Category: From Saffron – The Insider Magazine

Coming as I do from an Army background, my father a senior pathologist in the medical corps, I had my fair share of residential relocations growing up, each change of city meaning a change of educational institution and the tectonic shifts that went with it – making new friends, adapting to new teaching methods, playing catch-up on the syllabus (for no school is ever at the same level of progress as another, particularly half way through an academic year), managing the expectations of a new set of teachers and adjusting to the new set of foibles and idiosyncrasies they came with – though, truth be told, a doctor in the army, particularly one with the seniority my dad had when my schooling required me to be resident in one location for at least three years at a stretch, is much less booted about than his counterparts in, say, the armoured corps, artillery, infantry or border security forces where you can consider yourself lucky if you aren’t ordered to pack your bags and head for the next temporary home every eighteen months or so, with or without your family.

Despite the relative stability of my Alma Mater years (in physical terms if not mental), I find myself, without any discernible effort on my part, an unwitting (and, dare I say, reluctant?) member of four separate alumni associations. When you add to that the several organizations I have worked for in a career, checkered of sorts, spanning three decades that have robust and active “past employee” associations of their own, then, at any point of time, I am automatically subscribed to at least eight separate newsletter services, not to mention the Facebook pages and the Yahoo and Whatsapp chat groups that go with them.

With the instant access to one’s target audience that current technology provides, the narcissistic and exhibitionistic impulses it inflames and the subconscious creative urges it inveigles out of even the least right-brained individuals, I am frequently drowned in an unbridled, tsunami-like barrage of electronic mail, posts, texts and tweets from active alumni who, on the evidence of their activity on social media, have nothing better to do with their time than inhabit this virtual world and yearningly reminisce about the good old days.

To annotate their fading memories, they unearth monochrome photographs from long-forgotten albums of you looking 25 years younger (which you probably were when those photos were taken) or you, caught in an unguarded and (invariably) embarrassing moment looking like something you wouldn’t ever want to be reminded of let alone have flaunted publicly. Borrowed quotations, embellished with what are thought to be appropriate images in case one were to miss their deeper significance, are shared like a morning prayer as are meandering jokes that require one to scroll down endlessly to reach the punch lines, apparently to heighten their impact on senses that, by now, are likely to have been rendered numb by the preceding plethora of texts, notifications and illustrated annotations. To exemplify that they aren’t always living in the past, they post images of alumni parties (in cities where their strength is large enough to justify them) where, if the array of fine whiskies and wines and magnified close-ups of exotic cuisines are anything to go by, everyone should be having a whale of a time time, though, on the basis of photographs alone, there is little evidence of the energy and joie de vivre that are thought to accompany such splendorous occasions, which still does not mean you won’t be getting an invitation to next year’s country house/5-star hotel/exotic location gathering of the clan, despite your not having attended the preceding 25.

And, as a guilty counterpoint to the fond recollections and hedonistic revelry, you have the occasional “In Memorium” that, like the requiem Lord Tennyson wrote for his beloved Cambridge friend – though not in anywhere near the same lyrical terms – announces the passing of a former colleague and, in so doing, reminds you of your own mortality, as if such reminders of one’s impermanence were needed.

At the risk of giving offence to the hundreds who have voluntarily welcomed me to the club, befriended me without prejudgment or query, put me on their group lists and shared their world ungrudgingly with me, even to the extent of introducing me to their wives, sons, daughters, grandchildren, persons most revered, traits least liked, habits, hobbies, political opinions, religious beliefs, most favoured restaurants and least preferred travel destinations, I must say, like Groucho Marx did years before me in words more appropriate than I can ever hope to muster, I don’t want to belong to any Club that will accept people like me as a member, not if the raison d’être of its existence is to relive the past for I have neither the memory nor the affinity for it.

Or, it could simply be that with the sands of time running down, I would rather be living the moment than mourning, like poor Mr Engelbert Humperdinck, the way it used to be.

