The human body is quite adaptable; but like every living being on this planet, it ascends, plateaus, and then descends before hitting the pit from where it had risen. The metaphor of hill for stages of life is thus quite apt.[break]
Conventional meaning of the “over the hill” idiom is slightly supercilious. At its worst, it implies that someone is too old to be useful.
Even a charitable interpretation carries suggestions of being past one’s prime. However, there is no need to be alarmed when a teenager uses the expression.
She may be endearingly referring to a senior colleague who refuses to join Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Age is an attitude: You are only as old as the apps of your smart phone show.
There is some truth in the insinuation that “seniors” talk too much about experiences of the past and show too little interest in the prospects of future.
That is perhaps natural. When you are going downhill, everything below looks frightening, and memories of the climb left behind refuses to leave your consciousness.
After certain age –youngsters insist that 40 years is the cutoff point, adults believe it to be 60 years –one tends to forget to remember to forget the past, just as a pop icon of yore once sang.
The young ones have hopes and dreams; older people have memories of struggles tinged with exhilaration of disappointments and accomplishments.
Memories become morbid when they give rise to necrophagia and remembrances begin to feed off the experiences of the past that had lain buried in the recesses of the heart and mind.
Reminiscences overwhelm reflections and the past enters into midday reveries when the body is trying to find a balance between the warmth of the sun and the chill of the wind on a languid winter afternoon.
Ram Narayan Pradhan, 73, was “Ram Dai” to most people who worked with him even for a short while. He passed away after spending nearly half a century in Nepal’s English language journalism.
In the office of the Independent Weekly newspaper in the mid-‘90s, I remember him typing out perfectly crafted prose and passing the page with the request to see if there was anything amiss.
I don’t recollect having noticed even a spelling mistake. Having spent much of his career at Rastriya Samachar Samiti in the age of manual input and teleprinter, Ram Dai had mastered the art of writing simple text without being simplistic.
He usually wrote short pieces, but the punch of his prose used to be unmistakable.
His untimely death induced memories of years I had spent in copywriting without someone like Ram Dai constantly reminding me to cut the text down to absolute minimum if my purpose was to express rather than to impress.
Peddlers of dream
Memories, like stories, are reconstructed every time they are narrated. It is possible that I remember less accurately than I believe. I jumped into the pit of advertising by accident.
Mani Joshi is into many things these days. Once upon a time, he was an ace graphic designer.
I usually dropped into his office for a bite out of his plate of vegetable chowmein during lunchtime. Navin used to come there too, to get this or that artwork prepared.
My only utility was suggesting some missing words or correcting ill-done text. Without even noticing it, I had been lured into the occupation of peddling dreams.
Money was not the main factor. Most businesses in the early eighties could not bring themselves up to pay for few everyday words used in the copy.
Mani was generous by temperament, but compulsions of running a competitive business made him pragmatic.
Howsoever meager, the remuneration helped supplement the measly salary of a midlevel government employee. But what I really liked about copywriting was the opportunity of playing with words.
Copywriting is an exacting discipline. The essence of a product or service has to be expressed. Its fragrance needs to be captured in words. There is no room for eloquence, however. Sentences have to be pared down to the minimum. Add a word, and it would look superfluous.
Take a term away, and the expression would appear incomplete. The same thing is said about verses, but copywriters cannot claim poetic license: Their creations have to make sense to the layperson.
The proportion, balance and rhythm of a finely crafted paragraph in advertising have to appeal to all the senses.
The viewer should be able to get the touch and feel the aroma and music of the product before going to the store to buy it.
The architecture of the text has to match the beauty of the accompanying artwork.
The artistry of words has to complement the elegance of empty spaces in print or the dynamics of movement and music of silence in a television commercial.
Moonlighting is a dismissive term. I remember having burnt midnight oil poring over great advertising copy to appreciate the luminosity of a well-chosen word or the cadence of a finely crafted sentence.
The great hit of that time “Coke is it” had only three words while David Ogilvy’s classic was mile-long in advertising terms: “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.” The only rule was that there was no rule.
I began to subscribe to The Asia Week, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Executive Digest, The Advertising Age, and The Economic Times in order to learn the techniques of the masters of the field.
I was already buying most Indian periodicals that Sandesh Griha sold in those days. It was exciting to watch the magic that words could achieve.
Among all the instruments of our craft, I loved a good pencil with an eraser end and the hardbound dictionary. Software such as Wordstar, and later Word Perfect, would make the tin box called Zenith Computer a useful tool, and the Selectric typewriter lost its charm.
However, Macintosh transformed the task of copywriting into a pastime.
You could spend hours watching your text dance in different garbs of its stylish fonts. I remember Binod Chaudhary wondering in admiration at the magic of Macintosh: “So this little box checks spelling and grammar and emphasizes words on its own!”
The denouement
Like many love stories that begin with infatuation, flirtations of a dabbler with casino capitalism ended on a note of disappointment suffused with a sense of fulfillment. By that time, the advertising scene in Kathmandu had become a little complex.
The agency had taken up the challenge of marketing the public offering of the shares of Jyoti Spinning Mills.
I bought loads of books. We had endless rounds of discussion with Roop Jyoti, an enlightened and erudite businessperson who had graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, been to Harvard and fought an election before deciding to revolutionize Nepali industry with his innovative approaches.
The advertising was a hit and I became one of its first victims. I had committed the grave error of believing my own rhetoric and invested every paisa of my savings into the shares of a company I was helping to sell.
The unraveling took sometime. The premier public limited company went into deep red even when its machines were humming 24x7 and the factory was supposed to be doing roaring business.
First, the promoters promised to buy out the ordinary shareholders. Then the script became a worthless piece of paper.
In the Jyoti Spinning Mills debacle, I lost every paisa that I had ever earned from advertising with compound interest.
The only thing that remains from my days in advertising adventures are a shelf of books on consumer behavior, media and marketing; loose sheaves of media research findings, unused boxes of visiting cards, and a few friends whom I can chat up without being intimidated by their Roman-Rana and mock-Malla villas, Thai bespoke suits or Korean SUVs.
These days when I hear being claimed that advertising informs the consumer or that it is the lifeblood of free media, I have to perforce smile to hide my annoyance.
I remember using that line in an internal conference of advertising agencies of a premier international airline. The retort of the chief executive of the principal advertising agency was short and succinct: “Scholars research. Journalists inform. Consumers pay. Governments regulate. We sell. Period.”
Businesses are not the only ones that believe in the mantra of marketing. The chief executive of an academic NGO shared how a donor quizzed her about “buy-in” of funded researches and field studies.
The aid industry is a huge marketplace with multiple interests. Someone in Norway, a country with about one-third the population of Karachi City, recently admitted to have put up spies in Pakistan.
Were they strategically placed in human rights organizations and the media that have relatively freer access to law enforcement agencies and the judiciary?
That would be speculative, but influence-peddling is quite common among donors and lenders who fund propaganda talk-shows over radio and television, sponsor junkets of opinion-makers to Zurich and Johannesburg, or pay for essays with lists of references longer than the content.
This is the new frontier of advertising in developing countries.
Ram Dai had been editor for too long not to notice that the line between journalism and advertising had begun to blur. I had not met him for a long time, but he would often call late in the evening to bemoan that well-crafted text was hard to come across.
He should have lived some more to mentor youngsters. But once again I lapse into wistfulness, a telltale sign of rancor that comes with advancing age.
Lal contributes to The Week with his biweekly column Reflections. He is one of the widely read political analyst in Nepal.
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