All for Bread and Butter

“Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me,” was a line lent to us by the great American poet, Robert Frost. However, in the context of Bharat Dabholkar’s experiences in advertising, this quote makes for the perfect adman’s prayer. Not just because it is short, concise, and has the word “forgive” in it, but on listening to one of Bharat Dabholkar’s anecdotes it seems as if the lines were written by Frost keeping our Tuesday speaker in mind.

Bharat Dabholkar has been hailed as one of the first creative geniuses to bring Hinglish into ad copies. An idea that his boss Sylvester DaCunha patronised, when, as an employee, the speaker suggested the use of this new language in the Amul billboards. As you know, the outcome was a success. And as success was never known to any man not willing to struggle, so was the case with the “funny adman.”

One of the Amul billboards, if memory serves right, depicted Lord Ganesha holding a slice of bread and being offered butter by the Amul girl. While no one had an issue with the creative liberty taken by Bharat Dabholkar, there was (of course) one lawyer who took offence. A day after the billboard wasunveiled, the speaker received a twenty-eight page letter from the irked citizen. It read, as summarised by the speaker, “You cannot show a Hindu God holding bread in his hand, because in the olden days christian missionaries would throw pieces of bread in wells, and non-Christians who drank the water got converted to Christianity.”

An apology was enough to steer the lawyer away from the offensive, but another incident forced this Tuesday speaker to give up “taking chances.”

The next year, on the day of Ganesh Chaturthi, another hoarding of Ganesha without bread was unveiled. This time the advertising agency did not receive a legal notice, but someone working for Amul was contacted by Shiv Sainiks, who threatened to burn down the hoarding if it weren’t brought down in forty-eight hours.

Here it is important to know that the late Dr. Verghese Kurien, founder of Amul, trusted his advertising agency blindly. In the words of Bharat Dabholkar, “The credit for what Amul was, is not because of the creative people who wrote those one liners, but because of a client like Dr. Kurien.” The latter was known to give the advertising agency complete creative freedom. Nonetheless, the political threat did call for a meeting with the ad agency.

It was Bharat Dabholkar’s decision to overlook the threat since he was confident that if the Shiv Sainiks were to burn the hoarding, the media would turn the event in favour of the brand. However, he did meet up with Balasaheb Thackeray, the leader of the Shiv Sainiks. Amusingly, the Sainik leader was unaware of such a threat, but promised to send a few of his men to protect the hoarding after realising that the man behind the Amul ads was a Maharashtrian. Now friends, if that isn’t the great big joke that Frost refers to, what is?

And as history will note, for the fifteen days that it was displayed, the hoarding stayed safe and sound.