Between the Briefs

I just borrowed Groucho Marx’s title to say that this is going to be brief post. I’m just writing this brief post to say I’ll be back next year, post the winter break.

Until then, as promised, the pixie dust (or snow, if you prefer) will keep you company. Enjoy it while it lasts. You can spend hours watching its measly trail. But it’ll be gone on Jan 04, 2009. Pffft.

So see… it’s that time of the year again. The end of the year, I mean, of course. So everyone is going around making these resolutions that will mark 2010. Now me, I’m not the kind of person to make resolutions. But yet, here I am, contemplating a post on it. It’s not the resolutions that tempt me to write this, but the way it will be written that does. See, all these social media experts (they’re everywhere now), they keep telling me that you must write posts with lists. People love reading lists. Which I somehow find strange ’cause I read a to-do list every morning and really, it doesn’t fill me with a warm and fuzzy feeling on the inside. An occasional hot flush, perhaps, but that’s about it. But the social media experts told me to write a post with lists ’cause people love reading it and ’cause everyone today has the attention span of a fruit-fly and ’cause a post where everything is written in bullet points makes it easier for everyone to take it in. And you can’t argue with the social media experts, so here I am doing the two things they asked me to do:

• Writing a “lists” post (starting now)
• Writing on “trending” topics

So yes, it’s that time of the year again and I must make resolutions. And as I move closer towards closing in on my second year on the job and on my twenty second year staying alive, here’s what I promise to do:

• A Little Less Cynicism, A Little More Ideation – I think it’s safe for me to say that I’m not exactly everyone’s daily dose of sunshine. I wrinkle my nose way too often and leave the room with a bitter after-taste. But well, like my CD once said, “If you can’t think of anything nice to say, make something up.” Those weren’t his exact words of course, but it was something to that effect. So starting 2010, I resolve to spend a lot more time thinking of niceties and spend a lot less time saying “It won’t work”. Perhaps it’ll make me a better person too, but I wouldn’t hold my breath and wait for that one if I were you.
• Swear to Swear Less – Yes, fewer “The fuck is wrong with him/her?”s, “What kind of a retard made this/wrote this/thought of this?”es, “Why are being made to act like boorish idea whores?”es. Come 2010, I’m going to be refined and polished and calm and composed. Some four-lettered words can’t be avoided, of course, and we’ll just have to learn to deal with them even though they taint and mar our otherwise chaste work environment. These include (I’m really beginning to kick ass at these lists):
  • Can’t
  • Won’t
  • Don’t
  • Hmmm
  • Nice
  • Good
  • Okay
  • This. Idea. Can’t. Sell. Crap.

But anything over and beyond is totally and utterly non-permissible. “Love thy client, colleague and vendor and slowly arrive at a state of beatification”, is what I’m going to see myself do. God promise.

• “Why so Serious”, No More – No wise cracks on this one. I’m serious. I take everything (including myself) too seriously and more often than not, it’s not worth it. This doesn’t mean you’ll find me putting on a pair of stilettos and dancing on table tops (erm… I mean, it’s only the end of a year, not the apocalypse, no?) but still… from now on, I will smile at least three times a day without any provocation and be found basking in the warm & toasty warmth of the world. I might even stop biting my nails to get rid of all the nervous tension and start getting manicures with pretty little French tips. Imagine that… Shikha Gupta – copywriter by day, poster girl of exhilaration by night. Kafka didn’t know what he was talking about when he wrote “The Metamorphosis”. Because this, ladies and gentlemen, is the real deal.
• Open to the Idea of an Open Relationship – You know how sometimes you’re working on something and you spend a fair amount of time on it and you think it’s niceish and then when it gets printed you put it up on your desk as a tiny memento for yourself… you know the feeling? And you know how sometimes another agency works on a similar cause/brief and does it well and does it so much better and gets the world to stand up and applaud it and how part of that world includes your team and your client… you know that feeling? If you don’t, let me paint you a pretty little picture. It’s kinda like being married and having your husband drool over your frenemy and tell you how hot she is, is what it’s like. And it makes you want to punch your husband in the face (or wherever it hurts most) and dramatise the whole situation and say, “Yeah, I’m never going to be good enough for you!” But then you arrive at a state of reconciliation (with yourself, not the husband) and understand that some things can never be changed. The grass shall forever be greener on the other side (excuse the cliché) but two can play the game. This for that, tit for tat. It’s very immature, I must admit, but at least I no longer come off as a prude. That, and also, despite all the anger it makes you want to better yourself just so that you can stand up, point and say, “Ha ha! Who’s hotter now, bitch?” So well…
• Stop Inflicting Self Harm – In spite of all my anger and resentment, I don’t come home and slash my wrists every night. No, the self harm I’m talking about is this… ranting and venting without restrain on my blog, pretending that NO ONE will read it. But it does get read. Not read enough to be made into a movie, perhaps, but read nonetheless. And for reasons understandable, I don’t feel like jeopardising my job or career just yet. So from now, everything’s going to be a lot more bowdlerised and cryptic and “read between the lines” types. And you must prod and probe to arrive at the larger truth or forever await your moment of divine revelation.

