Between the Briefs

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.

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.

Sometimes I like certain words just for their sound or for what they look like on paper. But I don’t necessarily like what they mean. One such word is “camouflage”. See, it looks so pretty… even minus the handwritten something, it looks nice on screen. And it’s nice on your tongue… smooth, but interesting. But it’s a sorry word. It’s got military attached to it and just generally has this self-effacing, dissolving quality to it. Very wallpaper-patterny.

Ironically, though, I realise how much camouflage is a part of our work lives. This realisation occured over a rare social situation with a few colleagues last evening. The story goes something like this…

Yesterday, after quite a few hours of work, someone suggested we go out for a drink. I’m generally a little wary about work+social situations because:

• I’m socially retarded and usually extremely uncomfortable around people and the like, unless there’s a certain comfort quality I associate with them.
• This would mean imposing a case of extended camouflage on myself. You’ll understand what this means once you’ve understood what I mean by “camouflage”.

However, despite these and various other paralysing reasons, I was brave and agreed.

So here I was… listening and not speaking, in a twitchy little setting. At this point I must interrupt this story to go back in time (this is what we call an exposition or, more dramatically, “flashback” in storytelling terms) to a point where I committed a certain indiscretion. A few months back, I recommended a friend of mine for the position of copywriter at the place where I work. This is someone I’ve known for four years now, more or less, and someone I’ve met every week to whine about work since we got out of college. So this certain friend:

• Knows incidents and people from work even before he starts work with us
• Knows incidents and people from my life a lot more than people from work

In my defence, I did advise against it because I knew combining general social element (“Friend”) with general professional element (“Work”) would successfully mar the attempted camouflage. However, I digress. The indiscretion was committed, friend was hired, friend (who is infamous for not being able to keep anything to himself) shared insights or snippets of them with other colleagues and I was in a twitchy little setting last night, listening and not speaking.

This is when I hear someone say (insert missing context here) that the friend has said that in a similar context, I generally behave differently. This is also cue for someone else to say that the friend has also said that no one at work really knows me. At this point, the first someone reiterates, underscores, emphasizes and just otherwise wholeheartedly agrees with the above statement. And this is cue for me to finally get to the point and (if you’re still with me) tell you what “camouflage” means in the given situation.

Actually, you might be disappointed to know that the camouflage I’m talking about is not all that different from the real camouflage. It basically means blending in with your surroundings, in whatever way you can. So, with reference to what I’ve been rambling about, this translates as:

• Having a work you
• Having an un-work you

It’s like having personality outfits: Office Wear, Casual Wear and I’m-Alone Wear.

Now, camouflage at work is mostly in relation to people and then incidental to situations. People-related camouflage has three crucial components:

• Mirroring – This is where you must mimic another person you’re working with to maintain a state of harmony. So if client says, “My product will revolutionise the way people breathe!”, you nod along and say, “I’m sure it will.” Not to mention having to elevate or degrade your intelligence to match the varied levels of understanding people bring along, and tuning other varied personality traits.
• Complementing – This is where you become what the other person is not to complete the picture. For instance, if one person is extremely laid-back, you become the hyperventilating types to get work done and if other person is hyperventilating types, then you calm down to make sure the universe is not thrown off balance. It’s all very esoteric.
• Resisting – This is a tricky one. See, the thing about camouflage is, you can sometimes confuse “blending in” with “losing”. Which means, if someone says, “That idea sucks ass!” (which they will, very often), you could be tempted to just agree all the time. But in actuality, you need to know when to agree and when not to agree. This applies to both, ideas of your own and ideas of others. This is not so much a strategic thing, just something you need to do. This does not mean that if you do feel strongly about something, it will get realised. But at least you don’t feel sick thinking you didn’t think of anything reasonable.

When you practise all of the above, you achieve successful camouflage. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you make your presence felt if only because you blend so well and so unobtrusively.

