
caught my eye.
So it was probably a wrong move on that guy's part.
And therefore, I pulled out that book.
And I just flipped it through.
And there was something nice.
I mean, today I know it is the design
of the book and the typography and all that.
I'm able to say it now.
But those days, not just typography and design,
I didn't even know what copywriting was.
I wasn't sure.
I vaguely thought it was that guy who
sat under the judge and wrote stuff down.
Which is what a lot of people still think copywriters do.
Yeah, I don't know what the connection is.
So I was very curious.
But it was so attractively laid out.
And I said, OK, I think you were allowed
to take three or four books on your tickets
those days or something.
So I made this as one of the books that I took.
And I took it home.
And I was there by 5 PM.
And something was so engrossing about that book.
I read it over the next four or five hours,
allowing some time for some food and all that.
And I finished by 10 o'clock.
And by the time I went to sleep, I
was so certain that I'm going to become a copywriter.
It was so good.
That book did its job, honestly.
I mean, it's not like I've had that kind of some feeling
ever again.
I have not read or listened to somebody
and made some instant decision like that.
But it was so clear that I should be doing so.
And I was vaguely thinking, maybe in India,
there must be advertising agencies too.
And if somebody is willing to pay money
for doing this kind of stuff, certainly I can attempt this.
This seems to be a nice way to get paid.
Then, of course, being in that academic frame of mind,
I was thinking, who teaches this stuff?
Is there somewhere you need to go?
And it so happened that the very next week, my cousin
was much older to me.
He had a family in Delhi and all that.
And just as we were talking, he said
that there is a new institute there called the Indian
Institute of Mass Communication.
It's become pretty famous now.
It was in its fledgling days then.
And he said that I think they have a course on advertising,
but I'll get my secretary to check it out.
And if there is something, I'll let you know.
So then his secretary checked it out.
And then we exchanged mail, meaning
what is called snail mail today, actual letters handwritten.
And you send it and wait for so many days and all that.
And therefore, he did find out that there
was a course like that.
And then it was a matter of the next few months.
I joined there, basically.
So that is how.
And that was a nice course because it was conducted.
It was coordinated by a professor from inside.
And most of the lecture, practically all the lecturers
were from the industry, the advertising industry in Delhi.
And some pretty good luminaries were there,
copywriters, art people, creative directors, and everybody.
And it was nice to know from practitioners.
And therefore, you could show the stuff that you created.
And they'll give you their very frank appraisals and so on.
So it was quite something to be able to learn.
And we spent about 10 months or something in that course.
And they gave me some scholarship.
And I got back all the money that we
paid for that course also, which wasn't much.
So therefore, and I stayed with my cousin.
So therefore, it was a bit of a jolly time.
There was nothing for me to do.
I was left in his house and went, caught a bus.
And probably my only expense was those bus tickets or something.
So therefore, it was all pretty cool,
made some new friends, and all that.
And from there, of course, I did my internship
in Delhi at Ogilvy at that time.
It was called Ogilvy, Benson, and Maitha.
Later on, it became Ogilvy and Maitha.
And then it became O&M.
What is the process for getting an internship?
Was it much simpler than?
It was because the university, or it's not, sorry,
our institute wrote to, they asked us to choose.
And me and somebody else, I think, chose Bombay as the place.
And he chose Linthas.
And I chose Ogilvy.
Therefore, we could both be in Bombay,
although in different agencies, we
could meet during lunchtime, because both the offices were
in South Mumbai and all that.
So that was nice to have somebody there.
And therefore, the course director wrote to these people.
And it was somewhat simple, I think.
I don't know what happened, because we were told that, yes,
it's been accepted.
And we were taking some midnight train from Delhi to Mumbai.
And we were there.
So I spent a month there, beautiful time.
I learned a lot, asked a lot of questions,
probably made an ass of myself, but learned a lot.
And yeah, Mani Iyer, he was the name of that.
He was a big doin' of the advertising industry.
And he's no more.
I mean, they were all very, very accomplished people
and all that.
So you got to meet him.
On the first day that you went, he
spent about 15, 20 minutes with you.
And in the last day that you were leaving,
he spent again 15, 20 minutes with you.
And he also got up to walk with you
to this well-furnished, huge cabin.
He came up to the door to open the door for you
and wish you good luck and all that.
I mean, these are all things that you
don't forget decades later because we knew that it
was some PR thingy at some level.
And you know that it was all done.
But it is a nice thing.
They don't need to have done it, though.
Trainees and students, they really need to have done it.
Just one thing.
In terms of writing, are you saying
that before you read the book, you had never really
looked at writing as one of your strengths,
or you had explored writing in some form?
Actually, no.
I had not written anything.
But one of those vague things like,
it's not exactly dear diary kind of stuff.
But my father used to say, read the Hindu,
or read the statesman, or read something
which has got quality editorials in it and all that.
And half the things you didn't understand
because it was all about some war somewhere
or some famine in Bihar.
And at that time, you didn't know anything much
about these things.
So you had no particular context.
And TV was in its infancy.
So therefore, there was not much to read or something.
But they were very clear that, no, if you want to write,
then write of a certain standard.
That much I understood.
And therefore, I used to just pick up
stuff that interested me and oddball, not continuously,
now and then, all told, maybe 20 pieces of some prose
I must have written over two years,
not in any organized way, not in a, what shall I say,
not in some Sunday I will sit down and do this,
not in that sort of, there was no timetable to it.
Just a free flowing thing.
But barring that, I was not the guy.
People say I have a book inside me.
I was not that guy.
I didn't write poetry.
I didn't write short stories.
Or I didn't submit anything to magazines or newspapers
or stuff like that.
But yet, when I read that book, I
felt that I could be doing that.
It's quite a leap.