And there you have it… my plans for 2010. If you can think of anything I can or need to add to this list, do add it. I might even consider it for real. For the rest of you, I’m going to leave you with a little pixie dust to add to your holiday cheer. Poof.

But the truth is, we never really learn. We think we do, but we don’t.

Because we don’t really learn to know when to give up or learn to know when to fight. For that matter, we don’t even learn what it takes to say, “No” at the right time or say “This is not what I signed up for” when you know you’d signed up for more (or less, depending on what your day’s like).

We don’t learn to read people’s thoughts and figure out what they want, the way they want it, without a brief and we definitely don’t learn to take a brief on face value.

We don’t learn what makes us clingy, desperate people, who’ll claw on to whatever little we can to make sure we survive and we don’t learn what it is that makes us just as blasé at other times.

We don’t learn to just yell at someone who’s got their head up their ass and tell them they’ve got it all wrong or learn to put our foot in our mouth and say, “Yeah… okay… fine”.

We really don’t learn a lot except for when it comes to kidding ourselves.

A general unhappiness prevails at work. It’s been this way for sometime now. This makes me sick… like physically sick. And I learn that I will continue to be unhappy unless I get what I want. I want to be things. I want to be:

1. Un-unhappy
2. Happy
3. Accomplished
4. Exceptional
5. Brilliant
6. Exceptionally brilliant
7. Satisfied
8. Dissatisfied
9. Inspired
10. Inspiring
11. Irreplaceable
12. Replaceable
13. Impassioned
14. Calm
15. Empowered
16. Fragile
17. Read
18. Written about
19. More
20. All of this, more often

When I was in college, I once attended this seminar on advertising and marketing. I attended it really because Prasoon Joshi was supposed to be there and, at that point, I was in awe of him. Yes… it’s pathetic, but it’s true.

Anyway, as luck would have it, Prasoon Joshi couldn’t make it due to “unforeseen circumstances”. But we had Prahlad Kakkar there in all his glory and that wasn’t so bad either. So then we have this Q&A session where someone asks Kakkar what he looks for in someone when hiring them. I remember Kakkar’s specifically using these words: “I look for someone with a fire in their belly”, followed by other such stuff as they need to get up in the morning with a passion to conquer the world or something like that. All very pretty.

Almost a year and a half after taking up my first job, I revisit this episode in my mind and learn one of the most important lessons ever – NEVER TAKE ANYTHING FOR GRANTED.

And I say this now with a conviction you can’t dispute. And I have two good reasons that stem from the same episode, other than a whole lot of other reasons. But here’s what I’m talking about:

• If you believe whatever is printed on an invite, you’re in for a disappointment. The person who sold the show to you in all probability just lent his name. Don’t get me wrong. He will teach you something about advertising even in his absence; but most importantly he will teach you a little something about deceptive advertising.
• If you take for granted that you will be one of the many with the” fire in the belly”, you’ll go through many days feeling like absolute crap just because you cannot keep up the pretence of being passionate about your job all the time.  Again, I’d ask you to wait before you judge me. I’ll explain myself with a few situations:
  • A month or so back, my boss had signed us up for some classes on Entrepreneurship Development where a lot of this inspirational rubbish was being flung around for free. And someone said, “If your job or whatever it is that you’re doing doesn’t make you laugh any more, you need to quit.”
  • And then someone who used to be my client asked me whether my job makes me happy and it took me a while before I could answer this question honestly.

Statements and questions such as those above really make you think twice about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Now you’d think I’m someone who hates their job. But I don’t. In fact, I find it hard to imagine myself doing anything else, is how much I think my job and I meant to be together. But I just think being passionate about it every day is too much to ask for, realistically speaking. Because the things you’re really passionate about will come by just once in a while. For the most part, you’ll be stuck doing things you’d rather not do. For instance, as a copywriter you want to be creating ads – big, brilliant ads that people love and will discuss over coffee or beer in the same breath as Obama’s winning the Peace Nobel. Perhaps the day will come when you will create such ads, but before that there will be years of brochures, flyers, posters and whatnot that just won’t inspire a cell in your body even after you spend days and weeks trying to perfect it.

