Saturday, May 19, 2007

Karmayogi

My biography of R K Swamy a self-made advertising icon of the 20th century is scheduled to be released on 29 May at Chennai. Now that it’s official, I can broadcast the following piece I wrote some time ago to the world.

To my eternal regret, there have been a few extraordinary personalities my essential reserve has prevented me from getting to know better, although the opportunity presented itself time and again — R K Narayan, Semmangudi Srinivasier and Kalakshetra’s Sankara Menon were examples.

There are others you wish you had had the chance to get to know better; you came into contact with them just once or twice in your life and that from a distance, and later heard fascinating, even inspiring accounts of their lives from those who knew them well.To this category belonged the late R K Swamy, the advertising legend from the south who made history by establishing the first all-India advertising agency based in Chennai, and took it to the Top Five in record time. A writing project brought me in contact with many members of the RK Swamy BBDO ‘family’ – that’s how the employees and associates of the agency are fondly called by all concerned — and it was a memorable experience to listen to their accounts of this unlikely adman, a completely self-made person from a poor, orthodox Iyengar family of Kumbakonam.

Straitened circumstances took Swamy’s parents to Bombay to seek a livelihood there in the late 1920s, and that is where Swamy’s career in advertising began, when he and his brothers were forced by circumstances to go to work when they should have been entering the portals of college. Unschooled the siblings might have been, but certainly not uneducated, as all of them, especially Swamy, became voracious readers and highly intelligent survivors in the university of life, to put it rather dramatically.

Joining the international agency, J Walter Thompson, as a translator of Gujarati advertisements (!), Swamy grew rapidly in the organisation by sheer devotion to work and extraordinary display of initiative that led him to impress his boss Edward Fielden with a thoroughly researched report on the tobacco market in India commissioned by a British client of JWT.

As he rose in the agency, Swamy absorbed the best values practised by Fielden and added his own sense of honesty, integrity and fair play to his work, so that all his work came to be synonymous with solid research and hard facts. No tall claims were made, and no product was sought to be sold on the strength of smart copy or attractive visuals alone. A man who never went to college, he also earned a reputation for his proficiency in English.

Having earned his spurs in Calcutta and Bombay, he persuaded his boss to transfer him to Madras where he opened the JWT South office in 1955. Building a brilliant young team around himself and Umesh Rao, the creator of the Air India maharajah, he created advertisers out of Madras companies traditionally notorious for their reluctance to embrace the medium of advertising. He soon conquered Madras and his branch was the most profitable in the whole of JWT India which later became Hindustan Thompson Associates or HTA on Indianisation.

How Swamy walked out at age 50 to create his own agency, when the HTA management overlooked his obvious credentials for the top slot in India in favour of outsider Maurice Mathias, is now part of the lore of Indian advertising. Friends and relatives wondered if he had made a risky, quixotic decision that could lead to disaster, but Swamy made a huge success of his new enterprise - by always taking the path less taken.

He pioneered public sector advertising in India, he took on large bodies like the Indian Newspaper Society fighting them on matters of principle, and became a powerful spokesman for the whole industry. One of the earliest in advertising to practise modern management principles in the industry, he was a pious man, who played a major part in the revival of temples and gave generously for worthy causes. He was one of the first businessmen in India to anticipate the advent of globalisation and enter into partnership with a large multinational agency. Person after person I met in the course of my work expressed their deep admiration and respect for this many-sided personality who single-mindedly pursued excellence in all he did. One of them, a former CMD of a multinational corporation said of him:

“Everything he did had to be for the good of the country. He had an exceptional feeling for the poor, for the downtrodden. He was a very spiritual person, a karmayogi.”