So you finished your internship at Ogilvy
and then looked for a job straight away?
No, no, no.
I went back to Delhi to complete the next two
months of the course that was there.
OK.
And then, since I had my elder brother in Bombay, who
was who during the internship told me, come here.
Bombay is the place in whatever field you want.
And he was right.
And you have my house.
So again, I got food and residence
in somebody's house.
So I went there, and actually, the most inexplainable part
of my life, it was the next two months
that I spent from April to May or maybe even till July,
where I sat in my brother's house.
And he had a small kid.
And I used to play.
She's still my favorite, my niece.
And I was just playing with her every day.
I didn't attempt to get a job at all.
Because two conflicting thoughts were running in my head.
One is, why will anybody give you a job?
Not in a very negative way.
As in a very factual, clear-headed manner,
I was thinking.
Nobody knows.
You have no experience.
And you're saying, I'm coming to Bombay.
And I couldn't see any reason why anybody should give somebody
like me a job.
That was one.
And the other thing was, maybe I should do something about this,
but I don't know what.
Therefore, the thing happened that in these long
conversations, the two of my friends in Delhi
with this snail mail business, I think all of them,
all the other students who were mostly in Delhi,
and some of them were from Calcutta and somebody else
from Bangalore, I think, they all had been placed, so to say.
And a couple of my close friends got a little worried,
more than me.
And they went and told the course director
that this guy is not doing anything.
And why don't you speak to somebody?
My course director spoke to somebody.
And I got a letter in the mail from Shilpi Advertising
saying that if you're interested in a copy test with us, please.
I remember that language.
Contact the undersigned, that's what it said,
in that much officialese.
And it had some rock parrera, the creative director
of Shilpi saying, if you're interested, come.
I can give you a copy test.
So I went for a copy test.
And it was a remarkable copy test.
I mean, those days, we had, I don't know what it is now,
but we had a lovely copy test.
I quite enjoyed it.
I spent about two, two and a half hours in their office
doing the copy test.
They had questions like, how will you
explain how to tie your shoelaces to a blind man,
for instance, that means you have to use only words to explain
what you're supposed to do.
And it described a spiral staircase in 50 words
without using the word spiral or staircase, for instance.
And so on.
So it was a very, very interesting thing.
But one thing that caught my eye was the very last thing,
which was an attached thing of proofreading,
a page of maybe about 800 words with all deliberate mistakes
and this and that.
And for some reason, I was very good at that,
even though I did my MA in economics.
And I needn't have been that specific or pedantic
about the language.
But I always was.
I had that streak in me that somehow if you're writing
or doing it, do it very well.
Don't write like an ass or don't assume
that you're good at something.
Just make sure that at the very basics,
the grammar is right.
And after that, your content is correct or entertaining
or whatever it's meant to do.
It's a separate issue.
But let's, I mean, it's like your dress up or get up
or whatever it is.
Make sure that some basics are right about it.
And of course, finally, people will judge you
by the substance in any case.
So I had that thing in me.
And I wrote that.
And I forgot about it and went back.
Within about 10 days, I got another letter
in the post saying that regarding your application
for copywriter, can you come and meet the undersigned?
So I went and met that gentleman,
oldish, very old, polished gentleman
and excellent English copywriter.
Some of those people of those days were practically,
they were excellent.
They were seriously excellent.
So he made me sit down.
And I think I told you this before.
And that's why you got the idea also
of this whole business of proofreader.
Because I was thinking whether, I mean, if he's calling me,
I had enough sense to know that he wouldn't call me
all the way and tell me you're not getting this.
Doesn't make any sense.
So I knew that I had got the job.
So all I was thinking in my mind,
how much money should I ask?
And I somehow decided I think I should ask for 1,000 rupees.
I have no idea.
But I got four figures.
1,000 rupees is a big, big sum.
And just ask, let's see.
I mean, at the most, what will happen?
He'll say no.
So let's see.
That was the only idea I had about that interview.
And when I met Rok and he looked at my test,
he had brought out the test and he said he liked,
first thing that he did was to go to the last page.
And he said, this proofreading,
and he showed me that he had written with pencil,
he had ticked all those little, little places
and he had written zero defect.
And not seen this kind of a test in a long while.
So you're very good at it.
Normally, and then he said,
normally people miss this and miss that and miss that,
but you've done this, whatever.
I was more eager to know,
what about all that creative stuff before?
I've written pages and pages of stuff.
And he said, yeah, okay, that was nice.
This is nice.
And he didn't pay that too much.
In his mind, maybe because they had a lot of these public
issue offering kind of clients.
So for him, this proofreading was probably,
now I didn't know.
So he was really-
You were literally manna from heaven.
I can see that now, but at that stage,
I was a little underwhelmed to see,
why is he reacting less than,
I mean, I put in a lot of effort and I thought it was nice.
It was pretty creative and nice and nice imaginative answers.
But his focus was on this whole copywriting business.
I'm sorry, the proofreading business.
And he kept on and on about it.
And then he said, how much do you expect to be paid?
So since I was prepared, I said, I want 1,000 in,
I want 1,000 rupees.
So he said, no, I have your package ready.
And he showed it to me.
And then he said, listen, it's not exactly coming to 1,000
because after the deduction for this, that and the other,
you will be getting 975 in your hand.
But if you take it to the cash that we will be giving you
for library books or something like that,
it'll come to 1,012 or something like that, he said.
Some number just above 1,000.
So I thought, wow, I mean, this is worth it.
And he had already had the thing in.
Nothing to do with my asking, sorry.
No, I'm saying that the universe almost conspired, I said.
Right from the-
This is something that is happening.
And of course it also conspires against,
but it sort of evens out.
It was one of those times when somebody actually had that.
