His Lalitaji, the unsmiling housewife who sold you Surf, was inspired by his mother. His Liril girl combined an Indian housewife with Tarzan’s Jane. And he made the Indian man openly use a fairness cream. Ad guru Alyque Padamsee shares his many marketing mantras in this interview with The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24×7’s Walk the Talk
You have to be very brave to call my guest an old man in any context. Alyque Padamsee, can I dare call you the grand old man of Indian advertising?
Grand man will do very well. Forget the old.
The grand old man refuses to grow old.
If you think young, you are young.
What’s your favourite line? Don’t look at the rear mirror, always look at the windscreen?
If you want to go to the future, why look at the rear-view mirror all the time and have an accident? Look into the windscreen and plan what’s coming ahead.
You can become a wellness guru.
My third wife Sharon is into wellness and yoga and so is my youngest daughter Shazahn.
Who is now a film star.
A starlet in Bollywood, the first Padamsee to cross over from theatre to movies.
But you played Jinnah.
That was one film, and that was Hollywood. In 1941, my elder brother, Bobby Padamsee, started the first theatre group in English run by Indians in Bombay. I was seven, he 17. He was directing plays, and he gave me a role of a small page boy. I think the play was Othello. To go on stage when you’re seven and look around, you suddenly feel the magnificence of being in theatre.
What about drama at work? Our common friend, Rama Bijapurkar, told me about her first meeting with you as a trainee at Lintas. Your secretary came in to say Mrs Padmasee is calling, and you said, Idiot, tell me which one? There are three. One was your mom…
You are making that up.
You may ask Rama.
Rama once told me she remembered one thing about her years in Lintas. She said I insisted that everyone on the client service side and the creative side had to see a Hindi film at least once a month to keep in touch with the mass audience. Forget about the class audience. Hindustan Lever, our biggest client, was in the mass market and we needed to know what the mass market felt about all sorts of things.
Tell us about the Liril story.
How was the Liril girl invented? We did a little research. What does the Indian housewife do when she locks the bathroom to have a bath? That is the only time in the day, this was my surmise, that she gets to be herself. The other time she is cooking, cleaning, scrubbing, looking after her children, her husband, her in-laws. The only time she is by herself is 10 minutes in the day. What does she think of doing? Hindustan Lever had a good research team. They came back with an astonishing finding. It was 1974-75. They said the housewife sings a popular Hindi film song while having a bath, and daydreams of escaping from the demands on her time. One of them said I dream of Amitabh Bachchan coming on a white horse, kidnapping me and taking me away from all these jhanjhat. I said, Wow. The Indian housewife wants to escape. I was reminded of my school days. Watching Tarzan films. And Jane having a bath under a waterfall as they were in a jungle and there was no shower. That image remained with me.
And your other classic, the all-time classic, Lalitaji.
We were in a terrible condition. Hindustan Lever was crying as Nirma had entered the market at one-third the price of Surf. We tried everything rational half a packet of Surf is equal to a full packet of any other powder, more clothes, whiter clothes but nahin chala. Then, I remembered my mother was someone who knew value. She once bought a Packard in the morning worth Rs 2 lakh. The same afternoon, she was haggling with the sabziwaali over one rupee. I asked her, Why do this? You spent two lakhs and now.. She said, Beta, there is a difference between price and value.
So your mother became Lalitaji?
My mother became Lalitaji. The great line that sold our concept was that we moved the battlefield from price to value. The voice you hear of Lalitaji when she says Arey bhaisaab, Surf ki kharidari main samajhdari hai is sarcastic. She says, Sasti cheez aur achchi cheez mein farq hota hain, bhaisaab. She is again being sarcastic. She is saying, don’t you understand it, idiot? Hindustan Lever, at first, said you can’t have a housewife who doesn’t smile. I said that’s the whole point. Anyway, they ran it and it was a huge success. We had a poll and people said the woman most hated on TV was Lalitaji. Hindustan Lever said remove it. But I said see the second finding, Lalitaji is the most watched. Hated and watched.
In your time, you and your contemporaries were all mad peoplemulti-talented, bohemian, unconventional. How mad were you?
