‘He made India fall in love with itself again,’ KV Sridhar remembers Piyush Pandey

New Delhi: This morning felt heavier than most. News like this doesn’t come easy, not when it’s about someone who wasn’t just a colleague or even a friend but a part of your creative DNA.

When I heard that Piyush was gone, I couldn’t reconcile with it. For a while, I just sat in silence. He was one year older and I often teased him about being my junior in advertising. That small joke exchanged over four decades of friendship now carries the weight of a lifetime.

You expect to lose your seniors one day. It's part of the natural order. But when someone your age, someone who walked the same path and breathed the same madness as you, suddenly leaves it hits differently. You don’t just lose a person; you lose a mirror.

I’ve known Piyush for more than 40 years. We started out as competitors from different agencies, different geographies, but the same hunger. We fought fiercely for talent, for clients, for work. But beneath that rivalry was a quiet affection, a sense of kinship. We always called each other “partner” in jest. He’d say, “Ranji mat khel, desh ke liye khel.” Don’t play for the Ranji Trophy, play for India.

That was Piyush. Always larger than the logo on his visiting card.

I still remember our early days at Cannes in the mid 90s, when only a handful of Indians would show up. We had barely a couple of entries then, and yet, we’d sit at the Carlton terrace, talking about what it meant to make work from India that the world would notice. One evening, I told him, “Piyush, look at us, we have to cross borders to meet, drink, and laugh.”

He smiled and said, “We don’t belong to different agencies. We both work for the same agency called Indian advertising. When we’re here, we represent our country.”

That line has stayed with me ever since. 

It changed how I looked at our industry. From then on, we carried India with us in jury rooms, conferences, festivals, and boardrooms. We didn’t just defend our work; we explained our culture. And that’s what Piyush did better than anyone else. He made India understandable to the world and unforgettable to itself.

He never chased global validation. His pride was in being Indian. Whether it was Fevicol or Cadbury, it was always the India we all grew up in emotional, funny, imperfect, but real. And he made the world fall in love with that India.

Over time, our partnership deepened even though we never worked in the same agency. I was at Lintas and Leo Burnett, he at Ogilvy. But the bond went beyond office walls. We worked for the same clients sometimes Unilever, Cadbury, Bajaj often on rival brands. Still, there was never bitterness. He’d call me after seeing a good campaign and say, “Accha kaam hai.” And I’d do the same.

We shared an unspoken understanding that creativity was bigger than competition. It wasn’t about one upmanship; it was about pushing each other higher.

He was always generous with affection. I remember hosting an Andhra party at my home once my wife and I cooked for 18 people. I made everyone wear dhotis, and we served food ourselves. Piyush loved it. He refused to leave the table and made us keep serving him. Later, he promised to host a Rajasthani feast in return, cooked by his mother. 

He never got to do it. But when I met his mother later, he’d told her about that promise and she insisted on feeding me herself. That was the kind of man whose warmth ran in his bloodline.

Piyush often said we were “brothers from different mothers.” He envied my five brothers; I envied his many sisters. That’s probably why he had such a deep understanding of women and sensitivity in his work. 

I still remember dragging him into a UNFPA programme on gender sensitivity, telling him, “You have to speak. People will believe you because you have sisters. I don’t.” And he did. He spoke beautifully about how his sisters shaped his view of women and inspired him to tell better, truer stories.

That conversation later reflected in his work like that Google ad about the sister carrying laddus for her elder sibling. That’s how life and work intertwined for him. He never separated the two.

Even after all these years, he carried the excitement of a young creative. He’d often show me new work before it went out like a child showing a parent his latest drawing. Once, before an election campaign, he came home to show me the edits and asked what I thought. “Dekh na, kuch badalna hai?” That hunger, that enthusiasm never faded.

People often say we were rivals, but the truth is, we were partners in spirit. We competed, yes, but with admiration, not animosity. When he used a great Indian insight, it pushed me to find one of my own. And when I mentored young talent, he’d always encourage me, saying, “Keep doing that. Don’t care what others think.”

We had an unspoken pact to stand for what we believed in and to protect the spirit of this industry. No one else could destroy that bond, not business, not rivalry, not time.

Now that he’s gone, I feel a quiet emptiness. Our daily chats, the easy laughter, the shared pride of being part of something bigger than ourselves it’s all echoing in memory.

You can’t really sum up a friendship like that. It wasn’t built on grand gestures, but on years of small moments of shared jokes, mutual respect, and unconditional affection.

He taught me that partnerships aren’t about working in the same place; they’re about believing in the same purpose. And ours was simple to make Indian advertising proud, to make it matter.

Today, as I sit here, I don’t feel like I’ve lost a competitor or even a colleague. I’ve lost my partner, my fellow cricketer in this long, beautiful match of ideas.

And in true Piyush style, I can almost hear him chuckling somewhere, saying, “Don’t stop playing. Just change the pitch.”