The Pursuit of Bollyness – I

There are some who have the ability to catnap anytime, anywhere.

An enviable trait, unless they happen to be sitting next to you at a movie show.

Having snoozed peacefully through the crucial part of a thriller*, they awake newly refreshed, demanding that you fill them in on the intricacies of the plot.

* A Hindi movie allows a lot of opportunity for the sleep deprived, as the average flick is a three-hour long saga. At least.

Knowing they won’t connect with the rest of the movie unless you do, you summon all your extempore précis skills to give an expert synopsis of the story so far, in a very audible whisper.

How the (tycoon) male action lead or the “hero” – actual age 45, playing 28, in a complicated flashback recalls how he met and fell for the yet-to-be brutally murdered (impoverished & orphaned) female lead – actual age 16, playing 22, ultimately executing violent, gory revenge to the evil doer. Note to global readers: Yes, such movies exist.

If you’re lucky, a Hindi song starts just in time, sparing you homicidal glances from neighbours as you yak on.

Such an audience is however an exception. The average Hindi movie addict would willingly watch any movie released, over and over again, with complete attention.

Entertainment apart, Bollywood fascinates one and all.

If there is a common element that brings people together – young and old, homemaker and the career oriented, scientist and DJ, teacher and socialite, whether slumdog or penthouse millionaire, man and woman, it has to be the Hindi Movie. Or even, the Hindi movie star.

Our clients were no different.

They would simply lose their heads at the dizzying thought of attending their ad film shoot with a leading luminary of Bollywood.

Throwing caution and indeed, their budgets to the winds, they were suddenly willing to overlook a lot of past parsimony.

Having spent the last two quarters of the year haggling over not having to hike budgets, employee bonuses and even employee strength, they were categorically ready to pay obscene amounts to see their favourite film star shooting loving glances at or cuddling their bottle of hair oil, shampoo, toilet bleach, wall paint, soap or toothpaste as the case may be. All permanently frozen in celluloid.

Just in time for boosting the bottomline, final quarter. I refer ofcourse to the balance sheet bottomline, as in, profits. Not keeping your bottom in shape by dancing to the latest Bollywood track. Don’t be offended. This clarification is meant more for a certain cross section of ex-clients who may be reading this, like the one written about here, not you. Just pre-empting queries, as it were.

In some cases, we were able to make their dreams come true – not so much we, but the media pundits who ruled all things Bollywood – the well connected ad folks and the production houses, including the occasional Bolly movie director, like Karan Sabjan who also made ad films on the side just for fun and some pocket change. Given that he had direct access to most of the top stars, he was one of our most popular and in demand ad makers.

On this day, one of our cow belt* clients settled himself down for our next meeting. He headed a (largely) junk food company that was mid-sized, unheard of in the West zone, but popular in the North.

* It was interesting to discover that the media world referred to the certain sections of the North and Central zone of India as the “cow belt”. This may give a general impression of dairy farming, rustic poverty and the simple life, which is indeed the common man’s way of life in rural India. However, the entrepreneurs that belonged to the ‘cow belt’ are multi-millionaires to say the least. Their lifestyles are luxurious owing to the subsidies they enjoy as “farmers” and forget to pass on to their farm labourers. Modern day zamindars, they own sprawling designer farmhouses, a fleet of cars, and their wives would put any fashionista to shame given her accumulated knowledge and wealth of international designer labels. Don’t believe me? Go see. No surprise that Indians hold the largest number of offshore Swiss bank accounts.

“I want Amibath Machchan*“, said Mr. Prakash, once ensconced comfortably in our conference room. His bratty offspring, let’s call him Bottompincher Jatin or BJ, was busy settling his array of four cell phones in front of him. Two of them were the latest models of mobiles, just launched. Each meeting that he attended once a month, at least two of his phones were replaced by a newer model.

* Since am painstakingly disguising all identities here, this is just to keep up with the overall theme.

Amibath Machchan also known as the Big M, is one of the leading stars here. Which is an understatement as anyone knows. For those who are visiting our planet from elsewhere in the universe and still haven’t understood his significance, it would suffice to say that in certain parts of India, he had temples dedicated to him, with people garlanding his effigy.

I looked over at LL and he at me. For once, we were in empathy.