I was mad enough. How did I get into advertising? I never planned to get into advertising. I was a theatre man, I wanted to do theatre.
But you couldn’t make a living from it.
Yes. Nevertheless, I was living in my parents’ house. We were well-off. My mother sent me to London for an education, to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to study drama. I could do anything I liked. And then I fell in love with Pearl.
Your first wife?
She was married, about to get a divorce and had two kids. My mother said if you want to marry her, you have to leave the house. Get out. My blood froze. Had no money, no job. Had just finished college. Next morning, I called a friend, Gerson da Cunha, and said, Look Gerson, you have just moved from journalism to advertising. How is it? He said for theatre people, advertising is easy but you have to start as a trainee. I said how much will they pay me? He said Rs 300. I joined and, after three years, I was the films chief at Lintas, earning a good salary. I rented a flat and moved Pearl and the kids there. I told my mother I’m getting married and left the house. I was about 22. I say to young people, live your karma, not your parents’ karma.
How have you managed to make younger and younger women fall in love with you?
Testosterone pushes all men. Whenever you see a pretty girl, you go out of the way to become the nicest person on earth to her. Women take longer. They don’t just look at your face, but hear the voice, and see whether you can make them laugh. Most Indian men want to talk all the time, talk about themselves and three favourite topics myself, cricket and money. I’m interested in money and cricket. But I find the wooing part fascinating. What happens with marriage is the seven-year itch. I’m writing another book and one of the chapters is devoted to marriage my three marriages and why they didn’t last. I’m suggesting a marriage licence, like a driving licence. You take it out for seven years. At the end of seven years, both parties have to renew it. So, in the sixth year, you start re-wooing your wife and your wife starts re-wooing you. It makes you re-assess your marriage, which you never do in your entire married life. My parents were married for 60 years, but my mother didn’t speak to my father for 40 years.
To keep yourself younger, you also keep a notepad by your side on which you write every morning.
Absolutely. Everyone in Lintas, and everyone who works for me, including my maid and my driver, carries a notepad. Every morning, before I put on my chappals, I write what I could do today that I’ve never done before. And anything I see. Take Marine Drive, I asked the architect who redesigned it, Why have you again made it grey? Why can’t you have a little colour?
The only colour on Marine Drive right now is your shirt and mine…
Yes. There’s a guy in pink pants, that guy in the blue shirt; the rest are in white, brown and black. I don’t know why those are male colours. But you know, the Indian man wants to look good all the time. I work for Emami on a consultancy basis. I said we can’t beat Hindustan Lever on Fair & Lovely. But why don’t we forget the women, and get the men. Everyone laughed. You know, research shows that 25 per cent of the users of Fair & Lovely are men. They borrow their sisters’, or their wives’ creams and use them secretly. Why don’t you bring it out in the open? That’s how Fair and Handsome was launched.
Research and advertising, but theatre is all about memorising stuff. I believe you remember most of your lines from many of your plays.
Shakespeare to me is God. Take Shylock. A Jew in Venice looked down upon by white Christians. Say, he was an Indian and he lived in Australia. Antonio, a rich Australian, comes to him and says I want to borrow 300 dollars. If he is a Naxalite or a Maoist, he would answer, Signior Antonio, many a time, and often in the Rialto, you have rated me about my moneys and my usances and still have I borne it with a patient shrug, for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe. You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, and spit upon my Indian gaberdine, and all for use of that which is mine own. Well, now you come to me, and say, ‘Shylock, we would have moneys:’ You say so; you, that did void your rheum upon my beard and kick me as a stranger cur over your threshold: moneys is your suit what should I say to you? Should I not say ‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible a cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ Or shall I bend low and in a whispering humbleness, say this; ‘Fair sir, on Wednesday last you spat at me; and on Thursday you called me dog; and for these courtesies I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?
Well done.
I like theatre to reach out and hit the audience in the heart and the head.
Same with advertising.
Absolutely! You have to grab them so that their hearts and minds are involved with you.
You know, intelligent, smart, interesting young people like you and me need to have many such conversations.
Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more.