Pratik Basu tells you almost everything you may have wanted to know about how leading Indian advertising agencies

Those mad ad days





Pratik Basu tells you almost everything you may have wanted to know about how leading Indian advertising agencies were run in the 80s from a top management perspective. He also helps you to understand why most advertising professionals in those days had alcohol coursing through their veins instead of blood. Come on, wouldn't you be driven to drink if one of your biggest clients with a very generous advertising budget hoarsely whispers that he has erectile dysfunction and insists that the agency absolutely must diminish the damage it will cause to his playboy image in the media or else?
But let's start at the very beginning: our protagonist, a marketing chap, is offered a job at one of Calcutta's biggest advertising agencies. Both the salary and the designation (2nd suit at the top) are terribly attractive. The agency is in a spot of turmoil for several reasons: God (as a few idiosyncratic national heads of agencies in those days were reverentially referred to) is set to retire and has appointed his successor in Bombay. The regional heads secretly disapprove of his choice and are planning a coup. Business is tough as marketing and manufacturing firms are migrating to other states in droves thanks to the ruling Left.
To make matters even more unsettling, our protagonist has to deal with the eccentric-bordering- on-insane characters that populate this strange new world. He studies them as keenly and affectionately as Gerald Durrell would examine a deadly scorpion discovered in a shoe, and delivers solemn observations that make you chuckle.
We learn that the female of the species is deadlier than the male because not only is she treated as an equal, she also has a secret weapon to fall back on: womanly wiles, ergo tears or shameless flirtation. That when hitherto revered 'Gods' refuse to retire they are callously dismissed by their fickle worshippers as "That Old Man", and that clients judge agencies not merely on their creative abilities but the lavish parties they throw.
The style is faintly reminiscent of PG Wodehouse with witty long-winded sentences and biblical and classical references thrown in for good measure.
Style, however, is not everything — action is also required to compel the reader to turn the pages rapidly enough to stir up a light refreshing breeze. There are just a few side-splittingly funny situations in the novel and Basu fails to exploit them to the fullest. As a result of which there is a fair amount of rambling and that's a bit of a downer. Well, just a wee bit.
I'd like to end on an upper, though: if you were part of the advertising fraternity in the 80s or 90s there's a very special surprise thrown in for you: there are hilarious descriptions of several people you may recognise despite Basu's tongue-in-cheek declaration that, "If someone were still to find a resemblance with people real and known, then the fault must lie with that person's deductive abilities, not my imagination."