When he passed away at 11.30 this morning, the world lost its best back seat driver, the business of advertising lost one of its finest client servicing executives, the musicians lost a genuine lover of melody and I lost a brother.
In the mid-80s, while we were colleagues at the once iconic ad agency ASP, we often drove down to Farraka to have a meeting with our client, NTPC. The meeting was only an excuse, as we only did tender business and it usually managed by post or courier. It was the joy of driving down to Farraka in the wee hours of the morning, do about 300 kms and reach the NTPC Guest House by noon, stopping at dhabas on the way, having a semblance of a “meeting” and then pick up prawns from the local market and by evening we had hit the road again. We had a horrible driver, Alam, who was trained to flash his lights when you wanted to over take on the highway and he took this flashing business, to even flashing at cows! I took turns to drive and covered as much distance as I could and there was KD sitting behind me (he surprisingly did not know how to drive a car, even though he handled the advertising of then India’s leading four wheeler brand, Ambassador). He kept giving instructions from the back seat as to when I should overtake, when I should flash my lights, swerve, slow down…
“Will you shut up?” I often yelled, rather always yelled at him. How can you have someone ordering you when you are negotiating a convoy of trucks coming from the other side at night? How we survived the trips we don’t know, but whenever we had a dhaba stop he would laugh it off, telling you to have another cup of tea. He had an amazing smile. So disarming, so full of love and innocence! Never mind the time, of course, that his highway expertise almost landed us at the Bangladesh border at night — we had lost our way while trying to reach a destination deep inside a rural pocket, off Murshidabad, where a client was participating in an exhibition.
I first met KD through a common friend when he was working for Clarion in 1980. I was working for ACIL and I needed a support to help me work on the Dunlop and Khaitan accounts. KD was looking for a change and I took him to Sarbajitda for an interview. There was no interview, we had a few drinks and Sarbajitda told KD that since I had suggested his name, it was good enough and that KD should send us his salary package, so that ACIL could better it, even by a few hundred rupees and he could join immediately. He was happy. I was happy. I dropped him at the crossing of Deshapriya Park and told him to send me the figures by the next day. As soon as I took a left turn on Rashbehari Avenue towards Gariahat, the left rear wheel of my now famous Standard Herald came off, creating an uneasy commotion on the street. Most of the onlookers thought it to be a funny incident.
KD never came back and for the next three years I never saw him. Three years later five of us from ACIL joined ASP, which was then housed along with their subsidiary agency, CC, on Albert Road. The building was shared with ISKCON. KD supervised the Hindustan motors account, which included Ambassador, Trekker, Porter and such other vehicles. I had joined as the Account Director and my responsibility was to take charge of all the accounts. As per practice, I requested the servicing team to brief me on the business.
“There is nothing to brief,” he assured me. “You have to go to the Birla Buildings every day at 3 PM, meet Mr Tapan Sinha, show your face to all other Product Managers, attend to them if they called you, hang around for a while and repeat the same drill every day.”
“What about the strategy? Planning? Positioning exercise?”
He had a big laugh and before I could react there was a crashing noise of cymbals and dhol from the ISKCON side of the building and when it all stopped, he suggested that we stand in the queue and have the prasad for free from ISKCON.
“Good stuff…made with ghee…Khichuri…” he dragged me away.
Later he told me there was no strategy or any such serious stuff at Hindustan Motors.
“If the product manager thinks he needs an ad because he has been ticked off at the Sales Review meeting, he will call you, give you his ideas, tell you what he wants. You do what he wants you to do. Don’t bother about advertising. Just work on a headline and design a catalogue cover. It will go through.”
“Why do we have to go there every day at 3? Why can’t we go in the morning?”
“There is no work in the morning. It’s a very relaxed environment. One onwards the Managers will put on their jacket and go to the Dining Hall and enjoy a three course veg lunch. Then they will come down and relax for a while and from three in the afternoon they will get active. By 5.30 they will religiously go home.”
For five years that we worked together at ASP, this was the drill. It was during this period that we got closer as friends and became a part of each other’s family. His father was a retired army officer but had been incapacitated due to a road accident. The Colonel was full of beans and had won over the handicap by sheer will power. He reminded me a lot of my late father, who also had his movements restricted due to a leg injury. KD’s mother was very fond of my wife and me, and we would very often drop in to their place near Charu Market. Those were great days. The Colonel would honour me by asking KD to open his “chest”, his cellar. We would drink, while KD’s mother would pamper my wife like the daughter-in-law. She came to bless our son when he was born and even suggested a name.
Our personal equation started going deeper, specially after he took over the role of being the uncle my son never had. Jumbo Kaku was his best friend and I think he was his latest attraction in life. When my son was a little over a year old, we decided to make a trip to Farraka during the Christmas weekend with my family in tow. This time there was no racing as we had planned to stay over at my maternal grandfather’s house on way to Farraka. We had a leisurely drive, stopping at dhabas, guzzling beer and Jumbo Kaku did the honours of even cleaning my son’s arse after he did potty at a dhaba.
