How Piyush Pandey made middle India cool

New Delhi: For years, Indian advertising worshipped the metro. The elite, the foreign-returned, the English-speaking few. And then came a man from Jaipur with a thick moustache, a louder laugh, and a mind sharper than any MBA handbook.

That man was Piyush Pandey, the man who made middle India not just visible, but cool.
Before Piyush, ads spoke to India’s top 5%. After him, they spoke to the other 95%. He brought the heartland into the frame, the street into the storyboard, and the desi idiom into the headline. 

Suddenly, “Lalitaji” from Surf Excel was every neighbourhood aunty, and “Fevicol” was not just glue but a way of life.

Piyush never saw India through the lens of data; he saw it through the window of a train. He knew how people talked, what they laughed at, what they cried about. He turned their quirks into punchlines and their habits into insights.

 He didn’t romanticise the middle class, he represented it.

His creative world wasn’t powered by Cannes aspirations; it was powered by chai, cricket, and conversations. His characters were real, from the rickshaw-wallah to the schoolteacher, from the factory worker to the college student.

Through them, he gave India a new kind of pride. He made it okay to be small-town smart, imperfectly perfect, and emotionally intelligent.

Think of Fevicol again: dusty, rural, and wonderfully Indian. Or Cadbury Dairy Milk’s dancing girl: not glamorous, not urban-chic, but full of life. Or “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara”: a tapestry of faces and languages that celebrated diversity long before “unity in diversity” became a campaign tagline.

He didn’t chase the global tone. He created the Indian one.

Even in his English-language scripts, there was the scent of Indian soil. You could hear it in the pauses, feel it in the humour, and see it in the pride of being authentically Indian.

When the world tried to become Western, Piyush reminded us that our stories were enough. He showed young creatives that brilliance didn’t come from a foreign brief but from the backyard. He made colloquialism classy. He made “common” the new “cool.”

As he rose to become Chairman of Ogilvy India, and later Chief Creative Officer for Ogilvy Worldwide, Piyush never stopped being that Jaipur boy who believed that India’s middle was its magic.

 Even in his leadership, he built teams that valued simplicity over style, humour over hype, and emotion over ego.

Today, as the industry grieves his passing, it’s worth remembering that Piyush Pandey didn’t just build brands, he built India’s creative confidence. He made storytelling native again, language local again, and advertising relatable again.

He was, and will always remain, the man who made middle India cool, not by changing it, but by celebrating it exactly as it was.