The Hindu Business Line : A different hue

Halfway Up the Mountain, a debut novel by Kiran Khalap, unveiled by Jacaranda Publishers at Oxford Book Store in Mumbai late last month is a first of sorts, where the author looks at the world through the eyes of Maya, a village girl. The author delves into philosophy and mysticism, probing the eternal question of whether bliss is accessible to every human being. With poetry, sensuality and a narrative spine provided by Atma Shatakam (`Song of the Soul'), by Shankaracharya, the great eighth century philosopher, the novel attempts a universal answer.

Kiran Khalap is a well-known name in the advertising fraternity. A career spanning years, he started off as a copywriter and moved on to become the CEO of an advertising agency (Bates India). He is a leading brand consultant and co-founder of chlorophyll, India's first brand consultancy. Once a teacher in an experimental primary school inspired by J. Krishnamurthi, Khalap is also the winner of an Indo-UK Short Story Competition (1997). Besides, he regularly contributes to Man's World, India's answer to Esquire magazine and helps run Centre of Gravity, an organisation devoted to mind-body awareness. This is the first time Kiran has attempted a full-fledged novel.

In a freewheeling interview to Catalyst, Khalap outlines his ambitions as an author and also explains the unique functioning of his brand consultancy, chlorophyll, launched in 1999.

Why did an advertising professional like yourself decide to write a book?

Advertising is a job I do. My identity is not defined by my job alone. As a human being, I have been curious about a million other things in life. Things like hiking, rock climbing, mind-body relationship, travelling to exotic destinations to understand different cultures, trees, cats, drawing, literature, humour, philosophy, or questions like `the meaning of life'. I enjoy Dave Barry and Calvin and Hobbes as much as I enjoy the poems of Basavanna (a 12th century spiritual thinker and reformer) and Mahadeviakka (a 12th century Kannada poet). I enjoy Ken Wilber (a philosophical thinker) as much as a sweetly-exhausting day on the rocks in the Borivali National Park in Mumbai. I believe Benares is as exotic as Venice. Some of these are difficult pursuits, with many false starts, blind alleys and labyrinths. Some I have followed since adolescence, some are recent additions.

I believe if you are born in an ancient civilisation like India, you are blessed many times over: There are a million ways in which the most difficult questions in life have been answered. In India, access to infinity is easier. For instance, I discovered a life-altering level of clarity in J. Krishnamurti's books. So I decided I ought to say `thank you' to him through my actions, rather than just through words. I was 19-years-old then. That's how I ended up being a teacher in his school in Varanasi for four (very enjoyable) years. Many years later, I decided I could share the insights garnered during those years through a series of experiential workshops, so I started the `Dynamic Balance' workshops along with my yoga and rock-climbing teacher, Vijay Chidambaram. You can check out the experience on www.cogindia.com. So you see, my current profession is a very small part of who I am.

Why then a book of fiction? Just as Centre of Gravity reflects my twin pursuits of self-awareness and mind-body relationship, Halfway Up the Mountain reflects my pursuit of literature and the meaning of life itself. I wanted to write about something very beautiful, which is life itself. That's how the book was born. Does it achieve its objective? Only time will tell.

Has your experience in advertising influenced your book?

No. I guess the only skill that advertising taught me, and that came in handy, was the skill of proof-reading.

After writing non-fiction for long, why an attempt at fiction? How different is it from what you normally write?

All writing is sharing of a viewpoint: Even non-fiction is a reflection of how you interpret what you experience. As Anais Nin (noted diarist and writer of erotic fiction) said, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are!" Non-fiction is 80 per cent reality out there, 20 per cent reality inside your head. It was first published when I was in college, in the Indian Express. I wrote about Benares in 1982 for a magazine called Celebrity, which was then edited by Shobha De. The person who encouraged me to write was my college friend Nikhil Lakshman. Then I won an Indo-UK short story competition organised by Asian Age. For the past three years, I have been writing non-fiction regularly for Man's World.

On the other hand, fiction is 100 per cent reality inside your head. It is more difficult, more challenging. To me, Halfway Up the Mountain is my (naïve!) way of sharing my beliefs and my reality. I believe being a creative person is different from doing creative work. A truly creative person understands Pere Teilhard de Chardin's (French geologist/palaeontologist) description of creativity: "To create is to unite". A creative person (as opposed to a creative worker) would not be trapped by her or his own talent. She or he would be busy `uniting' other frames of reference. Whether it is human beings with human beings, or human beings with nature, or human beings with `spirit'. That brings us to the theme of the book. Halfway Up the Mountain is the etymological meaning of the word `mediocre'. The book traces the limitations of talented human beings. The protagonist, Maya, is a girl from a village. She has no talent per se, and her life is intertwined with men of exceptional talent. Yet, it is she who discovers the real meaning of life.

