Sunday, October 07, 2007

Cut for a short commercial break

I pause here to catch my breath. And while those mesmerizing 30-seconders play, let me take you to a far more interesting place. The mess I was in.

It was six months since I had decided to become a copywriter, and I hadn’t got a word in yet. I’d quit the agency that wasn’t, to spend my time looking for an agency that was one.

And that was all I was doing. Day after day. Week after week.

While time wasn’t the scarcest commodity on my hands, it was fast catching up with money, which was. And as I watched the beer dry up, I arrived at the conclusion that necessity was nothing but an ill tempered spinster.

It was depressing. The ‘I told you so’ voices were gaining momentum once again. Plans like climbing a drain pipe into a creative director’s cabin did creep into my mind, but came slithering down when I tried to imagine the physical probability of such an endeavor. You see, I’ve always been a growing boy. A process that happened vertically till the age of 18, and continued happily thereafter with a 90 degree change in direction. So my enthusiasm at challenging gravity with the aid of a drain pipe could at best be called a deafening silence. (I shudder to think of having to call this story BE to CU).

And one day as I sat in the company of the last beer I could afford in the near future, I got my first advertising idea.

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