MY AD FILM

This is an ad film I conceptualised and wrote. We shot it in December 2008 in Mumbai in Film City. It got featured in many international advertising websites like adforum, bestadsontv and brandrepublic.

TVC Credits

Title: Bus Stop

Concept & Script by: Kapil Ojha, Vaibhav Kerlekar

Agency: Mudra DDB, Ahmedabad

Direction Team: Umakant Singh, Parikshit Vaidya

Production house: Full Circle Productions

(C) 2008.

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE...

...and it’s not coming here again!

“Give me a lie and I’ll glorify it. Give me some deceit and I’ll sanctify it.”
This is something my profession makes me blurt out everyday. That’s something I know I’m doing all the time but pretend, or rather try to pretend, to not know it. I am constantly employing adjectives, good adjectives, better adjectives and sometimes even the best adjectives to things I am not even sure if they deserve it. Some things I have a vague idea about or some things that I may not even ever come across again. But I glorify them. I make them sound convincing. Because I’m good with words, so some say. But I’m always wondering whether my talent is a blessing or a curse. But whatever it is, I am, and I can’t deny, a copywriter in an ad agency.

Till now, I have worked for the ‘best’ soap, the ‘best’ shampoo, the ‘best’ bike, the ‘best’ fabric, the ‘best’ building and, of course, the ‘best’ companies. Sometimes I wonder that since I’ve already put all my efforts in proving that all of these are the ‘best’, if I happen to work with their competitors then how will I define other soaps or bikes! Well, not to worry. Since, we have creative freedom in our field, and I also happen to have a good dictionary, I am sure I’ll manage to find another synonym for ‘best’ for the competitors’ products as well. J

But leaving aside advertising for a moment, just think about this, ‘Why is a better-told lie better than a non-glorified truth?’ Is truth important or the way a tale is told? Is life all about gloss? Why do I need my shoes to be spic and span, when all they should be doing is protect my feet? And the better a shoe protects the feet, the better it should be perceived as. I mean, I am not against beauty (or rather, cleanliness in this case) but all I intend to ask is that aren’t we giving importance to everything else but the truth. Aren’t we giving more and more importance to staged quarrels between judges in a singing contest show on TV rather than the contestants or how good they sing?

I guess our outlook towards things and our perceptions are getting shallow and shallow day by day. Shakespeare said years ago that ‘all the world’s a stage’. But I bet he never would have imagined that people in future would take him too literally. Because all I see is that the ‘actors’ in us are growing too sharp and the world has already turned into a real-life drama where every act or gesture is, in some way or the other, fake. Be it a chat between two friends, a politician’s speech to a crowd or an advertisers’ official communication to the public in general, isn’t the ‘lie quotient’ taking a beating on the truth more than ever. If ten years ago a boy confessed to his father that he cheated in exams, he might have had to sleep in the veranda that day. But today if such an incident occurs, any wise dad is instead sure to give him some tips on how to avoid being caught by a supervisor. An income tax raid may have been a taboo in society a decade ago, but today it is a status symbol. Today, we’ve taken corruption as granted for any political party and hence, our reason to vote for or against a party is anything else but corruption. We know all the lies and pretences that good-for-nothing Rakhi Sawant makes, but we love to see her on TV. We love to see her lie, don’t we? We love to see her fake praises for other, her bogus jokes her extra-glossy mannerisms and her phony fights.

Reasons for this, I don’t know. Maybe as the world is getting closer and closer with technology, we are dealing with more and more people, and hence, lying to more and more people. Just like a virtual reality game, we are finding more comfort in a ‘staged’ world around us. Just like an artificial plant in a vase, everything about us is turning artificial - our smiles, our talks, our acts, and maybe, even our desires.

And while all this is happening, silly writers like me who are attempting to think and not just ‘go by the flow’, are getting jittery and jittery day after day. We are wondering what’s behind this ‘bury the truth’ revolution. Why are we getting so cynical, extremely practical and truth-averse today? Are the lies growing in number or is it because more of them are being revealed? Or are we simply coming to terms with reality?