As any regular subscriber to this magazine would have ample experience of, all parties, even when an imported DJ is not belting out popular, electronically altered Bollywood hits with an enthusiasm that borders on the manic, have ambient noise, the kind that fills the blanks when conversations dangle, eases the embarrassment when someone forgets the punch line to a joke that he’s primed his audience for (or, worse still, elicits no spontaneous laughter after delivering it dramatically) and dissipates the tension when someone commits a faux pas by relaying something one’s not supposed to know (or has been sworn into silence to keep secret). The decibel level of ambient noise is directly proportional to the collective intake of ethanol (or, inversely, to the pace at which levels of various distinctively shaped bottles drop), with voices seeming to become more booming, laughter more raucous, glasses clinking more noisily, crockery crashing to the floor more thunderously, despite the wall-to-wall carpeting, whispered instructions to floating waiters sounding louder and even the air-conditioning – an unobtrusive hum till moments ago – seeming to assume a stentorian, invasive character.

Amidst this Bacchanalian revelry, it is, indeed, a brave person who, possibly by dint of having drawn the shortest straw and, consequently, nominated, against one’s wishes and proclivities, the role of designated driver for the evening, has to retain his balance among people who’ve for the most part lost theirs, calling upon the patience of a Job to circumnavigate the obstacles that passing inebriates are inclined to throw his way.

First, there’s the inebriate with the galling propensity to endlessly repeat a phrase entrapped in his (or her, because one thing intoxication is not, it is not gender specific) befuddled brain, as if it were on an endless loop, like a mantra, with even the most innocent sounding set of words tending to assume sinister connotations with each repetition, more so, if repeated in a descending order of lucidity, a simple “So glad to meet you starting as an expression of mild gratitude and ending on a tone of impending menace.

Worse still for the unfortified if it’s a whole paragraph, usually beginning with a rhetorical “Did I tell you?” that’s trapped in the woozy cerebrum, not just a single phrase, and, undeterred by your protestations that, indeed, you’ve heard it before, an attempt at a hasty exit defeated by a lunging grab of your arm, the story unfolds for the nth time from what the inebriate believes is the beginning but what you know for certain is penance for sins you’ve committed from time immemorial, absolution coming only when the tipsy teller of tales deviates from his narrative into an oblivion from which there’s no return, still clutching your arm – or any other accessible part of your anatomy – as a drowning man might a lifebuoy.

Second, there are those whose libidos are unfastened by drink, amorous instincts fanned by the spirits coursing in their veins and reaching parts even Heineken would be hard put to reach and providing a plausible excuse, if one were ever needed, for the irresponsibility of the actions to follow, viz. declaring open season on members of the opposite gender which, generally, would entail grabbing with friendly intent, embracing with more affectionate purpose and slobbering upon with somewhat less convivial consequence. Thankfully, such inebriates have a short lifecycle, like candles in the wind, their ardour artificially pumped up by a certain measure of the spirituous stuff that, if even marginally surpassed, has the exact reverse effect, swiftly dissipating all amatory inclinations just the way a tiny pinprick renders the biggest balloon flightless.

The third is the happy inebriate who, with continued fortification and approaching intoxication, gets increasingly jolly and, like Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice, decides (involuntarily, I would imagine) that if the world’s a stage where every man must play a part, then he would play the fool’s and with mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.

In my judgment, there are three stages to a happy inebriate: the first, when the mind is rousingly liberated making for coruscating wit and scintillating conversational repartee. The second stage is when the happiness quotient remains undiminished but the mind, though still open, is incapable of the focus required to engage in complex verbal jousting and, with impairment of the brain’s capacity to receive, analyse and respond to intellectual data, the accumulated happiness is channelled into acts of physical comedy of the pie-in-the-face, chewing-serviettes, putting-cutlery-in-mouth-to-distend-cheeks and kissing-every-hand-that-comes-one’s-way category, the kind that Rajendernath was famous for in the films of the Sixties when he sat on every birthday cake that happened to be in his close proximity to the great joy of the bakers of Bombay. The third is the stage of oblivion when the not-so-happy-any-longer inebriate makes a dramatic exit – from the world, so to speak – in a flurry of unarticulated action, usually not of the voluntary kind though, truth be told, the three stages of the cheerful dipso are not always distinguishable, the journey from life and soul of the party to crumpled clothes collapsed on a sofa often seamless with no detectable break in-between – stirred but not shaken and then, senseless and silent.