So that is how I got my first job.
And what happened in the first six months was basically,
I was, and I was not called a trainee copyright.
I somehow hold that as a matter of great pride.
Because I know that since,
everybody comes in as a trainee first,
and then they become a junior writer,
and then they become a copywriter,
and then they become a senior copywriter, and so on.
And I was not called a trainee copywriter.
I was called a copywriter.
Copywriter.
There's no junior, trainee.
So that, whatever that formal letter that you got
as a letter of appointment,
appointed me as a copywriter in Shilpi Advertising.
And for some reason,
I posted to my brother saying,
see, they're not calling me trainee.
And he was, he was in atomic energy or something,
and he had no idea of anything of this.
So he said, yeah, okay, fine, cool.
Whatever you say.
So that way, that was a learning experience
in terms of, you know, checking reams and reams of copy.
Because those days, these public issue,
I mean, people may not know these days,
but a lot of what is called IPO now, I think.
But then the government required you to do
a certain kind of declaration of all kinds of information.
Therefore, many companies were forced to take out
huge newspaper full page ads,
which means that contained what, maybe 20,000 words
sometimes of the closely written copy,
but it's all handset.
And therefore, you know,
and you couldn't afford to make mistakes,
like some agencies,
this silly mistake of public issue without the letter L,
which means, you know, something else altogether.
You know, there were terrified people in agencies
where you didn't want those kind of
idiotic mistakes to happen.
After the senior people and the copywriter
and the croc himself had checked it,
it would come to me for a final check.
So I was given this privilege of,
Has Narayan signed on this?
So, I mean, a bit of an important kind of stuff to do,
but it's very tedious.
I mean, I know that I still love profiling.
I still like it.
It's a lovely thing to do,
to be careful about one's piece and cues
and all the rest of that,
but it was tedious.
I mean, you can't do it for six months like that.
Yeah, it is tedious.
Yeah, so at some point, I mean,
I also got some campaigns to do and it all went off well.
So that was what my first job was,
mostly proofreading and some creative work
and being called copywriter rather than a trainee.
But by this time, I think apart from a change of agency,
you are fairly clear that advertising
is where you want it to be.
That didn't change.
Yeah, I think so.
I think I was pretty clear because when I made friends
and I was figuring out what people were,
see for me, I don't know, maybe for everybody it is.
I don't know.
For me, money was quite an important thing.
So I couldn't at one level believe
that they pay you for this.
See, I don't know if it's snacks of naivety
or arrogance or what, I don't know,
but I was thinking, they give you money to do this.
This is not that hard.
I mean, I was yet to meet all the multinational clients
and this and that, all that comes in the future.
But in the first, I'm not sure it is.
It's like this is money for jam.
I mean, you're just doing something which is happy
and there is nothing much to really strive
and struggle and all that.
This comes naturally and there are other people around
and you get company and you can sit with the art guys
and figure out things and working later was not a problem.
And I was also unmarried and it is all sort of a nice thing
to be happening and then to think that, wow, man,
somebody is paying you for this.
You felt like you were conning somebody kind of thing
and why not?
And if somebody wants to pay me for this, fantastic.
So yes, therefore I think I fell in love with advertising
not so much for this or that.
It was basically that I could earn money
and good money at that.
When I asked senior writers how much they were earning
and then creative directors and they would say,
not just me, this is what I'm earning,
but somebody is earning that much.
I would say, what?
They paid this much money at that time?
Wow, so which means I could see that in four or five years,
I could very well be earning that kind of money
and I did too.
And it was always, and I've never felt that I needed more.
At every stage in my life till even now,
I used to feel vaguely that I'm being overweight.
I don't know if that is a common thing
among other people or not.
I always used to think that.
I'm scared that I'm somewhere and they are paying me
and I've never asked for a raise ever.
I've never asked for a raise ever because I didn't need to.
I don't know, I felt they were paying quite a lot
and every time you changed, they gave you 20% more,
sometimes 25% more once or twice
and then you said, okay, cool.
So there was no, I don't remember negotiating
with anybody, I don't, or maybe at the end of the day,
once you have a certain amount of money,
my temperament has always been, it's enough.
I wanted that money, but my travel and various hobbies
at various points in time, but otherwise it was okay.
I had no complaints about on the money front.
So how did the next move happen?
See, I was about almost to the date I was there from,
for a year in Shilpi in Bombay and there was a call
and there is the studio, it's like a line of artists
with their artboards in front of them, no longer a site.
Nowadays, everybody has.
No longer the case, yes, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Yeah, so people of a certain generation may know
that there were these boards
and there were these half broken blades,
Bharat blades for cutting and thing,
and they had cardboard underneath
so that the blade didn't cut through
and spoil the wooden furniture.
And the smell of that solution,
there was some solution which is-
The upper skills, I can remember that smell.
And yeah, and they had to paste the artworks and all that.
So there were a line of four or five artists
in the line that I sat.
I sat at the very back and there was a Hindi copywriter
and somebody else and then me.
And to my left was the very senior copywriter
whom I know to this day.
This row went on about eight or nine deep.
And at the end sat the master of the whole thing,
which was the studio manager
who was in most agencies, the very, very powerful guy.
The accounts guys dreaded to go to these kind of guys
because they were the traffic managers.
And they'd say, no, tell your client this, get out.
I don't do all this thing here.
They would say anything.
And because they were very clear their jobs,
they couldn't be touched.
And they generally knew everything.
His name was Mr. Malam.
Everybody's was, it was a advertising agency.
So everybody was encouraged to call.
Even as a trainee, I could call the MD of the agency
who was a Roger Pereira and everybody called him Roger.
And there was this rock who was called Rocky
and so on with Nandita.
And so everybody was, although they were all many, many,
I mean, they were all very senior people to me.
