There was a time every advertising copywriter worth his or her salt had a novel up their sleeve. Salman Rushdie was one, of course, but so was a whole array of other writers, from F Scott Fitzgerald and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, through Peter Carey, Martin Amis, Dashiell Hammett and James Patterson, to Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Don DeLillo.
And in India we’ve had people like Aubrey Menen (author of the largely forgotten The Prevalence of Witches), Kiran Nagarkar and Anuja Chauhan. The latest addition to this list is Shashank Gupta.
His Pimp is the story of the 60-year old “uncle” who loses his job and is drawn into becoming a pimp, renting out rooms in his late father’s bungalow by the hour.
The book begins compellingly. The first chapter is just 29 words long:
“I am a seventy-year-old pimp. If you must still go on, let’s flash back ten years to Chapter 2, my first jottings. I said turn the page. Moron.”
Who could resist an opening like that?
A dense, profane little book
As you’re drawn into the narrative, you realise that “Uncle” is not a nice man to know; not the kind of genial, glad-handing pimp of Paul Theroux’s Saint Jack, for example. Instead, he is a dark, demented character, driven by complex memories of a dead stepmother, which “caress his solitude”. A man who, in fact, might have belonged in the pages of Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, accompanied by characters like his henchman Kamru, who “like a bat, cannot sleep at night”, and the girl whose name, heartbreakingly, is “Nothing”.
Pimp is a dense, profane little book, with riffs on things like penises stuck in zippers, whores who smell of sweat and stale liquor-breath, dead babies in gutters, and the recurrent leitmotif of a razor that is quick to slice off an errant finger or draw “a thin crescent moon of blood from ear to ear”.
The narrative grows progressively darker, as “Uncle” – through some bizarre tantric process, perhaps – transcends through sex and sadism into godhead. Or does he? It is often hard to tell where reality ends and hallucination begins. Yes, Pimp is a challenging book to read.
The line onwards from Rushdie, Marquez, et al
Why do so many copywriters turn to writing novels? Many of them – of a certain generation, anyway – joined advertising essentially because they had literary aspirations. Indeed, “copy tests” of the past focused largely on the candidate’s love of words and turn of phrase.
Some writers, like Rushdie and Garcia Marquez, used advertising cynically, to subsidise their early years. Others, like Peter Carey (one of the few two-time Booker winners) and Indra Sinha (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winner and a Booker-shortlisted writer) had very successful copywriting careers before outgrowing them at some point to move on to higher things.
A newer generation of advertising people, however, have done their time in a newer medium, and therefore move on to feature films – like Dibakar Bannerjee, Ram Madhvani, R Balki, Pradeep Sarkar and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra (although the impulse goes back, of course, to Shyam Benegal and Satyajit Ray). If we look at the wider world, filmmakers like Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson, Tony Scott, Adrian Lyne and David Puttnam – not forgetting the Indian-born Tarsem, director of Hollywood films like The Cell, Immortals and Mirror, Mirror – all began their lives, extremely successfully, in advertising.
What is the reason for this curious pattern of career migration? Advertising people offer a variety of explanations, but perhaps the one that rings most true is that a career in advertising can be – contrary to the glamorous public image – tedious, subserviant and soul-curdling. As a result of which people often find the need to redeem themselves in other ways.
As Kersy Katrak, the legendary advertising guru once replied to somebody who asked him what he did: “Actually, I’m a poet. But I lend my arse to commerce.”
Awaiting another voice
So where do we go from here? Just as the print once gave way to TV, TV is now rapidly giving way to interactive digital media. And with that there is a whole new generation of advertising people that is emerging, with similar creative impulses and aspirations, but a very different set of media skills and crafts.
Simultaneously, as we know, there is a whole new art form called e-literature, created to be experienced only on digital devices, like computers, cell-phones and iPads. A dazzling example is Pry, an e-novella by Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman, which is, in fact, a complex hybrid of text, video and gaming that allows you to interact with an iPad and, using the usual touch-based gestures, enter the story on the surface, and then pry it apart to discover the real story that lies beneath.
Thus it takes you into the mind of James, a veteran of the Iraq War, and allows you to sift through his memories and discover a deeper story, shaped by the kind of lies we all tell ourselves – lies that are revealed only when we reject what is apparent and, instead, seek an alternative truth.
Meanwhile, even as you’re reading this, some young advertising professional somewhere – Portland? Amsterdam? Sao Paulo? Pune? – is possibly creating the new Ulysses or Citizen Kane of e-literature. As TS Eliot put it: “For last year's words belong to last year's language/ And next year's words await another voice.”
Limited-time offer: Big stories, small price. Keep independent media alive. Become a Scroll member today!
Our journalism is for everyone. But you can get special privileges by buying an annual Scroll Membership. Sign up today!