A leaking verandah had smudged Piyush Pandey’s script when he was ruminating under a window ledge. That innocuous every day event would give him the idea of a son forcing a father on his deathbed to add zeros to his will — while a water drop erases the all-important ‘1’ at the start of the amount. It’s how ‘Dr Fixit’ waterproofing joined legions of other brands — from Cadbury’s humming-word ‘kuch khaas hai’ to Asian Paints’ sentimental festive film and Fevicol’s hoot of inseparable sketches — in getting etched on minds.
Pandey’s old friend and former Test opener Arun Lal had jingles running in his mind on Friday, since the time he heard about his death. Besides a mourning universe of Indian advertising, the legendary adman, who died at 70, left behind cricket-mates from his college years, who first witnessed turns of his phrases and chuckling puns on the field, some of which grew into iconic campaigns in later years.
But Pandey’s autobiography starts with what he loved about cricket.
Jaipur knew of an aggressive batsman and a chatty wicketkeeper with pithy pointers well before MS Dhoni arrived. Pandey’s first love might have been words in advertising copy, but his eternal rom-com ran with cricket, starting at St Xavier’s in Jaipur where he was on the school’s cricket team with future BCCI administrator Amrit Mathur.
At Delhi’s St Stephen’s College, his chirpiness during their annual derbies with Hindu College, had a star-studded audience in 1978, with his team comprising historian and author Ramachandra Guha, first class players Subhash Sharma and Rajinder Amarnath, along with Lal and Mathur.
“You might not be able to print this but you can try,” went the preamble of Lal’s favourite Pandey anecdote as he bid adieu to ‘Buddy’, his former teammate and 6 am cricket confidant, who would ring him up at dawn to guffaw about the latest thing that amused him about the sport or showbiz. Pandey, Lal says, was a gem of a guy, an ad professional of integrity who wove magic with earthy, Indian, Hindi ideas, but who loved crude, humorous repartee when playing cricket.
Back in the 1970s, Stephen’s-Hindu matches went on for five days “like Tests”, Lal says, and were unofficially declared holidays, so everyone could turn up to cheer. “During one match, the Hindu College captain complained that one of our bowlers was chucking. The umpire paid no heed, so he started screaming, ‘The f***** is chucking.’ Piyush calmly said from behind the wicket, ‘No, the chucker is f******’,” recalls Lal. “His humour was understated, and what others took four lines to say, he could scrunch into one,” he adds.
The ad world will miss his grounded, earthy wit, but Lal says, “Cricket missed out on an aggressive batsman at No.6, a terrific man to have in the team, because he chose advertising where he became iconic”.
While Pandey would also pen important messaging, like for polio vaccination and anti-smoking public service announcements towards cancer prevention, it was in how he made everyday products accessible by dipping into Hindi, that lay his charm.
Politician Shashi Tharoor and historian Mukul Kesavan were Pandey’s contemporaries, but he stood out for his self-assured presence in this erudite English milieu, while being comfortable with Hindi and raising a laugh-riot with his puns and jokes. When Stephen’s team took a Delhi bus, he was known to prattle away to a blushing conductor, “I-S-B-T, ba-jao see-ti.” After West Indies won the 1979 World Cup, Stephen’s cricket would be rollicking with his catchy, “West Indies are holders. They have Holding” ditty.
Guha calls him the “M S Dhoni of Indian advertising”, for vernacularising his profession in the way Dhoni did for cricket. The Dhoni analogy ran through both his cricket (he played Ranji for Rajasthan), and advertising career.
“Cricketers back then were concentrated in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, and most came from playing University cricket,” explains Guha. “Similarly, advertising was ruled by the likes of Mike Khanna, Alyque Padamsee and Mohammed Khan, who worked in a westernised, very English space. But Piyush came from the middle class, and had a hang of the popular mass idiom in Hindi. That’s why M S Dhoni.”
Their bond formed over travel and play from college cricket back in 1979, changed to banter on ducks Guha scored and catches Pandey dropped — the puns continue to ring in chuckles after 40 years.
Lal would often receive 6 am calls to make light of the most serious cricket developments. “You know why Sridevi won’t marry you?” he asked Lal one day. “Because she doesn’t want to become Sri Devi Lal!”
“It was college boy silly humour and he was mad, but it’s how he saw life — not taking it seriously. He never had favourites in cricket. He admired a performance. His philosophy — take it easy, who the hell are you, anyway?” Lal recalls, adding that Pandey was averse to making his successful career his whole personality.
Pandey made good his college promise to Lal of working alongside him, following him to a tea company. “Even when he was in client servicing and before he joined creative, he insisted that advertising wasn’t only about selling a product, he said the target audience must love the ad, which shouldn’t need fancy gimmicks. He could cry hearing an emotional story, and we both believed that ESPN-Star, which in those days treated Hindi like a stepbrother, needed to open up to a vernacular audience. They spent huge money on English content, but their ads were 80-90 per cent Hindi,” Lal recalls.
It wasn’t uncommon for Pandey to visit fish markets and vegetable mandis, and gently listen to conversations between the sellers and vendors to understand the pulse of the people. “You are selling nothing if you don’t touch hearts,” he often told Lal.
Former BCCI administrator Amrit Mathur says Pandey betrayed no hints of his inclination to get into advertising, though he came from a family that loved music, theatre and culture. But he was a master of wit and wickets, something that became unforgettable in the 1994 Cadbury ad. “It captured the spirit of freedom, where the girl dances onto the field after a six. Buddy loved cricket and mastered the ad world,” Mathur says.
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