Everybody was called by their name,
but the studio manager was Mr. Malam.
You'd never said Malam to him.
I don't know why.
You don't play around with that.
Very, very forbidding.
So now Mr. Malam was the guy with the black telephone
and he got a call.
He said, Narayan.
So I was sitting, I hadn't given the number to anybody.
So there's no reason for me to give the studio manager's
number to anybody at all.
So I thought it could be a mistake.
And I went there and there was somebody who was saying,
I'm the finance director or somebody.
It was Mrs. Sista of the Sista's organization,
which later on became Sachi.
And she said, I've heard about you
from some as a mess something.
We are looking for a senior writer
for a Bangalore office for Sista's.
Would you be interested?
So I said, yes, just on the spot.
I mean, I hadn't thought of anything.
But if somebody's calling, I don't know.
I didn't know why I should say no.
And Bangalore seemed like a nice city.
I'd never been to Bangalore before.
And I was by myself.
I mean, of course, with my brother and family.
Otherwise, there was nothing much.
And I was sure that obviously there'll be more money.
They're calling you.
They'll give you something more.
And so I said, yes, on the phone.
And I put it down and Mr. Malam said, you got a job offer.
That man knew everything.
You couldn't get past him.
So I said, no.
What makes you think that?
Boss, I've been here.
I know.
I know all that.
So I told him, Mr. Malam, you're mistaken this time.
Or something like that.
I said, and I walked away.
And I was thinking, this man is a magician or something.
I don't know what he was.
Obviously, he's been there for years.
He's given enough of these phone calls
to people from strange people asking for things.
But how did it land up at his?
Normally, the receptionist would get it, right?
How did it end up at Mr. Malam?
I don't know why it didn't at the receptionist's phone.
I can understand because you could get it off the phone book.
I don't know if people know that there used
to be a telephone book which was this.
Yeah, exactly.
You can kill somebody if you threw it
at their head or something.
It's no longer there.
But those kind of books were available.
And if you searched under S and you turned the pages,
you could read Shilpi Advertising
and you could call that number.
It was freely available.
But for some reason, I thought that the creative department,
which was attended to by Malay.
So that's the way.
And then I went and met his sister.
And she said, I can give you this package offer.
And it was some 2 and 1 half times what I was earning then,
even after an increment from Shilpi at the end of one year.
So there was nothing for me to think.
I said, yes, I'm going now.
Yeah.
No, I am saying one thing that's missing from everything
that you've said so far is something
that young people today face an enormous amount of,
which is pressure on the job.
You talk to anyone and they're at stress.
But you're like, you're breezing through.
So what?
No, it appears like that.
I know that it probably appears like that.
I think about it sometimes.
There must have been stressful days.
It is just that I know I've come across people later
in my career also.
And I feel that the way I could have been,
and I have been useful to many of these people,
is to encourage them to get a life of their own
outside of the office, god damn it.
That's all that's been my life.
Nothing is worth that much.
See, once I know that my money needs are met and I have a job,
that's about it.
Like my mother's, I'm sorry, my wife's mother,
she used to tell my wife long ago,
before I came into their lives, that when you come back
from office, she told her daughter,
like you discard your shoes or slippers at the doorway,
leave your work there when you enter the house.
I think that is a very sensible way of looking at it.
Very sensible at times.
Probably more valid even today, because people
are so tied up in their own definitions and identities
and whatnot.
Why should some, it's something you do for money.
It doesn't mean that you're disrespecting it.
It doesn't mean, I used to work on some of the better
campaigns and all that.
I really don't want to get into all that, but some probably
very, very big brands that all of you guys know,
I've worked on all of that.
So it's not like I was shirking and actually scanning people
and taking money and doing nothing.
I was not that.
I was getting my 100% and I've done my hard yards,
I've done my midnight oil and all the rest of that.
So there is no...
Don't let you have.
But I was also doing other things.
This was not the be all or end all.
I have, this is one thing that used to strike me those days
in my mid-career when I used to be sent to Amsterdam or New
York or whatever some conference, this or Hong Kong,
especially the Europeans and the Americans.
And the thing that you learn from them,
even if you had a project during a normal work day
as a workshop, there would be, you know,
you are put with three other strangers.
So 20 people in a room, say the creative directors
from different countries are all meeting together.
There's some one head honcho holding the workshop and saying,
why don't you guys take a theme of, you know,
water scarcity in the world or some such thing, you know,
or women's issues or something and come up with something.
And so you'll all be separated into four or five groups,
et cetera.
And also everybody was new to everybody.
And you're given just half an hour or 20 minutes sometimes
to do this part of the exercise,
that part of the exercise and all that.
And it was quite, you know, on the one hand nervous,
it made you feel, but on the other hand,
it was also energizing because you're meeting with other
people from different countries,
but essentially the same kind of,
when you find out that it's just about the same thing
everywhere, it's not like, you know,
they are sharper, better, greater or anything.
It's the same thing.
Yeah.
Yeah. But the striking point was everybody was exactly
finishing at 20 minutes because at five, five 30,
they are in the speech resort.
They want to go out surfing.
They want to go out swimming.
They want to go out something.
They've got their girlfriends or boyfriends
or the significant other or whatever it is.
And they want to get out.
Whereas first Indians, I've got everything in mind.
This is, I, what do I have?
I don't have anything to do.
I mean, this foreign country,
I don't swim and I don't certainly surf.
I don't know anything of these things, these guys do.
So I was waiting for dinner, eat food,
read some book and go to sleep.
So when you come back to India,
I had a lot of hobbies, but when,
when you come back to India,
I used to tell all these guys, just get a life of you,
be interested in something else so that you don't think,
most of the Indians think that the evening is there.
No, night is there.