Contrary to the expectation that my retirement years would stretch lazily before me, Time hanging heavy, teasing me with endless opportunities to luxuriate in the delight of doing the things one missed doing in one’s working days, at a pace of one’s own choosing, with no deadlines to stress over (except this magazine’s chief editor’s), I find every succeeding year passing at a speed faster than the previous one, bringing with each changeover the inescapable realization that one’s memory bank is almost full and not many more can be created and stored unless some of the earlier ones are relived one last time and then permanently erased, like, for example, my memories of the frenzied partying that used to accompany the three months of genuine winter Calcutta once had.

In the days before they lost their free spirit and engaging unpredictability to become client lackeys, advertising agencies were differentiated as much by their creative output as their ability to throw parties, all their misdemeanours forgiven on the day of reckoning (and contract renewal), except if they had handled a party ineptly, particularly in a city like Calcutta that had a reputation to uphold for uninhibited and exhibitionist hedonism dating back to the Swinging ‘Sixties, albeit an esteem irredeemably tarnished by decades of local non-governance and the perennial power cuts that had become a damper for even the city’s irrepressible, party-throwing, party-going elite.

In those days, ad agencies worth their salt did not just throw a party, they organized an event, the venue usually the ballroom of a five-star hotel, which, with the limited options that Calcutta provided at the time, was almost always The Grand Hotel on Chowringhee, the sprawling lawns of Calcutta’s historical clubs – the normal venue for winter parties – diplomatically steered clear of since they were the preserve and prerogative of corporate houses and it was not politic to compete with one’s clients on their own turf, not if one were likely to out-do them in terms of extravagance and ostentation and certainly not if one wished to continue to get one’s exorbitant artwork production estimates passed without embarrassing questions or penetrative investigation.

The larger the ad agency – in perception, if not in real terms – the bigger the party, even if the agency were neck-deep in financial woes (which most in Calcutta were) because, in advertising, perception is the reality. So, the bigger your debt, the more frequent your parties: to welcome a new chief or bid farewell to an outgoing one, to laud a new campaign that had yet to prove its worthiness or bury an old one that had outlived its usefulness, to introduce an overseas visitor on a busman’s holiday or a local rewarded an overseas junket in the guise of training, to celebrate a new client acquisition or commiserate an old client loss, to congratulate itself on winning an advertising award or a client for having had the good sense to run the campaign that won it, to extol the virtues of one’s own planning techniques or critique the findings of someone else’s marketing research – there was never a shortage of reasons for an advertising agency to party.

The primary objective of an ad agency party was to be memorable – memorable defined as what you think you remember rather than what you actually remember, which, two hours into any ad agency party is virtually nothing – and, to this end, parties, in Bombay, could be elaborate, theme-based stage productions and grand masquerades or, in Delhi, all pomp and pageantry, with bhangra dancers, Shah Rukh Khan, elephants carrying palanquins, performing bears, parrot astrologers, et al or, in Calcutta, just running on high spirits – a lethal concoction of an unlimited supply of 100 proof ethanol and a live band belting out Rock favourites till the wee hours of the morning.

Often times, pondering the irrepressible need of ad agencies to outdo each other in their capacity to throw unforgettable parties, I found myself battling a conundrum: if the endgame of a party is not to remember, then how can it be memorable or, if no one recalls it, how does it pass into an agency’s folklore? By my third agency party, I had the answer: just like you have a designated driver when you go out on a premeditated binge, so does an ad agency have a designated chronicler, whose job it is to retain sobriety against all odds and recall for posterity the relevant bits and pieces of the party that will buttress the image of the agency as number one in the party stakes, which achievement alone is, often, enough for it to be perceived as number 1 in the revenue stakes, too, because, by advertising’s unbeatable and unique brand of logic, an agency’s ability to spend is directly proportional to its capacity to earn.

On such simple premises are the best-laid plans of advertising agencies founded.