BIRTH OF A STAR

As Piyush Pandey hands over the baton of Executive Chairman at Ogilvy, Chintamani Rao, Strategic Marketing and Media Consultant recounts the story of an account supervisor who rose to creative superstardom

IT WAS 1986. Piyush Pandey was an Account Supervisor working with me on, among others, Hindustan Lever. We had a brief on Sunlight Detergent Powder, on which our response was overdue. Young Piyush, meanwhile, was itching. He came to me one morning with a script he’d written. Not only was it spot on, but, back in the day when advertising was written in English by Stephanians (Piyush is one, too) and Xavierites and translated into Indian languages by freelancers, he had written it in – lo! and behold – Hindi.

We were out of time and we had a solution in hand, so, like a good account man, even at the risk of annoying our beloved Creative chief Suresh Mullick, I told him to go ahead. He developed that script and two others, and off we went to present them.

Sanjay Khosla (later a big cheese at Kraft) was the client. He liked the scripts and approved them, but was curious. Never before had the agency presented work in anything except English. He asked who the writer was. Naively unprepared for the question, we shuffled our feet and mumbled something about this new guy we had.

I went to Suresh and confessed. Far from being upset, he guided Piyush to refine the scripts, supported him, and gave him full Creative responsibility to make the three films for Sunlight. (That was Suresh!)

And that, boys and girls, was how Piyush Pandey wrote and made his first ads, as an Account Supervisor.

It naturally followed that he was called on now and then for his input on one brief or another. He went on to work on Fevicol (work much lauded and much awarded over the years), Luna mopeds, and, of course, Sunlight. His big breakthrough came in 1988, when he wrote the unforgettable Mile Sur lyrics, for the second of Suresh Mullick’s three Independence Day films.