The Chakki Walla

 
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The Chakki Walla

            “Why in the world did I not know you better in HTA?”

            That was my friend, Ranen Basu, three days ago in an email, posing more or less the same question that Rajiv Desai and I have been asking each other (usually after our third drink) over the past couple of years that we have been meeting in Goa.

            I offered Ranen an offhand answer: The Chakki Walla.

            You remember this fellow, the chakki walla. I do. I would go every week, sent by my mother, lugging a bag of wheat to the local flourmill. He was there, this chakki walla banging his chakki with a metal piece in a convincing rumba rhythm to loosen the flour sticking to the insides of the mill. He was covered all over in fine white flour -- every micrometer of his body from head to toe – lips, eyelashes, the hair in his nostrils and ears all sprayed an even white. The only colour you saw on him was the reddish brown of his paan-stained teeth when he smiled and the black of his pupils in between blinks; the whites of his eyes merging with the rest of him. A marble figure in motion.

            I remember the day I met him on the street. He waved and smiled at me. I didn’t recognize him. He stopped and greeted me with a namaskar. Hesitantly I did the same. He could see that I did not know who he was and I saw the hurt in his face. “Kya baba. Pehchana nahin?Bhikubhaiyya. Chakki wala.” He was a complete stranger to me.

            I was seeing the chakki wala every week for years. I was meeting Bhikubhaiyya for the first time that day!

                        I spent four decades in that chakki called Advertising before I retired in 2002. I worked with the finest of writers, art directors, illustrators, strategic planners, media planners and client servicing directors; often through the night to meet those unreasonable deadlines. We banged our heads to the rumba rhythm of crazy concepts stubbornly sticking to the insides of our crania, sharing the labour pains of ideation, arguing and fighting over differing points of view as if nothing else mattered. We saw in each other the passion to grind out a grand idea. So then, we were covering ourselves over with that fine flour of our profession. We looked at each other through that powdery haze of admiration and awe. We saw all that brilliance, the tweaked madness, the energy, the feverish competition and the dogged ambition of some. And we missed the real person hiding behind all that advertising stardust.

            Right?

            I am not so sure. Maybe I am getting a little carried away by an analogy that’s seductive and certainly partially spurious because, to be honest, it does not apply to everyone with equal neatness. Friend, Mohan Lalwani is the same guy today as he was in HTA of the 90s. He slams you with the same embarrassing, shocking and intimately personal provocations as he did when he was Account Director on Lever brands. No amount of professional flour can hide that Lalwani mischief. Randhir Behl’s camaraderie is as hurtful when he slaps a hard and hearty “Hi!” on your back today as it was 30 years ago. I’d recognize him twenty years from now with my eyes closed and my hearing aid (if I needed one then) turned down. The Randhir you saw then is the Randhir you meet today.

            I don’t know if I might say the same of Rui Menezes, Deepa Kakkar, Sudhir Deokar, Prabhakar Mundkur, Anu Bhatia and a few others. Unchanged melodies? Maybe not. And what about Sheila Syed, Ketaki Gupte, Sunil Lulla, Albert Almeida, Rambha Mankame and, for that matter, yours truly. I have been meeting them over the years, some of them recently and I observe new facets of personality and character. I could say with Ranen, “Why in the world did I not know you better in HTA?” But I don’t. I know that it is not something that I missed seeing in them then. It is just that I see something new today – another talent, a new mellowness, another level of maturity, openness, conviviality or just a new demeanour added on by their life’s experiences, conscious personal development and age. An evolution.

            Time has become the new chakki.

            I discard too the idea that the more extroverted are the ones who seem unchanged, their projected behaviour and social interaction remaining constant at all times. I reconcile myself instead to a more obvious, less attractive explanation of the perceived change or constancy. It is simply a matter of the nature and closeness of our interactions then and now.

            For instance, Rajiv and I saw each other only at Executive Committee Meetings with backslapping hellos for openers followed by two days of earnest dickering over product, processes and profit. Evenings, dipped in overproof beverage fooled us into believing that we were letting our hair down. Perhaps some of us did. Rajiv and I had little interaction where day-to-day work was concerned, whereas Ranen and I also worked on some corporate and training assignments together. With our offices in the same building, we met almost every day; some of the time over work; most of the time over prawn gussi and fried fish at Mahesh.

            There are so many with whom I worked very closely; people I hold in great regard and much affection – In Delhi, Nikhil, Kamal, Ashok, Vandana, Denis Joseph, Alex Kuruvilla, Aman Nath, Pulak Biswas… and in Bombay, Claree, Warner, Sawant, Bawker, Bhagwan, Ananda, Anita, Sattar and Anwar Ali Khan, LVK, David Innis, and in the other offices, Srirup, Dharen Chadda, Chaks, Pops, Indu … and Oh so many! I have not met them for years. Of course, there are chances that we will meet some time in the near future; and when we do, I wonder if we will say to each other, like Ranen Basu: “Why in the world did I not know you better in HTA?”

            Or will it be: “Hey! You haven’t changed one bit!”