How has chlorophyll, the brand consultancy you are with, been faring in the advertising industry, being a fee-based agency?

Chlorophyll is not a fee-based agency. It is not even an advertising agency. To us, chlorophyll is a way of living creativity, rather than practising creativity. Bernbach attempted to end the division between copywriter and art director. John Hegarty attempted to end the division between account planning and creative departments. We are attempting to end all divisions within our brand consultancy.

Chlorophyll's creative process follows the principle of childbirth: Creating a child means `necessary participation' of a father, and `unique responsibility' of mother. In our creative process, all the five senior partners participate, but each has a well-defined unique responsibility. To ask the question `how is chlorophyll faring in the advertising industry' is akin to asking, and I quote my partner, Anand Halve here, "How is Dr C. K. Prahalad faring compared to Sir Martin Sorrell?" chlorophyll is not just a different name, it is a different business model. We think of ourselves as practising, self-employed professionals, not businessmen. Therefore, chlorophyll is not a smaller or faster ad agency animal, it is a different species altogether. For instance, right from the beginning, we have committed ourselves to not being scalable. Since 1999, to its clients, chlorophyll has meant the inputs of five senior minds on a limited number of assignments, and that's exactly what it has remained. Quite the opposite of most agencies that describe their business by the number of accounts bagged, growth in billings and growth in manpower.

We are interested in being invisible, like the molecule whose name we share. Everybody is aware that the chlorophyll molecule made life possible by converting sunlight into food, but nobody remembers it. Our work does not carry our name. We don't enter our work for awards: There are no awards for creating brands from scratch anyway! We are also not interested in clients who do not believe in our viewpoints: We have refused more relationships than we have forged. We have also refused 99 per cent of pitch situations. Because we do not believe in giving away ideas free: Which is what most `agencies' are forced to do by the industry!

Sometimes I laugh and tell my partners: "I wish our names were Karen instead of Kiran, Anatole instead of Anand, Mandy instead of Manjunath, Noel instead of Nalesh, Ron instead of Rajeev. That would have helped at least some of our insecure prospects to feel secure that they are hiring foreign names!" We are amazed that in a culturally sensitive area like branding, especially for Indian audiences, Indian marketers still suck up to international names, or Indian names with phoren accents! Do you have to travel to the US for the best software solutions in the world, the best chess players, the best classical Indian musicians? I think not.

Thankfully, clients like Unilever Amsterdam (for whom we just completed a project, huge by any standards) did not bother about our Indian credentials. Thankfully, neither does Hindustan Lever, for whom we have been handling Brand HLL at a narrowcast level, and Ayush at broadcast level, for the past four years. Nor does theTaj Group of Hotels, for whom we are partnering in building a brand from scratch. Nor Polaris, for whom we created a brand identity for markets around the world. Nor Nihilent for whom we created a global identity. Nor small family-run businesses which reposed their entire trust in us, like JG Hosiery or Universal Spices or cgh earth hotels.

We also handle interesting and difficult assignments like branding royalty (The House of Mewar) or NGOs. In case all of this sounds very altruistic, for the record, chlorophyll makes enough profits to keep its partners very, very happy.

Right from the beginning, we were aware that we did not want to compete with advertising agencies or management consultants. We were brand specialists. We occupied a niche.

We had to work hard to establish that niche, but we were fortunate that since 1999, we have got assignments where we created brands from scratch.

We also do a lot of work with corporate identities: We have a separate web site, www.brandideantity.com, to service this product.

We feel that even sophisticated marketers have well-established processes to build on tangible product benefits, but very few have processes that start with an intangible idea that can translate into a tangible product.

chlorophyll has developed its own processes to solve this problem.

Like most relationships in life, chlorophyll has both short-term and long-term assignments. If we feel we are not adding value, we withdraw. If we feel we are enjoying the process, we continue even if the money is less.

Do your future plans include writing more books and do you have any plans to turn full-time author?

I do not know if I will become a full-time author. I believe I have been a happy individual simply because I have had no ambition. I have no goal, no life objective beyond wanting to understand the enormity of life itself.

Factually speaking, yes, I have started on my second book.

Its title is Two Pronouns and a Verb. This can be translated any which way. As in " I love you", or as in "She loves him" or "He hates him". Of course, I am going to pursue the most intriguing translation, "Who am I?"

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