SEARCHING FOR MY FIRST JOB:

My last year in History, final year of MA in DU, wasn't a happy one.

Despite being acknowledged as a good student, my grades hadn't kept up. And now, as my postgraduation was coming to a close, the thought of what to do next was increasingly in my mind and making me anxious.

A lot of my friends were taking the oft-treaded route of preparing for UPSC exams, but to me that looked like a game of roulette. Yes you did get three or four chances, but the odds were overwhelmingly against you. What if you don't make it by the age of thirty even? Would I, a second-division History postgraduate student, with average communication skills & confidence level, get a job in the private sector at the age of thirty?

The other option was to pursue academics but my grades meant that an automatic entry to M Phil was not possible. And anyway, in my opinion, the department of History in DU was singularly lacking in energy & purpose. It was populated by fossils & I did not want to be a part of it.

Which meant only one thing. Seek a job in the private sector.

Looking back, and writing this from the comfort of my home, I can’t understand why I was so anxious to find a job so quickly. Maybe it was a manifestation of a lack of confidence in my own abilities. Plus, somewhere the thought of charting a new course, and being part of a high-energy, high-voltage kind of a job entranced me.

My thoughts, unrealistic to begin with, were fuelled by the utterances of a girl, a co-student & an acquaintance, who was doing some internship at some ad agency. She talked about her experience in glowing terms & unwittingly it added to the glam quotient ad agencies already enjoyed in my mind. Here I should add that 1970s & 80s were the golden era of advertising & ad agencies in India. I wanted that reflected glory of working in an ad agency pretty badly.

I appeared in some “copy tests” – standard tests instituted by ad agencies to test the aptitude of a candidate towards writing “ad copy”. This was the difficult part. Being a history student, I was used to writing long prose. Writing headlines like “Life is full, it’s full of Campa Cola times”, or “Gem of an engine, jewel of a car”, or “Lime & lemony Limca”, or “Come share my Thrill” seemed to demand a different kind of mindset. Or talent.

Big agencies didn’t want me, so I ended up getting a job in a small ad agency based in South Extension. The owner of the place was a strapping gent who had bushy hair, wore a white safari suit, travelled in a white Ambassador car & by his own confession, had been manager of Plaza cinema once. He was a strange candidate to have founded an ad agency. The whole day he sat in his cabin & read magazines like Sarita & Grihashobha. He did have a lot of books on advertising in his library though, which I suspect no one had read, and which I devoured with relish.

This ad agency worked only for PSUs and created publicity material for them.

Once I was sent to a meeting with a certain PSU based in Nehru Place, which unfolded like this:

PSU: This brochure is very important for us. It should be a flawless job.

Agency: Please give us the pictures.

PSU: We will give you the pictures in 60 days but we want the brochure in 30 days.

Agency: Please tell us what to write about in the brochure.

PSU: How do we know what to write? You are the experts.

Agency: But what should be the theme? What is your company all about? What does it stand for?

PSU: How do we know what we stand for? We are all engineers here. We know nothing.

Agency: At least tell us what you broadly want.

PSU: How do we know what we want?

And so it went. While coming back, I was wondering whether what I had just witnessed fitted into a “high energy, high powered” meeting that would lead to a pathbreaking solution?

Little did I know then that such meetings would occur & recur throughout my decade-long ad career & highfalutin hot air, masquerading as wisdom, would continue to blow throughout.

To be honest, I should have called it quits there & then, and come back to my familiar domains of academia & History, howsoever unappealing they looked at that moment.

One of my good friends, over a session of jalebi-samosa, did suggest it to me. He said I was chasing a mirage & in a country like India, it paid to be a part of the government sector. And all these thoughts of trying to chart a new course were senseless & childish. Hung over on multitudes of samose & jalebi, he proclaimed, rather dramatically, that the world will never change.

I couldn’t have imagined then that my friend’s prosaic words would come true one day. And that a "fulfilling" & "empowering" ad career would indeed prove to be a mirage for me.

And that my real life would begin when I would take up teaching as a career, a decade later.