"...the valiant never taste of death but once"*

I just got back from a funeral.

Alyque Padamsee, one of my three Gurus is no more. He cast off his robes and has moved on to a new gig.

I feel strangely bereft. So did many of the people I met at the funeral, Lintasites. People whose life AP had not just touched but transformed. That was AP, he transformed you. There is a whole generation of people who owe part of their success to AP. He was a hard taskmaster, a selfish man, a tyrant & a stickler for details. I loved working with AP, He transformed me and that’s why I regard him as one of my Gurus. . He was never satisfied until you had squeezed out the last drop….of whatever talent you had to offer. He made you realsie how bad you were and how good you could be. He helped you understand your own potential. That was his greatest gift.

AP was a strange contradiction. His generosity was legendary. Every year Lintas gave all its employees a gift. This was normally declared around the year end party. It all started with a Philips clock radio. Fridges, Microwaves, Cooking ranges, all the gadgets that we advertised and worked on but which very few of us could afford. Egalitarian AP ensured that everyone got the same brand, the same specs. That was my first exposure to his generosity. At the same time his Kutchi Memon roots & the “kanjoosi” showed up very clearly when we had late meetings at his home. His staff would organise kurmura sev/mixture for us as a snack while he went in and had his dinner. It was a discordant note and many years later I asked him why. His response was that he had so many visitors, his staff at home would find it too difficult to cope with providing meals for all. He had chosen to prioritise them than us.

AP was highly competitive and he instilled that sense of hunger and competition in an entire generation of us. I worked with AP from 1980 to 1994. He made us conscious of the competition, we tracked and monitored their wins and losses. He pushed the Agency into the number1 position & then ran a campaign to ensure that everyone knew it. He was responsible for what is a standard industry practice today, taking revenues and grossing them up to arrive at billings. That’s how he moved Lintas to the number 1 slot, by improving profitability. The world refers to AP as a creative man and he was that but he was also a brilliant business man and strategist. AP knew numbers & he knew people and he put this deep insight to work for the organisation and for him. He turned around the financial position at Lintas and whipped all the business heads to get cracking on collections. I remember AP instituting a special collections bonus which was given to the group that had the highest monthly collections with the lowest days outstanding.

His relationships with his clients were built on mutual respect and trust, but AP was not shy of using his theatrical skills to his advantage. Sometimes we got caught in the cross fire. I remember one incident like it was yesterday. Zara sa Rin had been launched. A campaign that Usha Bhandarkar & B R Sharan had developed, turning the soggy nature of the detergent bar into a strength. One of the TVcs had a line “chod do yeh purane tarike” and the graphics crossed out a bottle of what appeared to be Robin Blue, a product from Reckitt Coleman, also a client of Lintas in Calcutta. Chundar Sethi, the then Marketing Director was livid. Reckitt was planning to sue Hindustan Lever. The Marketing head at Lever was Shunu Sen another great friend of APs. I was heading the detergents business at that time. AP called me in to attend the meeting with Mr Sethi. He put up an award winning performance, ranted, raved, gave me a hard time about our work on Rin and how it had damaged Robin Blue. Told me that I would need to ensure that we changed our campaign and convince our client (lever & Shunu) to modify the TVC. Mr Sethi was assuaged, Mr Padamsee was in top form and yours truly knew exactly what had to be done….nothing.

AP brought high drama into our lives. Meetings with him were high stress situations. Firstly you always had to have a writing pad to take down his notes. Secondly you had to be thoroughly prepared with answers to all his questions, thirdly you needed to be super flexible. You could start a meeting with him in his office and end up on a pavement in Bandra! Those were the days before mobiles & I have spent precious minutes begging taxi drivers to take me back to Express Towers where the watchmen kept an account for me and paid off my taxiwallas. We had meetings in the office, at his residence a building called Christmas Eve, at Theatre rehearsals, going down in the lift & even during pee breaks. (That was only for the men. I have heard some hilarious stories about senior directors jumping out of their skin when AP tapped them at the urinal) Alyque never wasted a minute.

That’s one of the lessons he deeply ingrained into us. Time is precious, don’t waste it.

Thank you Alyque, you will live on in a generation of advertising folk. You showed us that dreams and ambitions can be limitless.

*"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once" William Shakespeare. Taken from Alyques funeral notice. Long may you live in our thoughts & affections.