My grandfather, a former zamindar from erstwhile East Bengal had built for himself a mansion in the middle of nowhere, in a village which was about 8 kms off the highway. He was a conservative, naturally, and I warned them that there would be no drinking at his house. We did not drink alright, but when dinner was announced, KD came formally attired in a dressing gown!! It took us some time to get adjusted to the sight, though he was upset at our reaction.
We spent a lovely weekend at Farraka, more so since the VIP Guest House was vacant and Satyadarshi, who also handled the Guest Houses other than PR, organized two rooms for us. Shila and I enjoyed, while KD and Mihirda looked after Subhojit. Being a VIP Guest House, the catering was outstanding and KD sahib was delighted to use the proper cutlery for slicing in to delicious Fish Orlys. I remember we also made a day trip to Malda and on the way back, we took the wrong route since some body suggested there was a short cut through the fields when actually there wasn’t. It had rained in the morning and the “road” was slushy. I had great difficulty in keeping the car straight as it was slipping off the road and worse, the world’s best back seat driver had taken over. After meandering aimlessly for about two hours we were back to the point from where we had started.
After I left ASP to work with Tara Sinha, KD also quit and joined Contract. Our meetings became a little irregular, but we did our best to catch up on weekends. One Sunday he arrived unannounced and with a coy smile informed us that he was getting married. We were all very happy and wanted to celebrate the occasion. KD had a problem. He had to be back home for lunch, but we had other ideas. We suggested that we go to Olypub for a drink and then split. With Shila and Subhojit, we got into the car with KD and on the way, we picked up Chitto and hit Olys. Bottles of beer followed, with KD punctuating the session with “I must run”, “I will get fired”, “…there are guests at home”. There were no mobile phones in those days and anyway his landline was not working. What was just a celebratory drink soon became a big bash and little Subhojit too was given a few sips to sample after which we suddenly noticed, he was banging his head against the wall! The toddler was drunk. KD ran to him and asked him if he was OK, to which Subhojit told him that he felt “spicy” in the head.
The Oly’s session was only a small session. Once we got to our car, we decided to drive down to Diamond Harbour to have tea and omelets. On the way, we had to pass by his house and Shila, who shared a sibling like relationship with KD, held him back in case he decided to get off the running car. We dropped him home around six and though he wanted us to drop in for tea, we did not have the guts to face his parents and left him to fend for himself.
KD was big time into music. He did not boast of it, but was very knowledgeable about the 60s and the 70s. You could talk to him for hours on CSNY, Floyd, Arlo Guthrie, the BeeGees and of course, the Beatles. I remember him attending Richie Heavens live at the amphitheater at the Dhakuria Lake.
Today, as I lament his death, memories keep on flooding. So much of it was fun. Ishan and I were waiting in Delhi for KD to land up with all the material that will be displayed for a Balmer Lawrie exhibition at Pragati Maidan. Blow-ups, negatives, bromides… and of all things, he forgets to identify his suitcase before boarding which is promptly sent to the cooling room and we get the material just hours before the exhibition is about to open! After I blasted him for doing such a stupid thing, he started laughing and assured me everything would be fine. His next question was perfect to blow my mind further. He asked me if I could take him to a place that served rice!! The three of us were sharing a room in Lodhi Hotel, somewhat hiding from the client who wanted to know the “progress” of his pavilion by the hour. Ishan, who was a pucca sahib, loved his chicken with pineapples, while KD had his daily doses of bhaat. When the suitcase was retrieved from the airline office, it was a different KD. He took over, made us do all the running around and barely seconds before we were asked to clear out by the security, everything was up. That was KD. Hard working. Committed. A client’s dream! Even though he maintained a non-academic profile, KD had a huge collection of print outs on agency matters. I still have some of them, including the 1970 McCann document on the “Role of an Account Executive”. Priceless. During the 80s we floated a team for participating in the Quiz Shows in Kolkata and before every quiz he would land up at my place with a series of BBC Quiz Books, and while Shila served us then a wonder food called Maggi noodles, we practiced. We lost in the first round of every such quiz program, at Saturday Club or at DI. Only once did we go on to be the runners up, but that was for an AD Club Quiz.
KD’s marriage did not work out. It left him a bitter man. It affected his life. He would come and talk to us like everything was normal, but somewhere he was losing himself. He joined Mudra and was on the Ad Club Committee when I was the Secretary. He was then working for Mudra and often organized the Mudra Conference Room for us to organize the judging of various categories.
The following is an extract from my book, Life in a Rectangle:
By the time I had finished my tenure as the Secretary, we had the entire Who’s Who of Kolkata turning up as judges. Many were legends. One particular judging session I remember was for the Best Radio Ad. This was during the time when radio advertising was on the decline and I remember we had just 9 entries. Most of them were of 30 seconds duration and I thought the whole process would not take more than 30 minutes. The judges were Bulbul Sarkar of AIR, the legendary Bengali film actor Basanta Chowdhury who possibly had the best voice in the business and also the largest collection of walking sticks and Ganeshas in Kolkata (father of well known journalist Srinjoy Chowdhry) and Shiben Dutt, advertising writer, an institution by himself. With three such personalities, the judging session took more than three and a half hours as they went into everything from diction, delivery, communication effectiveness, music, notes, beat, rhythm, brevity, drama and anything that can be a part of a radio ad. Kaushik Dutt, my colleague for years and a part of the family was helping me out with the judging session and he must have smoked a few packets out of anxiety and after the guests left, we hit the closest bar to get over the session.
