Not for him the flamboyance and tea-drinking ways. Piyush Pandey of O&M India prefers the Indian chai version and is set to surprise us with his Hindi poetry collection

Though candid enough, Pandey chooses his words during our conversation and reveals only as much as he thinks he should. Short, pointed answers, loaded with information, is the way he likes to go, and one misses a general feeling of camaraderie that usually settles into interactions with him.

Or maybe he’s just tired, since it’s nearly six in the evening and he had mentioned a day full of meetings when I had spoken to him the same morning. Or maybe he’s just a morning person, what with his two cuppas of chai in the morning. “I am a desi and love my chai instead of the usual tea,” he says, adding how he’s a big fan of adrak (ginger) chai as well.

Talking of tea, Pandey remembers with fondness his days with a brew company in Kolkata. It was his first job and turned out to be a lot of fun, what with young people from the same college, working in the same company, being looked after well and playing a lot of sports. “It was also a great learning experience about life, and had a lot of do with personality development,” he says, reminiscing how the job gave him an opportunity to interact with successful people at that time. “There was Arun Lal, Dr Vece Paes (tennis player Leander Paes’ father), Charu Sharma were all working with us. You learned something or the other from them – their mannerisms, how they conducted themselves and so on,” he says.

Despite the pretty picture though, Pandey started to get restless in the job after a while. A chance meeting with two friends who were in the advertising industry made him stand up and take notice, although he confesses he didn’t even know about the profession at that time.

Cut to today, Ogilvy & Mather has become India’s best creative agency according to the Cannes rankings. Additionally, Pandey has created history with the Abbys naming his campaign for Cadbury Dairy Milk “Campaign of the Century”, and the TV commercial for Fevikwik “Commercial of the Century”. At last count, Pandey had been given 900 awards nationally and internationally. For the man himself, however, the real appreciation lies in the fact that people on the street congratulate him for his work and tell him how much they love it.

Interestingly, this is only his second job, when he joined Ogilvy & Mather in 1982 as an account executive and took to the advertising world like a duck to water. “I loved the informality with which the advertising agency operated, and the place full of young people, the friends I made,” he says.

He was also encouraged to step into the creative department and his first campaign, “Chal meri Luna”, caught headlines. One campaign led to another and today the ad guru has some of the most enviable campaigns to his credit – Cadbury, Pidilite, Onida, Le Sancy, Polio campaign with Amitabh Bachchan, National Literacy Mission, SBI Life Insurance, Titan, to name a few. Most recently, it is the Fortune Refined Oil’s “Ghar ka khana ghar ka khana hota hai” (Nothing beats homemade food), and BJP’s campaign for Lok Sabha elections that he is particularly proud of. “I feel if you don’t have three or four pieces of work every year, you should start planning your retirement,” he says, lending a peek into his competitive personality.

Pandey is also proud of penning down the lyrics for the historical “Mile sur mera tumhara” campaign. An idea conceived and conceptualised by Suresh Mallick, the campaign was first aired on August 15, 1988, and had some of the most prominent personalities becoming a part of it. “He wanted a song that crosses languages and cultures and be simple enough to reach the people of India,” he reminisces. And when Mallick did not get an answer from the people he approached, he asked Pandey to do it. “I was a bit overawed but then I wrote it and he pushed me into writing it better,” says Pandey. He doesn’t like the new version, though.

But is there something he wished he had done?

“The Times of India’s ‘A day in the life of India’,” he says, without blinking, “A truly Indian campaign, it was like R K Laxman on film.” Talking about the creative process, Pandey adds how he has always had Lakshman rekhas (limits not to go beyond) while working on campaigns. “You must definitely stretch an idea but you must also know the limit of that stretch,” he warns, “Or you stretch is so much that there is a feeling that this is not me at all, this is against my culture and I react violently to it.”

He doesn’t sidestep the question of what went wrong with the Kurl-on campaign that caused outrage for a Malala Yousafzai poster, which showed her being shot and bouncing back. “I feel it was blown out of proportion, but I have cautioned my colleagues that what you may think is positive may not be perceived as such,” he says. He adds it is dangerous if something is open to interpretation so much.

Delving more into the creative process, Pandey reveals how his creative process includes being true to oneself and one’s surroundings. “After having done three decades of work, we still haven’t scratched the surface of India,” he feels.

Retirement plans? “Since no one has asked me to retire, I haven’t thought about it,” he says, laughing loudly. And although his work is a natural high for Pandey, he is also busy writing a book, which will be “a bit of biography, and about the truth of life.” He also plans to publish his Hindi poems shortly.

But what if he wasn’t in the advertising world – would he still have been a tea-taster? “Oh no, no. Either I would have been tired of it or they would have thrown me out,” he laughs, “I think I might have been trying to express myself to people in some form or the other,” he signs off. In other words: an advertising person.