And then there will be days when something you really do care about will come along and you are really impassioned about it. But by the time you’re done creating your work, either your team doesn’t get it or the client doesn’t want it or the budgets suddenly get scrapped and you end up with something mediocre at the end of it all. Now if you’re telling me that you’ve been through this all and you still wake up feeling kicked about your job then, there’s got to be something wrong with you. Because when you are churning out something mediocre, you bloody well feel miserable about it. Of course you could say “Just stop creating mediocre stuff” but that will initiate a whole new debate.

What I’m trying to say is, don’t take for granted that your job will kick ass or that you’ll always do what you set out to do. The good days will come… but not without a slew of horrible ones. And it’s being able to work through the sludge early mornings, late nights and pretty much every weekend in anticipation of the good days that’s more important than walking around wearing a “I *Heart* My Job” t-shirt all the time.

I often get yelled at by family and friends for taking my work too seriously. Apparently, it’s just a job… not your whole life. But over the course of the past week, I’ve been forced to draw a lot of parallels between life life and work life. And in shuttling between both these not-so-distinct entitites, I’ve realised that keeping the faith is a lot more difficult than keeping the sanity.

A huge part of life is not being able to make any sense of it. This keeps us sane. And when you do make sense of it, you lose your faith in it. The sanity may come and go… the faith, not so much. And a huge part of my work life is being able to make sense of things… with cleverly written lines, by bringing in a sublime philosophy to the banalitites of office furniture, by looking for art in packaging design. In the process, you end up investing a good amount of your time, effort, pride and soul in trying to make sense of it in a way no one has before. Of course, all that there ever was to be said has already been said, but you just want to try and say it differently… give it a new meaning, a new dimension, a new something.

And then one day you’ll look at some of your work and realise it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever and doesn’t say anything at all… new or otherwise. But it’s comfortingly familiar. It just says, “Look at me” and it makes sense to everyone else but you. And you’ll just have to deal with it.

It’ll drive you mad initially, the incessantly thinking about it, but you’ll get over it. You’ll arrive at a point of indifference, you won’t care that it’s all wrong, you’ll lose what’s left of your faith, you’ll stop questioning everything with the “What?”s, “Why?”s and “The fuck?”s. And you’ll learn to accept the “That’s life” answer to everything in life life and work life. So be it.

If you’ve been keeping up with trends in advertising or have just generally been alive for the past few years or so, you’ll have to agree with me when I say alternative is the new mainstream. And sometimes, this is true in more ways than one. This is to say, it’s not always about using alternative media in advertising to grab attention… sometimes it’s about maintaining your sanity while working in this industry.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again – we like to think of ourselves as a thinking people, an idea people, a creative people. And although it’s rare for most of us to actually live up to all or any of the above, we still like to cling onto the belief. It’s our only security blanket.

This is also makes us extremely childish. Because there will be times when we just won’t let go.

And then there will be times (lots of times) when you’ll think you’re right, when you think someone else is wrong, when you think you’ve been wronged. I mean, they’re just ideas… thoughts… formless things in your head. Nothing you can see and say, “Ah. I like this one.” Sometimes something will make sense only to you and will make complete sense to you. And you just won’t understand why nobody else understands this. At these times, you can choose to do one of the following two things:

• You can either talk it out and hope things go your way
• Or you can suck it up, act like everything’s normal and pretend not to care

If you chose Option 1, you’re a complete idiot. Talking won’t solve a thing. Maybe if  you were Oprah, yes, but not otherwise. If anything, it’ll only make things worse. I’ve seen people say it the way it is and it just changes things.

This brings us to Option 2. You land up here when you choose not to give in to the temptation of Option 1. This does not make you a saint or a martyr. It just means you choose to feel like crap sometimes for days on end just so that you don’ t disturb the natural order of things.

And in these situations, you need to rely on the alternative to say what you need to… albeit not in so many words. Of course, you never know who’s reading what you’re saying, but they don’t what/whom exactly you’re talking about either. Mostly.

And so we end today’s session with a prayer and thank the gods for Blogger, WordPress and Twitter. And so let it be.

Today’s lesson is simple enough to encapsulate in a couple of sentences but still really hard to come around. Because today I’ve come to realise that one day you’ll just know it’s time to call it quits but still won’t have the balls to do it.

That’s it.

Found this off the Ads of the World blog. A weird little game to kill the account guy.

Click on image to play