Category: From Saffron – The Insider Magazine

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.

Having spent my impressionable years in the stimulating company of the greatest fictional detectives ever conceived, held in thrall – often till late in the night, reading by torchlight under a cover so as not to awaken my parents who had declared “Lights out” hours earlier – by the honed, observational skills and brilliant deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes or the meticulous methodology and psychological insight of Hercule Poirot, I have come to believe that some things are sacred and when they cease to be, their “good is oft interred with their bones” (as Mark Antony famously mouthed in Act 3 Scene 2 of the Bard’s Julius C and, with more such pithy observations, managed to turn the tables on the dagger-wielding Brutus – of “Et tu, Brute” fame – who had shown the early advantage). And that is as it should be, the memory of the good preserved with veneration and awe, honoured and genuflected upon from time to time, usually on the birth or death anniversaries of their creators, or when the BBC deigns to do a filmic revival faithful to the original conceptualizations as only the BBC knows how.

Which is why this new, burgeoning trend of the estates (read “inheritors”) of the matchless legacies of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming and, the most blasphemous of all, even “PG,” commissioning (quite the appropriate word this, because the endeavour is nothing but crass commercial enterprise disguised as homage) contemporary writers to resurrect the creations of authors long dead, fills me, first, with anticipation, dread, soon after and, finally, deep dissatisfaction.

Take, for example, one such recent publication by an author who, for purposes of propriety and discretion, will remain nameless, that digs up Poirot from the grave that Christie consigned him to in Curtain and, quite literally, hangs him out to dry, brilliantined hair, waxed moustache and all. Touted as a publishing event to rival The Second Coming (which wasn’t a publishing event but quite momentous nonetheless), it is an abomination to readers like me who, having devoured the 33 novels and 54 short stories that comprise the original Poirot inheritance were rewarded for our loyalty by David Suchet’s pitch-perfect, 25-year, television portrayal of the Belgian detective with the egg-shaped head and character idiosyncrasies far too many to mention, not the least being an abhorrence for dust, a speck of which, according to his loyal, long-suffering companion, Captain Hastings, would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound!

In his exhumed incarnation, Poirot is almost unrecognizable: he is overbearing and verbose, his mouth doing substantially more work than his legendary “little grey cells;” his idiomatic English and vocabulary have uncharacteristically improved beyond any recognition; his reasoning is obfuscating to the point of being irritating and when he does deliver the grand denouement, it smacks more of whimsy than logic. And the plot, while tipping its hat at Christie’s classic modus operandi – the evils and misdeeds of the past echoing in the crimes and misdemeanours of the present – is so far-fetched and fanciful that even poor Poirot, no doubt debilitated by his protracted residence six feet under and having to permanently carry, even to the extent of sharing temporary lodgings with him, a seemingly unoccupied Scotland Yard man called Catchpool (after Captain Hastings, Catchpool? Really?) flounders, which probably explains why his ponderous, almost incoherent, reasoning at the end of the adventure sounds convoluted and totally implausible.

The best fictional detectives – Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Nero Wolfe, Jules Maigret, Peter Wimsey, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade – have the ability not only to challenge our brain to solve a puzzle before they do but, by transporting us to the here and now of their situation, invoke our imagination to be at one with theirs, our eye for detail as sharp and our memories as accurate, thereby making the suspense of the whodunit more gripping, the puzzle more fascinating and the eventual solution more participative. To be able to do that requires a talent and originality of thought far greater than what a counterfeiter can reproduce however much of an official sanction he or she might have from the respective legacy holders.

Like sleeping dogs, dead detectives must be allowed to lie, their inheritance intact, undiluted and untainted.