My Independence Day Special Advertisement

Bombay Dreams & Mumbai Screams – Finale of the trilogy

The city of contrasts

Till I went to stay in Mumbai, my definition of the word ‘contrast’ was limited to fashion where if a blue trouser and light blue shirt were a ‘match’, a sea green trouser and a navy blue shirt was a ‘contrast’. But welcome to Mumbai where contrast is omnipresent. A row of sky-rocketing glittery ‘over-branded’ buildings on one side of the street and a stretch of rickety dilapidated huts on the other. One man in a 15 square feet cabin in an office on one side and 15 men residing in a single square feet of garbage area on the other. A Jacuzzi bathroom on one side and no place to bathe indoors on the other. That’s contrast for you.

One may call it a cosmopolitan culture, but Mumbai also has this extreme contrast in culture and lifestyles. There’s this vendor on one side in one of the suburbs for whom Mumbai is as local and regional as the area where he lives and trades and there’s this global new generation of ‘cool’ Mumbaikars who think that swaying to rock music has brought them in the global league and hence even a hindi gaali (slang) needs to be pronounced with an angrezi accent.

After all, it’s not the cultures you ape that will define your lifestyle; but the deeds you demonstrate that will build the culture of your generation.

Coming back to my personal story, I was also experiencing a contrast. A contrast of writing but not writing creatively… a contrast of editing but not editing something that originated from my mind… a contrast of being too much practical but not imaginative which actually makes the true me. In simple terms, a contrast of being a copy editor in a newspaper and not being a creative writer and conceptualiser. Hence, after some re-think, I decided to quit DNA and join a not-so-big brand but a local agency that allowed me to pursuit creative excellence. And I was back to Ahmedabad.

Today, there’s this love and hate relationship that I share with Mumbai. I hate the crowd there, but I love the people that make that crowd. I detest the commotion there, but admire the commotion of opportunities that the city offers. I abhor the artificialness of the city, but I’m in love with the prospects it gives me in being original.

However, knowing mistakes but still committing them is something that our species is blessed (or should I say cursed) with. Why? Don’t we still cut trees, pollute and happily f**k with nature even though we know it is our ass that’s going to suffer in the end! Don’t we go on with our nuclear weapons developments knowing that it will take less than a day to turn the world into a junkyard if WW III erupts! And by choice or not, I fall into the category of humans… So, be it today, tomorrow or the day after, I know I’ll have to land back into the place where dreams and screams are twin brothers that never get lost in Kumbh mela but always stay together – you guessed it right, MUMBAI (I still love to call it Bombay though).

(The trilogy ends here)

Bombay Dreams & Mumbai Screams - Part II

Mumbaikars in the making

“Come to Bombay, you ass! How much more time will you waste away from here?” This is what my gang of langotia yaars always kept telling me. And now when I had finally reached there, this is what happened: My day 1 at room no. 1-420 got me into a police van! After a little bit of booze and disco, we were dancing with loud music on at 3 in the night at my friend’s place. His neighbours raised an alarm to the police and we were ‘arrested’ and escorted to the police station for ‘hooliganism at night’ or whatever the charge was called (we never dared to ask the policeman). Thanks to the fact that most of us are in the media and are accustomed to PR activities, we used all our maska-polish skills to get away by bribing the cops. (for more details, go to the I-420 blog :)

After that, due to hectic schedules and hopeless travelling problems, I hardly met my gang twice or thrice more in two months. On a Sunday, I decided to visit my friend Kedar who stayed at Thane. Considering that it was a holiday, I thought the traffic in local train would be less lethal. So, here I was with a walkman hung on my waist and waiting for a train that headed to Thane. But little did I know that in Bombay, local trains are even more crowded on holidays, because if it was the man of the house who traveled on weekdays to work, it was the entire family that traveled on Sunday for enjoying a holiday! Finally, my fourth attempt to enter train was successful and I spent the most perspiring 30 minutes of my life trying my best to save my walky from getting sandwiched between sweaty bums!