Therefore, you know, the whole day they waste,
they don't do anything much because to the back
of their heads, they know,
are a seven o'clock means eight o'clock.
It's there. Yeah.
Kind of some company,
they are eight o'clock.
You also get dinner on the house.
So, you know, all these things,
because you don't have anything else to do.
And especially the younger people who are not married
and they have no particular things.
And sometimes even the guys who supposedly
had these responsibilities, somehow work was all,
they probably didn't intend it to be that way,
but work consumes them completely.
Therefore their friends, who are their friends?
Their friends are at the workplace.
Yeah. You know,
we used to have friends in the house
and their colony where we stayed.
Right. Right.
Of course you also need some friendships
when you're working, but friendships at work are
at some level competitive, I think.
It's not pure friendship in practice.
It has, you know, if you are at your home friends,
somebody is an accountant,
somebody is doing something else completely.
So you won't tell a person,
like, I got rejected, man.
My client got, you know, damn angry and all that.
The girl will listen to you and say,
I got to go eat some chaat or something.
So they don't understand you.
And it's a nice thing.
If you tell your colleague that this guy,
this client behaved badly,
you're going to get significant stories from them
two times per hour and two times versa.
So it never ends.
Therefore I always tell people,
work has its place.
Please keep that in mind.
It has its place, yeah.
What is your method or did you arrive
at a way of getting an idea?
Do you ever think that,
oh, I have to crack it by this time and this is what...
So did you have certain ways of working,
of taking the brief and then seeing how you would come up
with the idea?
See, the thing is, between various clients,
especially when you work with multinationals
like Unilever and Procter & Gamble then,
and even Godrej and the more Tata's,
a certain kind of, what shall I say,
enlightened companies with a lot of layers
and of management and this and that,
they had processified this whole business of giving briefs.
So which means that, even their managers
and product managers and all that
were supposed to get some internal approvals
and therefore there was a system to it.
And therefore there was also a system
of evaluating advertising that does the creative.
It's like a non-creative person's way
of appraising creative.
It's like having a checklist.
Is it surprising?
Is it this?
Is it brief?
Is it something?
Will my target...
So it was all that and then you did one checklist
kind of stuff.
That is on the one hand.
On the other hand, you could meet businessmen
who just went by gut and you said, I like that.
Let's go with it kind of stuff or I don't know.
So then there was a in-between kind of...
So there was a whole range of completely processified guys.
So you learn to work with, for example,
when I used to work with De Beers
and it was a very, very British stultified system
of saying this brand is like this all over the world.
It will use shadows, which was a creative technique
of only showing not real people, but only showing shadows.
So if a couple were to meet each other
and embrace or something,
then it would happen as shadows on the floor.
Because I mean, there was a reason it was all in black
and white and then the diamonds stood very well
against black and white.
So there was an aesthetic reason for doing that.
But no need to make it a rule
because in somewhat emotional countries like Asia
and then for example, Mexico and few other countries,
emotion sells and these kind of,
you can't design shadows and say that,
you've got something happening in India.
So I had to fight with them for about two years,
but they got it.
And we did the shadows, we did the shadows.
You have to do it also and tell them
and within the shadows,
I made the Indian gesture of a bride bending down
in shadow form to touch the elders feet,
her own father or whatever.
And all those little Indian things we introduced
and the music was there.
But I told them, listen, you can go far more than this.
They went by numbers and research in a big way,
not silly research and not over small sample sizes,
really serious, big quality they used to do.
And they understood the point.
In two years, they changed round.
India was one of the very few countries
where we started using.
We still stuck to black and white, of course,
because it actually shows up the diamond
without any distracting colors.
But we had little distracting
and the stories became something else.
And of course, we used Aishwarya Rai for the first time
before she became the Aishwarya Rai
in the launching of Nakshatra diamond.
And it took off all places,
some place like Coimbatore on the map,
the sales map of the world sales map.
There was a New Delhi and there was a Mumbai
and there was a Hong Kong and there was Japan
and there was some place in, I mean, Tokyo
and some place, Shanghai and of course, New York
and all those places.
And suddenly there was one Coimbatore.
One of the directors there was asking me
when we went for some briefing
or some campaign presentation,
where is this Coimbatore or something.
So they were very surprised.
So suddenly this Nakshatra changed their fortunes.
So therefore the process depended on different clients
and working with them and then working as a team within
and saying, you know, can we,
because our job is to one, I see,
not to be rude, to accept what it is.
But don't accept it 100%
because something is telling you that, you know,
we can go further than this.
There's nothing wrong with this,
but surely we can go further than this.
And therefore you give them an alternative way,
which feels better.
And sooner or later, I find people listen to it.
More often than not, people are reasonable
because they understand that you're not doing
that creative tantrum bit.
Nobody wants that, you know, I'm creative and I say,
you know, this, that kind of thing.
That's the way it is.
That's an amazing bit of,
I think even though you were bound by processes,
you never sort of allowed that to become kind of wall
that was erected in front of you.
You sort of try to get through to the client and then say,
okay, make them understand why culturally
something like this may not work here
rather than, you know, be definitive about it.
No, this is not gonna work.
I'll tell you what works.
Because you can't be absolutely sure.
And like you said, it's a process of working through
with the client.
It would have meant taking one step at a time,
coming back with the client is going against the face
of whatever, you know, his processes.
So it's a long journey for them also to accept
that something which has worked in other markets,
I have to take this chance here is not an easy thing to do.
Yeah, so it took two years in their case.
So sometimes, you know, you need to be,
it's a long game.
It's, you know, you need to sort of be patient
because you know where they're coming from.
They have their disciplines.
They're not doing it to spite you.
They're not doing it to criticize your creative
or anything like that.
