"The last time Piyush Pandey called me…": Ajay Gahlaut on losing the man who could fix anything but this

New Delhi: Piyush is gone. There is no getting away from this fact. I have seen him at close quarters. He could retrieve the most hopeless of situations, win unwinnable pitches and pull miracles out of thin air. But even he cannot come back from where he has gone. And while I struggle to process this fact, all I can think of is phone calls.

My being stationed in Delhi meant that a major part of my interactions with Piyush over nearly twenty years were over the phone. Every time the phone rang and I saw the name “Piyush Pandey” on the screen, I knew some excitement was afoot.

It could be anything. He could ask me to write a song for a football tournament, translate a voice-over, meet a Union minister for a brief, present something he had written to Nandan Nilekani, get into an unmarked car to go to the RAW headquarters to hear him give a lecture, send him a radio spot I had written that he loved just so he could share it with his friends and have a chuckle.

He would call to crack a joke, congratulate me on a campaign he liked or bounce a baseline off me.

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, though. He was an uncompromising professional and would give me a tongue-lashing if he found something I, or my office, had done that was short of the highest possible standards. But these were few and far between, and when he did give me a piece of his mind, he would call back half an hour later and crack a conciliatory joke or two by way of apology.

Of the thousands of calls I must have received from Piyush, there are some that are seared into my memory.

We had just won the LG account in the Delhi office, and I was on the way to a meeting with the client when I got a call from Piyush. I picked it up and said, “Sir, I’m on the way to LG. Should I tell you what we are going to present?”

“Arre chhod yaar, kaam toh accha hi hoga,” he said. “India jeet gaya! Shaam ko party karna!”

This was the famous Adelaide Test match against Australia in which Rahul Dravid scored a double century and guided India to a win in late 2003. I later realised that this wasn’t a random call. It was Piyush calling to put me at my ease before a huge meeting with the biggest client we had won in years.

Then there was the time I had quit Ogilvy and was in a no-hope situation in a no-hope agency. I was twiddling my thumbs in the office one day and wondering how to get out of the situation I was in, when suddenly the phone rang. “Piyush Pandey” was flashing on the screen. My heart leapt. I picked up the phone, and Piyush growled at me, “Kahan g*$%d marwa raha hai. Wapas aa ja!” Those words were sweeter to me than any fancy appointment letter could ever have been.

When I finally quit Ogilvy in 2018 after eleven years in my second innings, Piyush remained cross with me for a while. He was an emotional man and felt a sense of betrayal at my having left Ogilvy. One day, he called me and asked, “Yeh LinkedIn kya hota hai?”

I said, “Yahan naukriyan milti hain, sir.”

“Toh LinkedIn kabhi mat kholna. Mere saath rehna,” he said in his bluff manner. I had laughed and agreed. But circumstances changed, and eventually I put in my papers. He wasn’t very happy and didn’t call me for a long time.

But gradually the calls started again. He wasn’t a man to carry a grudge. Strangely, though, a lot of the calls were blank calls. When I would call him back, he would say cheerily, “Mr Gahlaut, how can I help you!”

I would say, “Sir, aapne phone kiya tha!”

He would then apologise and say that it must have been a “butt-dial”, since alphabetically my name was first in his contact list.

Ironically, the second-last call I got from him was another butt-dial. I was used to this by now, so I texted him asking if he had called me.

He called back and said, “Call toh nahin kiya tha, lekin abhi kar deta hoon!” He asked me how I was and what I was doing. I enquired about his health and life in general. We chatted for a few minutes and promised to meet each other soon.

That was the last call I received from Piyush Pandey.

He is no longer with us. Advertising, for me, is dead. The music is over. The laughter is gone. A pall of gloom lies over the entire industry.

It is all very sad. But the saddest thing for me is that every time my phone rings, I will know for sure that the name “Piyush Pandey” will never flash on its screen again.