If you were ever on my previous blog, you might have come across my post which spoke about how your account is like your baby. And much like having a baby, the whole process is quite overwhelming. But what’s even more overwhelming than this, is having a creative miscarriage. I’ve had a whole monthful of them and it’s really hard getting over the loss.

See, the thing about being in advertising is that we love to think we’re a thinking people. Seriously… you never hear the words “concept”, “idea”, “brilliant” and “creative” used as many time in a day anywhere else. And given that we think we’re a thinking people, we tend to get attached to our ideas. So thinking… it becomes an emotional thing.

But sometimes what happens is even after spending hours and days and weeks concieving of that “brilliant idea”, and after having convinced yourself that this time you will make sure it comes to life come what may, and after giving up on the weekend joys just to stay holed up in your room with paper and squiggly lines, some things are never realised.

Ironically, though, the biggest cause of the creative miscarriage is generally the person who was thus far the most attached to it. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought something sounded great in my head but midway through a brainstorming session and midway through explaining the concept to a roomful of people, I’ve suddenly realised how stupid I sound. But unfortunately, you can’t take a sentence back after half the words have spilled out so you’re forced to finish it off with an apologetic, “Ah, never mind. I don’t know what I was thinking…” to save what’s left of your dignity. So the next time ’round, you don’t commit the same crime twice and just sit with an idea in your head, fighting “Should-I-Shouldn’t-I” battles while someone else comes up with pretty much the same idea and saves the project on the brink of extinction.

And then there are days when you after hours of strenuous thinking, you stumble upon what you were looking for just when you were about to give up and sleep on it in relief and wake up feeling all good about yourself, and still think you’ve got something worthwhile all through breakfast, and all the way to work, and while people spill in to work but begin to doubt its existence and purpose as time passes and as it morphs and takes a different life form every time you tilt your head for a new perspective and eventually give up on it. It’s sort of like what Andy Warhol said – “… If you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.”

Of course the opposite is also true when you sleep on the problem hoping that your brain will continue to work while you sleep, and you’ll come up with an idea somewhere down the line, and sometimes you do too, but it evaporates before you’ve even had the time to sit it down and have a little chat with it, and it leaves you without even having the decency to say goodbye.

And in those rare instances when something makes sense to you even days after of the original conception, and makes equal sense to your heart and brain and mind and everything else equally, you have what we call a “gut feeling” – and you’ve gone past your toughest challenge to the next level. The others.

At this point you sometimes gather all the courage you have to fight for it – that little namesless, formless thing in your gut. You’ll even go so far as to tell your boss he’s wrong, while still saying it politely and subtly, of course. So you’ll fight and claw and say, “But why not?!” until someone can’t answer it anymore and think you’re done. You’ve finally convinced everyone. Yourself, your team, your boss, your client. And you revel at the thought of having manged to get everyone to buy into it without ever realising that you still haven’t quite sold it. And so, while you’re making plans for your baby and what it’ll be like in the days to come, you have a creative miscarriage.

This process teaches you to always be prepared for the worst but not for the feeling of the misery that will inevitably follow, as always.

I started work “young”.  Less than three weeks after I wrote my last undergrad exam, I was at my first day at my first job. But some of my friends who went back to studying tell me they can’t imagine working.

I didn’t quite understand this. I never was a class-bunking, back bench-sleeping type of person, so my shift from college wasn’t as painful. But if there’s one thing I do miss about college, is that I didn’t have to display this overt sense of patience back then. I haven’t been allowed this luxury in the past 14 months and I sometimes think I’ll die from having to keep a straight face.

Today went the distance to reiterate the feeling. Here are some instances when you’ve got to unlearn instinct and give in to a superior power you didn’t know you possessed:

• When something won’t go as planned – Which is almost always. In eleven out of ten cases, if something’s scheduled to start at say 9:00 a.m., you can safely asssume it won’t start until at least 10:00 a.m. This is just an “at least”. Which means you fall under this category only if you’re unexceptionally lucky. If you fall under the normal to borderline category, add another half an hour or so. And if you fall under the borderline control freak to borderline manic category, another half an hour. Simply put, the chances and length of a delay are directly proportionate to how intolerant you generally are.