They're doing it because they have,
before long before they met you,
they had their own processes anyway set in place.
So just because they meet you,
they don't have to change their whole system
of working or something like that.
The question of being a little realistic about these things.
And I don't know, I probably was successful 60% of the time
and not successful 40% of the time.
You can't always win this.
So now that you've spent time,
I'd like to now explore a bit about what it means
to be a creative boss, because you started off as a writer.
Then how do you ensure that you're able to give direction?
Because ultimately you move towards creative director
and you know, up the ladder and then your job is,
how do you ensure that you get people to deliver
and get them to understand what you're really looking for?
How would you give feedback for example?
Yeah, it's a very valuable or a very strong part
of being creative director,
that you have to one, make judgments.
And second, it's not going to always be
in the favor of the person.
And I mean, because you know,
your allegiance is to the consumer finally,
not even to the client.
I would say your allegiance is to the consumer finally.
And certainly not to the people working under you.
It doesn't mean you're treating them or something,
but they know that you are trying to evaluate on behalf.
It is a responsibility like anything else.
What helps what I'm finding then,
what I found then and what I found later also,
is that if a creative director with roughly, I don't know,
12 to 15 years of experience,
who's gone through various brands,
worked with various teams, both on the client side,
inside with very good planners, very good account directors,
very good other creative people,
you can go only so far singly and in the big brands.
There are too many people involved
in many of these decisions.
It's very difficult to go too far just by yourself.
So anybody with any creative director
with 12 to 15 years of creative direction,
I have a feeling with this kind of a background,
will have a certain amount of, what shall I say, gravitas.
They can look at an idea submitted by anybody
and they look at it and say, no, man.
It's not arrogance, it's not anything.
That experience comes all into that moment.
So I would take anybody with 15 years experience
or 20 years experience or whatever,
with honest experience of working on brands and stuff.
And they view that as you've been through those struggles.
You've been through those late nights,
you've been through those difficult clients,
you've been through all those phases.
And if I can judge in 10 seconds
and if we can tell somebody, no boss,
this is not gonna work.
I don't know, there's a chance that it may still work.
I don't know, but if I say so,
or if anybody in that position says so,
I would listen to them.
Because they are not saying it just like that.
It's just coming from somewhere.
It's coming from their own experience.
That is one part.
The other part, which I've not really shared with anybody,
okay, one first for Venus Sportcast maybe,
is that this thing about having an internal evaluation,
which I always for some reason kept secret.
I don't know why this.
It is to do with as an observation as when I was in school,
I don't know, I wrote about it last year sometime
on LinkedIn about the invention of what you call
those nicknames for other students and teachers,
especially by schoolboys.
And I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 people may have read it.
So I'll take the liberty of assuming nobody's really read it.
And there I had gone through this thing of saying
that kids are very inventive.
They are of course cruel.
So I won't get into the ethics of whether
it's right to nickname somebody or not.
I'm coming in from purely the creative aspect of
how some people can do this kind of nicknaming
and other people can't.
And that's a good sign, for example.
Like we had a kid in school,
I don't know when we were very young,
you know, who used to for some reason
keep sweating profusely much after the, you know,
game spirit was over and all.
He used to keep sweating, his face was always glistening.
And some local genius in that class called him Dalda,
which is of course a one-off cookie,
which also glistens and you know,
it's some cheaper substitute for ghee
or something like that.
Very common in many middle-class homes.
I mean, at one it works fine, it brings him down.
But the thing is, he didn't have to explain.
Everybody knew that guy.
In fact, I remember his face after so many years,
but I don't know what his real name was.
The word Dalda stuck to him.
So, as we went from school day to night,
he stayed in school.
Yes.
So, his name became Dalda.
And therefore, the fact,
I don't know who that fellow was who coined this,
but that is, I'll connect this up with what I mean
by creative evaluation in a second or in a minute.
But that was, so let's say Dalda is the first example.
Second example is there was a Sanskrit teacher of ours
who lived a little further away across the playground
in front of our school.
And then behind it was a rubbish dump
and to the right of it and left of it
was also a continuous municipal rubbish dump of some kind.
And the city used to deposit all its plastic bags
and paper and waste and all kinds of nonsense
used to be piled up over there.
And this guy lived beyond that was a main road
that Dalda went across.
And he lived in one of those lanes across the main road.
So that Sanskrit professor used to take the shortcut
of crossing that main road, getting into that dump,
going past the playground and then entering the school.
Otherwise, if you took the main road,
he would have to go like that
and come all the way around.
Which would have meant another 15, 20 minutes.
And he was already in his late 50s
and had a big stomach and everything.
And he had his dhoti and his cloth bag and all that.
And he used to come down that dump.
And in Ascades around 1030, 1040,
when a certain period ended
and the next period was about to start,
a few of us used to hang around
in the back of the class where the window oversaw
this whole expanse of rubbish.
And we would see this guy almost religiously
walking over there.
He would get down, see a mound of dirt,
which was pretty solid,
but there would be pieces of grass,
damp grass, wet marsh.
So every day all that, the topography changed marginally.
So he had to make a decision at every mound
that, okay, now I will jump over there.
And then he would jump on that.
And then he say, okay, next one over there.
And then he, so we would watch this guy doing this,
making these little decisions
and probably in seven, eight minutes he reached the school.
And some guy chose to call him Armstrong.
This was a reference to Neil Armstrong
of that first man in the moon sailing.
Where they did that little hop skip
on the moonscape.
That is the second example.
That was brilliant.
And the thing about either this Dalda or Armstrong
or the third one I'll tell you shortly
is that that guy didn't have to explain.
It is lateral enough,
but he didn't have to say I'm calling him Armstrong
because if you have to explain the creative idea,
it's not a creative idea.