“Well, he’s certainly the biggest”, said LL. What he meant is, the Big M had been around since the last 30 (or was it 40?) odd years, having in no way eroded his appeal. Nor his price.

He was also known as the King of endorsements. Not wishful thinking, in this case.

A fact we were sure Mr. P was missing the significance of – financially speaking.

“Exactly why he would be perrrrfect ji. Our sweets are the best and so is he. A best to best* tie-up, as you always say, ha!”, countered Mr. Prakash. “Besides, he’s doing Badur’s ads! If he doesn’t mind selling their hair oil, mosquito repellent and Gawd knows what else, then he should certainly have no problem with our brand. Everything of superb quality! What say Jatin?” BJ, jolted from his unmoving gaze at his new palm pilot, nodded.

* The term we used was ‘leader to leader’. Not quite ‘best to best’, but I guess Mr. P had absorbed the point well, which is the important thing.

Badur was Mr. Prakash’s pet bugbear. Now, we happened to have heard only last week from Karan Sabjan, the exact amount Big M had negotiated for the Badur campaign for a two year exclusive. Nothing less than Rs. 12 crores. Or 120 million.

Mr. Prakash’s new brand wasn’t even selling that much yet. Realistically it wouldn’t, even for the next 5 years.

This was going to be difficult. There was no way of breaking it gently to Mr. Prakash.

He was one of those obstinate ones who once having made up their minds, considered it unthinkable to change it. Failure on our part to follow his decree would mean loss of face for him, and loss of revenue for us. Why? Because he’d drop our consultancy like a hot brick.

Bitten by the Bollywood bug, he’d have to be weaned off some other way. It was easy to guess why he’d succumbed. All the top actors were on an endorsing spree, from male innerwear to outerwear, shoes to hair gel, perfumes to pens. Small wonder that Mr. P felt the urge to take a flying leap onto the celebrity bandwagon.

“Okay, we’ll see what we can do”, said LL, taking the easy way out.

I let my jaw get back to normal position before the client could notice.

We’d ended the meeting satisfactorily. I backed out of the room, making sure never to face my bottomline, er, behind towards BJ. The small matter remained however, of signing up Big M for Mr. Prakash’s cow belt brands.

If A. Machchan could be called the King of Endorsements, and M. Jackson the King of Pop, then that would make LL the undisputed King of Manipulation.

If anyone could do this, he could. It was time to wag the dog.

To be continued…

Hex and the City

After week upon week of meeting heads of businesses big and small, the psyche of entrepreneurs still fascinated.

I never tired of discovering anew another facet to their personality and work ethic. To add to this, the sheer variety of personalities was mind boggling, to say the least.

Some were their polished best and others downright boorish. However, it seemed that though entrepreneurs may differ widely in appearance, mannerisms and behaviour, they all had something in common. Canny business sense, a no-nonsense risk-taker’s ability and all the qualities that various management gurus have written more knowledgeably about.

Knowing that sound business sense was the only driving force behind anything the directors decreed, I puzzled long and hard over what could be the logic and reasoning behind their decisions.

The reason I bothered with bending my mind towards this, is that I was interested in what’s called Acquired Learning*. Which is what I saw as a job perk, given that we didn’t have anything else that could be labelled such.

*In case anyone’s planning to acquire learning from me, note how I made the term sound like management-speak just by using caps. Refer to the “Glossary of Marrkit’s Marketing Terms/ Office Jargon” section from the Archives for the definition of Acquired Learning.

Let me explain what I mean. For instance, one of our flamboyant clients, Mr. Mistry, closely connected with all things Bollywood (or so he claimed), apparently paid through his nose for our services. And let us know it each time he visited, at the top of his cultured voice – which seemed to lose that polished accent at the same rate that his temper accelerated.

Watching him part with our monthly cheque due was like watching a schizophrenic will at work. He never presented it except with great reluctance, always implying that this was his last meeting with us ever. That we were leeches sucking his lifeblood away.

Each time, I watched with bated breath to see if his iron grip on the cheque would relax enough to hand it over without tearing it into two. Just like the melodramatic movies he financed, after a few minutes he was back to feeling sentimental and maudlin about his not so veiled taunts and usually ended by spewing equally liberal praise on us.

We didn’t hold this against him though, as he had great charm, was otherwise cheerful to work with and one simply could not remain annoyed with him for more than a few seconds. Not with someone who usually offered us passes for the latest A-list movie premieres. Ofcourse not.

