From chapter 2:
(I like to call this ‘The Arena’)

“Very lit
coliseum
tle has changed in the world of showbiz in the past two thousand years. Reality shows have been big ever since the Romans built the Colosseum. Down the ages, the genre has only matured and evolved; the French enjoyed a brief honeymoon with their guillotine, the Spaniards institutionalized their bullfights, and in modern times ABC has come up with the highly...well, ‘Survivor’ is in its fourth season. And International Foods (that hallowed multinational where I work as associate product manager, cookies) has perfected its own version of ‘the public spectacle’, also referred to internally as ‘Advertising Meeting in the 4th Floor Conference Room.’

Built less than a year ago, the 4th Floor Conference Room is IF’s pride and glory; a James Bond affair with wireless, digital and laser, miles of mahogany tabletop, acres of grey carpeting and thousands of leather chairs. Most afternoons it plays to indifferent audiences of VP’s, Directors and MD’s, but Tuesday afternoon, the day of the ad agency meeting, we had an entire ecosystem in there.

What is it about an ad presentation that pulls in the entire office? Every single seat in the room was sold out. Tan suits, grey suits, black and brown; they were all there, with coffees and moods to match. And the entire ad agency that had come along to cheer. (Or mourn, depending on how things went). In that non-smoking room Yogi’s voice droned, the suits thrust out their chins, the agency sucked in their cheeks - and five chairs from the left exit I inhaled lungfuls of anticipation and blew rings of fright. Yogi was droning jargon again.

I watched Lolita, the ‘creative’ head at the agency, warily. She was new; she’d joined two months ago, right after the previous incumbent left without notice ‘to find his inner self’ in Hollywood. The agency claims Lolita is from their UK office; I maintain she’s from La-La-land. You can see it in the pink gloves and orange scarves she wears (in June) and in the hundreds of beads that hang about her person. They claim she speaks English, French, German, Italian, Hindi, Bangla and Oriya, but Yogi was droning jargon and she was meditating and it made me nervous.

And the big boss had a cold. Not just a few adventurous early-adopter type viruses; he’d captured the whole mature virus market. He sat propped on his elbows and tissues at the far end of the table, and his water-logged eyes rolled from time to time.

We were on slide 15/103. ‘The strategic imperative of this challenging market scenario…’ Yogi’s voice droned and I buried my head in my hands.

Yogi is the account director at the agency and my cross to bear. Short hair, long face, big hands. Some brains, some attitude and a severe substance abuse problem. (Assuming you can call jargon a substance; it has the same life-threatening consequences). I have killed Yogi in my dreams a thousand times. Sometimes I use a gun, sometimes a knife and sometimes my bare fists, but the end is always a happy one. There was no such escape today.
‘The purchase and usage patterns of the core consumer group...’

I closed my eyes and sent up a desperate prayer. ‘Dear merciful God in heaven, just because our Curly Cookies are a lot better than those rip-off ‘Creamy Delights’ by Gourmet International, just in the interests of the whole of consumer-kind, just for today, please stop his gibberish and let him make a great presentation.’
It worked.
Vik, Head of Marketing, and my hero, stepped in. ‘Yogi, lets get on with the ad, we’re all familiar with the context.’ The big boss honked in agreement and Yogi sat down to skip slides. He stopped at 52/103. We all gazed at the screen, which now displayed a larger than life close-up of a Curly Cookie, cream oozing out, titled “PEARLY TWIRLY CURLY COOKIES”

:-O?! My heart backed all the way up to my lungs.”