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My Story: Rejected by NID, I was asked by 'God' Subhas Ghosal, 'Would you like to work in India's largest ad agency?'

Anurag Hira, Director, One by One Design, is a self-taught graphic designer and a college dropout by default. He has done stints in a few agencies – some of which he calls 'snake pits'! Read on...

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My Story: Rejected by NID, I was asked by 'God' Subhas Ghosal, 'Would you like to work in India's largest ad agency?'

My Story: Rejected by NID, I was asked by 'God' Subhas Ghosal, 'Would you like to work in India's largest ad agency?'

Anurag Hira, Director, One by One Design, is a self-taught graphic designer and a college dropout by default. When the design institute he so badly wanted to be a part of declined to take him in, saying they'd have to 'unlearn' him, he returned home to Calcutta with his Rotrings and chose never to move out. He has subsequently done stints in a few agencies – some of which he calls 'snake pits' – and has even interviewed NID passouts searching for jobs! Read on...  

May 21, 2013

publive-image Anurag Hira

It was the summer of '87…

I was chasing more girls in college than my English Honours graduation, as I realised within the first year itself that Chaucer and Spencer weren't exactly who I wanted to go after in life. Boy, did we have serious lingual differences?

As the self-taught 'poster boy' at St Xavier's Calcutta, I was lapping up all the female adulation while trying to get better at making posters for college festivals and cute greeting cards with corny messages for all occasions – from break-ups to make-ups. My sole objective was to hear them swoon and gush, hoping it translated into something more worthwhile for me! The RoI often paid off in kind, but those are some snug stories that best remain, well… untold.

That summer, I applied to NID. Having been shortlisted down to the lucky 100 and being called to Ahmedabad was, in itself, a dream almost coming true. But then, a dhoti-clad Professor Pulin Garg grilled me on how I had even acquired my Rotrings and the selection committee concluded they had to “unlearn” me? I returned home dejected, with fond memories of a red-brick campus that was not meant to be. Within a month, my brother Mohit got me an appointment with God – Subhas Ghosal – who had seen some of my creative produce and asked me in his trademark baritone: “Would you like to work in India's largest advertising agency?”

And that is how I tripped into advertising, having joined as a stipendary trainee at the then Bondel Road office of HTA Calcutta (now JWT), in July 1987. Within four years, I became HTA's youngest Senior Art Director without any formal training in art, having gorged on fonts and understanding not only their usage, but also studying parts of characters in public transport, with strangers staring down with shock at this overgrown lad poring over A-B-Cs?!

Ironically, in my fourth year at Thompson, this self-taught (un)learned Senior Art Director was interviewing one of the girls from my batch who had got into NID and was passing out (not as in fainting, but with a post-graduation diploma in graphic design)! She felt as awkward (I think) that here she was almost armed with a diploma, being interviewed by this 'reject' who had already moved way up, professionally. The humility of that moment remains a significant milestone in my little over 25-year career. It reassured me that passion, commitment and the ability to grasp were far more important than a formal diploma. As Mr Ghosal would say, “Observe, absorb and then connect!”

On hindsight, having not got into NID hasn't really made me feel smaller. I still walk 5'4” tall by design, so what if it's with a hunch, by default.

Cut to a two-year stint at Trikaya Grey with some path-breaking creative work in a debauched atmosphere. I then moved on to become one of the founder members of Equus, along with Suhel and Swapan Seth – who remain two dear 'brotherly friends' of mine. Incidentally, while Swapan and I did some stellar work (and continue to, whenever one feels the others' need), entering award shows was never a need. Our greatest reward was getting to do the next ad, on the high of our last. That was the adrenalin that kept us going. Six and a half years of having set up an office from scratch to doing some of the most noticeable work then, I moved to serve as head of Contract's Calcutta office, until business started dwindling and I was given the dirty task of having to shut down the office here.

Ironically, I have the distinction of having started an office and shutting down two – Equus Calcutta and Contract Calcutta! Having to close down an office is like being bungee-jump pushed!

I then joined Bates' Calcutta office in 2002 as its ECD – a veritable snake-pit, infested with inter and intra-office politics. It was the only agency where I met three CEOs within the first three years! At last count, the agency, which prides itself as 'the change agency', must have had at least six identity changes! And each time it underwent one, there'd be cross-country jamborees with APAC brass flying in for elaborate local lunches over bottles of Jacob's Creek, an overhaul of stationery, new reception area graphics with alpona motifs for local effect and the pain of having to communicate new email IDs all over again! Designing fresh key numbers for the agency was fun, though. Even though I left by the end of 2010, change continues unabated. That place had senior management which would hardly reciprocate mails on issues. If I shot an important mail on anything, I could almost expect not to hear from anyone up there. But if I sent a joke as a test follow-up, lo and behold! I'd promptly get a Hahaha! (or whatever the equivalent of ROFL was in those days). Good riddance to that pit, and to some poisonous old snakes that still slither and are probably even reading this piece on the sly!

Having got out of there unscathed, I detoxified my head and knew I had enough administrative experience in addition to creative respect, but so wanted to get back to doing what I had set out to do – pure design. What better than to set up your own shop?

One by One Design started off on what was a numerologically perfect date – 1/1/11. With a small team of passionate and fun-loving people, touchwood, the relationships that I've built over the years have been rewarding when they returned, quite literally, one by one.

But no story is complete without a touching foreword. And I will never forget the man – a really respected true-blue client in the city, who was the first to call me and say, “So you have set up your own shop? May I be your first client?”

That's what I call a humbling return on years of investment.

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There are great untold stories in advertising. If you know of any ad professional who came into the profession by chance or because of unusual circumstances, do let us know so that we can profile him. Write to us at Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

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