When you say it enough people say,
hey, I get it and they start laughing.
Then you know that it's working.
I'm seeing something and I'm hearing you saying,
I'm saying, wow, brilliant.
That's perfect.
Like I said, I'm not getting into the ethics
of whether we should be nicknaming
or whether it's really cruel or not to be able to,
address your elders as such.
It's a separate subject.
I'm not getting it.
I'm looking at it purely from the field of.
So the third example was when I was talking about this
during a cricket match to a fellow player
from another school,
that guy laughed at when I told him they call him Armstrong.
And he gave me an example of somebody then he had,
it was a Tamil teacher of some kind,
who used to wear that dhoti tied in that very traditional way
with that, I don't know,
in the form of loose pajamas that goes,
something goes between the legs and it's in the back
and all that.
And that guy had during some part of that class,
he kept bending down and maybe that part of the dhoti
was going over some itchy part of his ankle or something.
So he used to go down and then scratch his ankle, come up.
And he used to go down, scratch his ankle and come up.
And some guy from that moment named him auto rickshaw.
Okay, no, this will only make sense to people
maybe before 2000s when the self-stowage
in the auto rickshaw were not there.
Exactly, yeah.
So this was a solid metal rod at the bottom of,
next to the driver.
And if you got inside in that man,
turn that meter and all that,
and he bent down and he yanked it twice or thrice
or before to get his lot.
That's right.
And then, the whole class burst out laughing
when this guy said after the guy had gone,
not in his ear shot of course.
So if I take these three examples,
if you look at Dalda first,
I mean, if I want to seriously look at it,
then if I look at Dalda first,
then it's the glistening of the face
versus some kitchen item at home.
Okay, you made a connection
between two really unconnected things.
Somebody's face glistening
and some oil that glistens at cooking at home.
So from somebody's face to cooking,
you've covered a distance.
So we can call that lateral.
To my mind, that seems like, okay,
if a creative guy can come up with those kinds of ideas,
maybe he earns a salary, fine, good.
I think we can pay him, it's good.
He must be able to do at least that much.
On the other hand, if somebody was periodically
or very regularly doing the Armstrong ones,
where somewhere, you look at one guy walking
in some landscape and can go all the way to the moon
and say this resembles something,
the distance is even further
between some astronomical detail
and some playground in front of you.
And if somebody is making those kinds of,
that means the distance of the jump is much further
than the distance between the face
and the cooking oil, for instance.
This is really far out.
Then you say, man, watch out,
this guy deserves a promotion
with this guy or girl or whoever is doing that kind of stuff.
Then you say, wow, that's good.
So I used to, and if somebody went auto rickshaw,
that is brilliant.
I mean, that is like absolutely,
I mean, somebody is scratching their ankle
and you can connect it with some,
we know teachers, we know their dresses,
we know their habits on the one hand,
and we've all traveled at an auto rickshaw
at another time, completely unconnected.
So therefore, this business of connecting
unconnected worlds and the distance
of the unconnected worlds matters in creative work.
The further people can travel,
and I don't know why,
but some people are able to do this
better than other people.
And I'm not a sociologist or psychologist or something.
So I don't know the person,
why is somebody able to do it, others,
I take it as they come.
When these people do it and the distance is huge,
is better, then in my mind, I always evaluate,
this is the secret I was telling you that,
you know, even my own ideas, the next day,
at the time of creating any idea,
everything seems fantastic, in any case,
within the next five minutes.
But when you give it some pull off time
and they see it the next morning,
you feel like, what was I thinking?
So sometimes your own ideas and other people's ideas,
I've noticed that, is this, you know,
Dalda kind of idea?
Is this Armstrong kind of idea?
Or is it really an auto kind of idea?
Because many people think that being lateral
is what it's all about.
It's not, it has to also make sense,
which means the clarity must be so clear.
Like I said earlier, if other people,
you have to explain, see, I'm calling it an auto rickshaw
because then it doesn't work.
It's no longer a creative idea.
Creative idea means you went far,
you did the distance, but the listener makes no effort
in understanding what you're intending.
So basically it's your hard work or your thinking
or whatever it is of finding that lateral connection.
But the connection is made simply.
That's why, you know, I don't care for people
who can make just lateral connections.
It doesn't make any sense.
You know, I can think of this and I can think of that.
That is rubbish.
You still have to solve some problem, deliver some promise.
It still makes sense somewhere.
So therefore that has its own kind of clarity.
So I've always been on the one hand telling people,
be clear what you want to say.
And on the other hand, the opposite thing of saying,
listen, go far away from the direct kind of clarity.
Find some imaginative way of being clear.
Anyway, I've been taking maybe too much of the time.
That's, I know, I think this is one of those deep lessons.
And I hope somebody who's listening understands this.
You're not simply saying an idea should be good, better, best.
You're actually giving people reasons on
or ways in which they can evaluate something
and then figure out where it goes next.
So from whatever you've just told me,
I think there's an element of culture.
There's an element of context.
And there's an element of shared experiences.
True.
So if it goes across all of these things,
then to a large extent, you can tell people,
hey, I get it.
I don't, I can use that shorthand in a film scene.
I can use it in a preset.
I can use a sound from one of these things.
Just start that off and then say, okay, you know,
just exploring where this thing could go.
Explore how somebody who's into advertising
actually decides that he wants to learn Ruby on Rails,
which if I was told learn a programming language,
I'd run a hundred miles in the other direction.
I'm very happy exploring things that I understand.
But if it means that I have to put in,
I have to understand another foundation altogether.
So how does one get to that?
Yeah, I think these kinds of things are the many things
that you don't really plan for,
at least in my life it's been like that.
I've just stumbled into things.
So this programming business is also one of those things.
Maybe there's a background to it,
if at all it means anything.