Most of the time was spent in the office. I had both lunch and dinner at the office canteen. Work was good. Real good! There was a hell lot of difference in the way work happened at Ahmedabad and the way it did in Bombay. The bosses there were exceptionally good with their work. I was the youngest in the team and there was a lot to learn. But there was one problem. We were here till the paper got launched in Ahmedabad and this launch was getting more and more uncertain. So what happened was that both of us were left in the middle of nowhere – we weren’t employees of DNA Mumbai and though we were employees of DNA Money Ahmedabad, the paper’s launch was uncertain. We couldn’t get back home and nor could we start settling there. Both of us were extremely tensed. And when one from a dry state is under tension in a wet land, there is just one recourse - BEER! Yes, beer, every night. It is obvious, especially when your room partner is an expert boozer. The day Mitul got his story published in the newspaper, he’ll say ‘let’s drink to celebrate’. And the day he could find no story, he said ‘let’s drink to relieve mental pain’. Heads or tails, both pointed at the bottle.

(to be continued…)

Bombay Dreams & Mumbai Screams - Part I

'Bombay' was a word that somehow had earlier got stuck in my mind like a week-old chewing gum that passes through piles of dust and garbage on the footpath before it finally meets your shoe... and kinda, sticks like glue (hey, it rhymed)!

Anyway, as a collegian, Bombay was like the ultimate destination where all my sane and insane paths wanted to lead me. Wanted to write and do creative stuff and what better place to do that than Bombay.

And finally, I even landed there. As a copy editor with DNA newspaper. However, it was supposedly for a short period (two months). Actually, I was working for DNA Money's Ahmedabad edition which was yet to kick and hence me and my reporter colleague Mitul were sent on an official trip to learn and well as help the Mumbai DNA team.

Just like any whimsical boss decides a national product launch in two weeks (for which the product is yet to be identified), this decision of our trip to Bombay came all of a sudden and in just two days, I was in Mumbai. Meanwhile, Rachana, my now-wife and then-girlfriend had already drowned half of Ahmedabad with her tears.

Day 1 was exciting. Finally in Mumbai! Our accommodation was not yet finalised. This bugger Mitul had assured that we'll find "asylum" in some hostel kinda place but it never worked out. Hence we reached DNA office with four suitcases and some bags between the two of us, only to find that we've reached a "factory" of human machines, almost 200 on a floor in some 20 rows X 10 columns, all staring at us - as if we were two fully-loaded astronauts!

We spent that night in a nice 7th floor apartment (DNA's guesthouse) somewhere near Mahim. But we had to leave it in 5 days and find a place on our own. And we did it. A small (actually, tiny is the right word) room in a small house in an untidy government colony in Antop Hill (the name made us think it’s the most posh area in Bombay and we soon discovered it was a place where all the taxi-drivers of Bombay landed at night to sleep in their homes)! There were two best things about this house – 1) A cat which jumped on my bed every night from a window that couldn’t be closed and 2) a crazy old deserted woman right next to my window who yelled gaalis all day and night (those which even a guy would hesitate to utter). With these two things, Mitul’s and my sleeps in Bombay were indeed, very sound! (pun intended)

End of part I (More to come)

A Writer's Block

Here's an idea that I have. This is how a short story I am writing would begin...

Holding a pen in hand, sitting amidst scattered empty pages with an uncontrollable urge to put thoughts into words… here I am, wanting to write with nothing to write about…
intended to write with no pretences…
addicted to weave incomplete sentences…

It’s been about year-and-a-half now that I’ve put something on paper that’s worth reading. All my creative turbulences seem to have vanished as I find myself famished, struggling for a good idea to start my next novel. Success, they say, is short lived. And so do I believe. But what’s haunting me more now is the fact that it’s very hard to imitate your own success. My last two novels made record-breaking sales, the latter superseding the success of the former. What made them more famous was the fact that both of them were finished in just 8 months each. And here I am standing 16 months past my last novel, still waiting to crack an idea worth writing!

‘Master of instant bestsellers struggling for an idea’, sounds like a news article headline doesn’t it? It may seem flimsy but you just can’t imagine the string of problems & consequences I have begun to face. The malaise of facing a creative impotence, pressure from the publishers to deliver something soon and over a dozen phone calls a day from desperate fans complaining of not getting to read something from one of their favourite storyteller. Truly, fame brings its own consequences.

Comments please...