Given this, it was odd to notice that he usually skipped two meetings a month. This was pointed out to me by LL’s EA, who was similarly puzzled.

Two meetings a month on an average was huge, as from his point of view it was a considerable financial loss.

What was more of a mystery was that his team seemed to know in advance they needn’t visit, even though he always made a last minute call to us cancelling his meeting. I know this because he had me do the tedious job of calling his team up one by one, to tell them the meeting was off. Yes, we also threw in such secretarial add-ons for our clients, especially ones like Mr. Mistry who felt that by getting us to do these small additional tasks, he was getting his money’s worth out of our firm.

His being the last meeting of the day, scheduled at the unearthly hour of 8 p.m. onwards and ending at roughly 11 p.m., I celebrated each cancellation. It meant I’d reach home while my parents were still up and not have mom suspecting I’d been doing the usual movie and dinner thing with some unidentified guy about to lead me astray. As if. I’d have killed for that sort of attention. But unfortunately, the eligible single male did not ever enter the borders of the office complex we worked out of. The sort that did make it deserve an exclusively devoted chapter – some other time.

One week, on the day Mr. Mistry’s meeting was scheduled, I made a routine reminder call to Andy, Mr. Mistry’s operations head.

“Morning Andy! Just wanted to warn you that the report you’re looking for won’t actually be ready for Mr. Mistry and you in time for today’s meeting, but it will be done day after for sure”, I said.

“No probs, Ash”, said Andy, warmly. “Send it whenever. In fact, I don’t need it today for sure. Take your time.”

Hoping that Mr. Mistry would take this news as breezily as Andy had, I decided to bite the bullet and break the bad news to him in person. “That’s great Andy, but I’d still better speak to Mr. Mistry now and explain why.”

“Oh, he’s not here. How about a movie this evening? A group of us from office are planning to see the 8 p.m. show. We have complimentary passes. Join us?”, trilled Andy.

“You’re kidding, right. Are you planning a mass bunk? Have you forgotten, your meeting with us is for today!”

“Ha ha!” sang Andy, sounding way too cheerful. “There won’t be a meeting today. Except, yeah, at the cinema.”

“Okay”, I said, “are you officially informing me that the meeting is off?”

“No”, said Andy, “Unofficially. And you didn’t hear it from me.”

“How can you be sure? And where is Mr. Mistry? Travelling?”, I asked, hoping this tale of cancellation was true and not just something to do with Andy’s quirky humour.

“No, he’s very much at his own home, watching the match.”

“Right. And we both know even cricket wouldn’t keep him away from our expensive doors”, I said, disappointed that that was all Andy was making a fuss about. “So, forget the movie.”

“You mean you were ready to make it for the movie? Cool! So am holding a pass for you”, persisted Andy, maddeningly.

“Noooo!”, I screeched, sounding a lot like Mr. Mistry at a cheque parting. “You go ahead and take on Mr. Mistry if you want, but I can’t bunk the meeting.”

“Hey chill”, said Andy, “Okay, tell me, how many meetings has he cancelled in the last three months?”

“That would be…seven at least?”, I answered, marvelling anew at this statistic.

“And what reasons did he give?”, questioned Andy.

“The usual kind, I guess”, I said, trying to remember. “Someone visiting for dinner, another important meeting, or travelling.”

“Well, that’s all bull!”

“How’s that?”

“I’ll tell you, but you can’t let onto Mr. M or anyone that you know this. And one more thing – you have to come for the show”, said Andy, cunningly.

“Sure, Andy. I do like the big screen experience. Just not at the cost of Mr. Mistry. So tell all.” I was intrigued by all this suspense and partly convinced that Andy was just wasting my time.

“What’s today’s date?” asked Andy.

“17th”, I said, wondering where this was going.

“Which adds up to the dreaded number 8. Mr. Mistry’s worst nightmare. He’s rabidly afraid of the number and his astrologer told him to never step out of the house on those days. Woooo… careful, it’s the 17th today!”, hooted Andy, irreverently.

“So, you see”, continued Andy, “He’ll never show up for a meeting on the 8th, 17th and 26th of the month. See you at the movie, then!”

Okay, well.

Sometimes there was no logic or reasoning.