Somewhere in the 90s, you know, America was flooded.
This is the pre-Apple, pre-Microsoft days of early days
of home computers of some, I mean,
the computers were there, but they were in offices.
Computers being at home was not yet a thing then.
And there used to be these reduced versions
of something called Commodore 64 in the US
and an Amiga or something or the other.
They were not popular in India,
but there was a British equivalent at the time
in the late 80s, early 90s called ZX Spectrum.
And that was a small computer.
And we had a client called ComputerPoint,
which was launching its-
ComputerPoint, I remember this.
I remember this company.
Yeah.
So, and then we got into it and then, you know,
me and a friend got into it so much
that we used to play those very simple oddball,
but extremely addictive games.
And in the name of telling the client,
no, no, we have to understand the product
and all that kind of stuff.
We used to land up in their office
and with only the security guard there,
play till one o'clock in the night and all that,
mad times, but we used to play.
And therefore, then later on I bought one also
and it was there at home.
And then I bought books about what it is.
And then I realized that one of the things,
besides games and little things that it could do stuff
like, you know, your home accounts and very simple stuff.
And it taught you the basic language as in B-A-S-I-C,
all caps, it meant some acronym, I think.
Yeah.
And that was a language before,
I think it was there with COBOL
and all those languages and no more anywhere.
And so I had something I must have read somewhere.
I said, let me try.
And I used to write very basic programs.
You could make one little dot move
from right side of the screen to the left side of the screen
because you put in some little code
and all that sort of thing.
I found it fascinating.
If I had taught myself that this is maths
and arithmetic, I would have stopped.
But for some reason it didn't feel like it.
It felt more like a logic and stuff.
And therefore I got it.
So maybe there was some background there
because when I came to around 2010
and Apple, I was a Mac user from around 2001 till today.
And therefore I think I used their web program
to score something then.
And that again had this aspect of programming
and creating stuff on your own.
And Apple of course made everything so easy.
And then I got into something called Drupal
which was actually a content management system
which is there till today.
And of course WordPress beat it hollow
and now WordPress exceeds it.
And of course the Drupal aficionados said
that WordPress is just a blogging platform and all that.
But it's not.
WordPress is today a proper content management system
as much as Drupal is.
And somewhere while Drupal was there,
I'm not sure when it happened.
Like I said, I stumbled upon Ruby on Rails.
But given my background of not being a stranger
to this field, I read some book on,
actually a printed book ordered from Amazon
and said, what's this all about?
And I felt this is sheer logic.
It's a very, very beautiful language.
And I said, I can pick this up.
Within a month I was there, in the next three months,
I devoted two, three hours after lunch every day at office,
not to meeting clients, not for looking at work,
but to just create a program.
I just became a little mental about it
and I started doing stuff to create a workflow,
not the financial workflow, but work.
When the client briefs, what are the suggestions?
What is the meeting?
Who's the person handling it?
How does it go through the account system?
Which copywriter, which director?
Who's the studio guy?
When is the invoice go?
When is the estimate come?
And sort of at some point it went off
into the financial accounting of the accounts guys
and all that.
It was a very elaborate program,
all written in Ruby on Rails over the next three months.
And they used it for three, four years.
It was called metalbackstage.com.
And then we could, it had only,
obviously with only internal usage.
So it came about, it seems like a surprising thing
if you look at it like that,
but if you look at the various steps taken at various times,
it seemed to have fallen in place.
And then suddenly I stopped everything
and said from 17, 20, 17, 20, 18,
somewhere there I said WordPress is it.
And I've been doing a lot of WordPress.
I love it.
Okay, wonderful.
If there is a young person getting into copywriting today,
so a lot of people think that it's full of pressures,
it's full of, there's no fun in the job.
Whereas when you and I joined,
I don't think we ever looked at this as like,
is it someone is actually paying you to do it.
So what would you look at?
How would you look at,
describe advertising to someone today
in the context of today's world?
See, the thing is, whether it's today or yesterday,
the value of a good advertising creative person
or even a servicing person or whatever,
lies in their exposure to life outside of advertising.
You don't become a good advertising
by advertising, I've been studying more advertising.
Now that may be true of in civil engineering
or some other fields where you know,
learn more of civil engineering
and you become a better civil engineer.
I presume, I don't know anything about the subject,
but not in copywriting and in creative direction
and in artwork and in creating creative ideas for a brand.
You have to have a life of your own.
You should know how people are.
You should know what aunts say to aunties.
Like once I actually saw a woman looking at herself
because in the reflection of a glass,
just as an example,
because some guy in a shop where I was visiting,
the shopkeeper called her auntie
and she looked at herself at her own reflection in the mirror.
Now that I made into a thing for an ad for Godhrij dye,
for hair dye for example.
Have you become an auntie too soon?
You know, is that first trans of...
You know, those kind of things.
Therefore, if you're observing life around you,
there is enough happening.
But if you just say, I'm studying ads
to become a better ad person, it doesn't work.
Of course, you need to learn the craft, all that.
But I would say just get out of it.
Just go on travel, do something else, find out something else.
Get out of yourself.
Get out of your head.
Go and see how the world lives.
How your uncles and aunties are, how your friends are,
what elders are all about, what is the 60 plus thinking?
Whatever, get out, find out, be curious.
Like Dorothy Parker said, the best cure for...
She said the cure for boredom is curiosity.
And there is no cure for curiosity.
So, believe that.
I don't think I could have summed it up better, Narayan.
I don't think there is anything that I need to do to add to this.
It's been an exhilarating conversation.
And I'm so glad that you agreed to come on so early in the thing,
because I would have loved to probably have you in again
at a point when hopefully this thing will grow a little more
and we'll take the other parts of your life.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.