The rest of KD’s life is a tale of sorrow. When at Mudra, and settled, he would get unnecessarily worked up with trivial office issues. He would call me up almost everyday and come over to my office and speak to me. He wanted out immediately. I was then at FS Advertising, looking after their Kolkata office and slowly I was being also getting involved with the affairs of their Delhi and Mumbai operations. I had told my boss that we can’t have a client like Exide Batteries serviced in absentia and she agreed to let me pick up a Branch Head so that I could be free to travel to other cities. I could do no better than to think of KD and a meeting was set up for my boss, Rama Luthra to meet him in one of her Kolkata trips. In the meeting, Rama told him that since I have recommended his name, she has nothing to ask. Just one question: Why on earth should he leave an established agency like Mudra and join FS Advertising? KD thought over it for a minute, nodded his head and agreed that he had no reason to shift. After he left I got a tongue lashing from Rama and rightly so. I did not speak to him for many months after the incident.
In 1992, I left Kolkata to relocate myself in Delhi. We kept up during my visits to Kolkata. His experiments in finding a stable job had backfired. In 1996, just after I had started my own agency, Sid Raut called up to say that an investor was planning to start an agency and needed a Kolkata man to run their office. I mentioned KD’s name and it was decided to fly him down to Delhi since the owner was there. He came, promptly hired a car at the airport and arrived at my office. He then went for the interview, was selected and went back to Kolkata. A few months later, he quit. His visiting cards, which were sent by the agency’s head office in Mumbai was badly printed and not fit to be presented to any body!!
When I started imagine! in Kolkata I asked KD to join me. My deal was that he was free to do whatever he wanted to do, earn for himself and his team and if there was anything left, he could pay for my trips to Kolkata. Nothing much happened, except that we suddenly had to go to Patna for a meeting. We were able to get two first class tickets on the Lal Qila Express, run off to Flury’s to pack Sausage Rolls and Chicken Patties, a bottle and race off to Sealdah station and celebrate as soon as the train left. We passed out, but not after tucking in to the Flury’s savouries. Next morning when we got up we found the coupe was occupied by some 50 people, many of who were sitting on the floor. Luckily Patna station was almost approaching and we had to walk over the people to get out of the compartment. The meeting was at the prospects house and at noon, our hosts requested us to help ourselves to his bar. Bliss! We returned by changing the train thrice, sleeping on each-others’ shoulders.
So many memories are crowding my mind right now. Tucking into some twenty singaras for breakfast on way to watch the Reliance Cup finals at Eden Gardens, and almost missing lunch trying to make up our mind on what to eat, Urmi running in to save him from my wrath almost on a daily basis and then all of us trooping out to eat Dhaks (Dhakai Parathas) at way side eateries in Dalhousie Square. He was truly, as Chitto branded him, our Brother John.
KD never came back to big time advertising. Instead he took on the task of managing his old parents, who passed away one by one. He was an excellent son, no mistake. He had become a recluse. For years he never had a mobile number. I think he never even had an e-mail id. He probably had never heard of a Facebook. He did not care. He shunned his friends. When our common friend Goldy Guha died, I called him from the crematorium. He heard the news stoically, did not offer any comment. He promised to come over, but never turned up. We realized and left him to his own devices. I tried to keep up with him on the phone. There was nothing happening and we knew he was slowly fading away from all of us. When my Life in a Rectangle was being launched in Kolkata I desperately wanted him to come for the launch. As always, he promised, but did not. He later called me to say that he would certainly come for the book reading at Oxford, but never did. I was hurt. After all, the book was about us.
Last March I was in Kolkata when Urmi called up to say that KD was down with cancer. It was terminal. I called up his brother, got myself updated and next day, went over to meet him. The durwan showed me the way and to my horror, I found he was locked out. There was no one in the house. I knocked at a closed door and not finding any response, pushed it open. He was sitting on the bed, using a piss pot.
“Cleaning my bladder,” he told me.
He had the same smile but looked a shadow of his old self. He was a living dead. I spent a very difficult half hour with him and almost told him to hang on till I returned to Kolkata in June. Once again, he promised but once again he failed.
This time around I kept my promise. I didn’t want to see him in that state again. Never.
In death KD has finally been freed. He has attained the freedom he was searching for. As I posted on FB minutes after getting the news from Urmi, ” Kaushik Dutt. Friend. Colleague. Goodbye, brother. Ray Manzarek is waiting for you. And say ‘Hi’ to Goldy if you meet him.”
sujitsmusings 