Serving the nation, one bikini at a time

Sitting in a bus, in the sweltering heat, just a distant echo of the “la-la-la-la-la” could conjure up visions of a cheerful woman in a green bikini. I was, in fact, in charge of those green bikinis, for a brief period, while working as a trainee at Lintas. They were kept in a cupboard, which was under my jurisdiction, along with double-sized wooden soap dummies and carbon copies of estimates. I had to bring out the bikinis when required, but no one ever invited me to any of the shoots. Sometimes, they would discuss the shoot in front of me. It was cruel and inhuman. I quit soon after. However, I stayed on in advertising, which was just as well, because the good times were about to begin.

They began with Narasimha Rao (who looked like he was constantly nursing some secret sorrow); he opened the floodgates. Suddenly there was so much to buy! We were rushing from shop to shop, credit cards clutched in our sweaty hands. As we travelled from one shop to another, men would leap at us from roadside canopies, and give us more credit cards. After a while, they parked inside shops, thus saving themselves the cost of canopies. We were surrounded by goodies, and we had the plastic to buy them with. We had decades of pent-up deprivation to make up for.

Soon after Rao exited, a bright woman named Anuja Chauhan summed it up for us. She coined a slogan for Pepsi: Yeh Dil Maange More! It captured the spirit of an age. In the Coke vs Pepsi wars, which have put the children of many admen through college, Pepsi won this round hands down. Coke, in comparison, was rather flat. Their initial films in India were a series of National Geographic type montages, showcasing Incredible India through cricket and picturesque turbans. Since we already lived there, we were not impressed. Pepsi, on the other hand, was telling us something that we had just begun to feel in our hearts. We were surrounded by good things, it was okay to want them. Greed was good.

This was also the time when we went global. Suddenly, we were a market. Foreigners loved us. They came by the plane-load, seeking new customers. We felt that it was our patriotic duty to fan the flames. I made a lot of presentations to multinationals in those days, and we laid it on lavishly. We usually started with an audio-visual clip, or curtain raiser, which featured a Rajasthani girl, the Taj Mahal, and a villager speaking on a mobile phone, backed by peppy music in which tabla, drums and bass guitar represented a perfect fusion of East and West.

Then we hit them with the PowerPoint. The PowerPoint was where we brought their dreams alive. “The Great Indian Middle Class” was a favourite, and over the years, the numbers grew much faster than the actual population, from a 100 million to 200-300 million, and all of them mad keen to buy washing machines. The numbers tended to fluctuate wildly. Sometimes, we mixed up individuals and households. We provided, as support, reports from newspapers and magazines, who were by and large equally clueless. No market has ever expanded as rapidly as the Indian market in the early ’90s.

Another good one was per capita consumption, where the story would go something like this. If per capita beer consumption in Germany is 6,000 litres, we would say, and that in India it’s three, imagine how big the market will be once it goes up to just 50? They would imagine it, and get quite excited.

We also spent a lot of time selling our women. I, myself, must have made at least 50 presentations on the subject of “The New Indian Woman”, who was a unique amalgam of tradition and modernity; wearing jeans at home, but saris in front of her in-laws. This gave us an opportunity to play the Liril commercial, followed by one for Keo Karpin, to demonstrate the diversity. Many of these presentations that I made were over 200 slides long. People often begged for mercy, but I pretended not to hear them.

In this way, we served the nation, bringing in precious foreign exchange, although the nation has never thanked us. It was a service we performed in the shadows, often at great personal cost. The aftermath was not always good. Many of these multinationals would come to discover, for example, that the market for pink champagne was not as large as they had been led to believe. Some of them rolled up their tents and left, cursing, but most dropped prices and hung on. We’re good friends now, although somewhat wiser. They never ask for per capita data any more.

Shovon Chowdhury’s latest novel, Murder With Bengali Characteristics, is set in a Bengal occupied by China.