Now here’s what you can’t do when you get pissed off, sitting around waiting for people to arrive.

1. You can’t scream – not at the skies, not at the person who’s late, not at whoever’s sitting right next to you – you just can’t.
2. You can’t even seem pissed off. If you’re known to be not-a-very-happy-person (like me), you could probably get away without smiling. But snarling, scowling, nose-wrinkling and tongue-sticking are not allowed.
3. No sarcastic repartee can be aimed at someone who asks “When did you come?” I mean, you could try… but chances are they’re not evolved enough for sarcasm anyway, so don’t make it any worse for yourself than it already is.

• When somone asks you 97 questions about how to buy a needle and still manages to buy the wrong needle – This is hardly an exaggeration. I actually know people whose every sentence ends in a question. Answers to questions are questions. Questions without answers are followed by questions. And it’a all quite exasperating. But can you seem exasperated? No! At best, you could probably skirt around a couple of questions and pretend you didn’t hear it. But mostly you need to have enough patience and breath to answer most of them. When questions are framed to get instructions, you must speak slowly and clearly. When after detailed and repeated instructions the person in question still gets it wrong, you still can’t scream. You only get prepared to answer more questions and pray, if you can, that they get it right this time.

• When you would be anywhere else, doing anything else – I still remember coming in for my interview and Mother Hen telling me, “If you’re getting into advertising thinking it’s a glamorous field, you’re wrong. It’s anything but.”  I nodded along to make sure he knew I knew. But I didn’t know it then the way I know it now. I’ve had days when I just want to sit in my little dark corner at work and do my dark little work without wanting to talk to anyone or meet anyone or humor anyone. But I’ve had to meet external teams, clients, external teams of clients and people of the internal team who could just as well have been on an external team. I’ve had to talk to clients about elevators and chairs and tables and whatnot with an assumed passion that I generally preserve for a few things sacred.

I think what I’m trying to say is that work can be trying at so many levels. And you just learn to try and be patient, and learn to be calm, and learn to swallow a lot of things, and learn to substitute saying it out loud for a lone, meek, cryptic tweet and learn to understand it’s not a big deal… all just so that you can do what you want to do because you were the one who decided to do it in the first place.

Over the course of an internal meeting today, I realise not for the first time that there’s always something to learn in advertising. I suppose this could be true of other jobs as well, but I speak of and for my limited experience.

So one of the realisations I arrived at today is that even after being around for one whole year in advertising and after six years of knowing that this is where you would like to be (more or less), it’s hard to answer “How did advertising happen?” without it sounding like an answer to a question in an interview. I suppose this is partially because it’s just advertising. That’s it. Nothing sublime about it. Nothing for the larger good of humanity (save the rare, effective CSR, PSA type of work). It’s just a selfish thing we do for ourselves to earn some money and have fun while doing it. I used to use the “It’s because I like writing and copywriting is easier than writing a book” excuse but have also come to understand that:

• Copywriting is not easier than writing a book (Of course I haven’t actually tried writing a book, but that’s because I’m still getting used to stringing eight words together fit enough to appear on a billboard).
• Copywriting is not something you do because you “like writing”… “liking” to write has some very romanticised notions attached to it. It’s whimsical, even. That’s what you do for yourself and an audience that will take shape with your writing and not the other way ’round. Copy, though, is different. There were days when my copy was celebrated by clients but these were also the same days I wanted to bury myself and hope that whoever wrote my epitaph did it better than me.

So answering the question becomes very difficult because as with all things strange, it’s just meant to be. You learn to accept it without thinking about it as often as you used to. But that’s only until the next time someone asks you “How did advertising happen?” and you’re left wondering if “It just did” will suffice.