The man who gave India some of its best TV ads
NEWDELHI: In 1982, New Delhi hosted the Asian Games. In a fit of magnanimity, the government decided to allow the import of 50,000 colour television sets to allow at least some people to watch India’s first colour TV broadcast – of the games. The quota was soon forgotten as Indians scrambled to buy colour TVs.
In 1984, Lalitaji made her appearance on TV , pushing the merits of Surf detergent. The iconic ad was created by Lintas, headed then by Alyque Padamsee. In 1985, the iconic Liril girl (the first one was Karen Lunel; the ad made waves in cinemas when it was launched in 1975) made the transition to TV. The agency was again Padamsee’s Lintas.
In one of those years, 1984, or 1985, Cherry Blossom’s Charlie Chaplin imitator captured the imagination of TV audiences when the first ad was aired on TV. He was as funny as the original, people said. The agency? Lintas.
Cut to 1989, and arguably the most popular ad on TV was Hamara Bajaj, featuring warm feel-good vignettes of ordinary lives across India set to a hummable score. The man behind the ad was, again, Padamsee.
Alyque Padamsee passed on to what he himself may have described as the great gig in the sky (apologies to Richard Wright) on the morning of Saturday, 17 November, after an illness.
The breadth of his career and the fields he straddled mean he will be remembered by many people for many things.Padamsee ran Lintas for 14 years, from 1979 to 1993, and was one of the first creative directors who went on to head an ad agency. Within Lintas, he was (only half in jest) referred to as God.
But more than anyone else, Padamsee, who turned 90 this year, was the ad man who adapted fastest to television, helping his agency create some of the most memorable ads in the decade before satellite television.
“Alyque brought flamboyance and swagger to the advertising industry,” says adman and author Piyush Pandey, who enjoyed a warm camaraderie with Padamsee although they worked in competing agencies. “He was ahead of his time, so people thought some of his work was controversial. But he remained bold and fearless. He was a good leader and inspired young people, giving them the confidence to play on the front foot. That way, he was a great influence, not just in Lintas but the industry overall.” It wasn’t that Padamsee’s Lintas didn’t create print ads. It did several, including a long list of recallable and likeable ones, from “Gabbar Ki Asli Pasand” featuring Amjad Khan (for Britannia Glucose biscuits in 1976; Sholay, featuring Khan as one of Hindi cinema’s most menacing bad guys, Gabbar Singh, was released in 1975) to the racy one (perhaps not by today’s standards) featuring Marc Robinson and Pooja Bedi for Kamasutra condoms. But in a decade when agencies struggled to transition from print to TV, it was Padamsee’s agency that was at the vanguard of the charge. This was perhaps because of Padamsee’s felicity on stage (and screen; he famously played Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi). He continued to act in and produce plays even into the 2010s. “He brought his theatre skills to advertising and vice-versa,” says Ambi Parameswaran, another adman and author. “An advertising review presentation is usually staid but he turned it into theatre. For one, he brought Lalitaji to the pitch and created a fake waterfall.”
Old-time Mumbaikars still remember Padamsee’s productions of Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar and Tuglaq fondly.
As Indian advertising struggles with another transition (to digital) and is yet to discover a creative genius to help it navigate the change, it’s time to remember the man who helped it manage the last.