These are busy times for Rahul da Cunha. Non-stop India will not allow him a breather as the scams and crooks, the cricketers and the crazies keep hurtling into his hoardings without respite.
There was a time when one Amul hoarding went up every week. In May this year, a record 17 of them went up, says the adman, who is Managing Director and Creative Head of da Cunha Communications, the advertising agency that creates the Amul hoardings. In the last week of the month, a particularly eventful one in the life of India, one hoarding went up every day, some across India, some only in Mumbai and Maharashtra.
The Amul girl had her say on Shah Rukh Khan's slanging match at the Wankhede stadium, the Kolkata Knight Rider's IPL victory, Jaganmohan Reddy's arrest, the petrol hike, the film
“We now want to tackle every issue; we want to talk to everybody. Look at the madness that reigns,” says da Cunha. “But the greatest joy is that one realises we are such a colourful country and we still have a great deal of freedom of speech.”
The madness has kept the Amul hoardings going since 1966, when Sylvester da Cunha, founder-Chairman of the agency and the late cartoonist Eustace Fernandes created the very first hoarding that said: ‘Give us this day our daily bread with Amul Butter'.
This month, the agency celebrated 50 years of the brand's advertising with a book featuring the most popular hoardings. Fittingly, for a book called Amul's India , and a brand whose popularity cuts across every social divide, it is not a lavish, expensive coffee-table book, but a charming, neatly-designed regular-sized one priced at a democratic Rs 299.
It is a book filled with wit, insight, courage and waves of nostalgia, a humorous but by no means frivolous record of the high and low points in India's recent tumultuous history.
It also has articles by a number of celebrities, including Amitabh Bachchan, Sunil Gavaskar and Shobhaa De, who've featured in the hoardings.
But first, Sylvester da Cunha tells how the famous catchline, unchanged since its first day, was created. When he told his wife Nisha about the campaign he was going to create, he recalls, she asked, off the cuff, “Why don't you say, ‘Utterly Amul'? To which he responded, equally spontaneously, “Hey, what about Utterly Butterly Amul?” And thus was born what he calls “one of the more memorable battle cries in advertising.”
Some thought it was ungrammatical. However, Dr V. Kurien, Amul's legendary head, said, “I think it's utterly mad, but if you think it will work, go ahead.” And they did.
SO MUCH NEGOTIATION
The hoardings have evolved from that simple one-liner into meaningful comment on a variety of issues. Their finest moment came in the 1970s, during the Emergency, when the press was dangerously muzzled. While many succumbed without a whimper, Sylvester da Cunha dared to send up a hoarding that declared: ‘We've always practised compulsory sterilisation' — a reference to the forced family planning measures ordered by Sanjay Gandhi. “Dad took issues head-on and got away with it,” remarks his son. “I'd have to be really courageous or really stupid to do something like that now.”
That's because, he says, “Every cartoon involves so much negotiation. We have to do a lot of research, take care not to offend anyone. We have to be humorous but not make light of matters, for these are not frivolous issues we are talking about. I spend a huge part of my day on this, because we are the custodian of this brand, which comes with such a great legacy.”
Also, he adds pragmatically and honestly, “The brand has to be protected. The Amul management has given us such a free hand that we have to be extremely responsible. We can't endanger their sales.”
It's one of the reasons, he says, that they “don't touch” Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray or his nephew Raj. “We're very tempted but we won't go near them, because they are so unpredictable. And the irony is that they are both cartoonists.”
Still, they manage to keep the flag flying. One of his personal favourites, says da Cunha, is the one on Lalu Prasad's fodder scam. ‘Fodder of the nation,' it said, and added, ‘Scamul!'.
But when they came up with ‘ Maine kyon khaya ' (Why did I eat so much?) for Suresh Kalmadi during the Commonwealth Games scam, they ran into trouble. “He was found guilty, he was in jail, his party had abandoned him. But party workers in Pune actually pulled down the hoarding,” recalls a bewildered da Cunha.
There have been some laughable protests as well. When they wrote ‘Satyam Sharam Scandalum!' for Satyam Computer Services's disgraced Chairman Ramalinga Raju, he says, “We got a formal letter from the Satyam Board threatening us with dire consequences: all their employees would stop eating Amul butter!”
The millions who haven't stopped doing so have made the hoardings an integral part of India's pop culture. What does the Amul cartoon mean to the long-suffering common man? “It mirrors his thoughts, whether of anger, perplexity or amusement,” believes da Cunha. “The attempt is to vocalise what everyone is thinking but can do nothing about.”
NO WARDROBE MAKEOVER
It is a small, long-standing team of three that comes up with the hoardings. While da Cunha and award-winning copywriter Manish Jhaveri think up the lines, cartoonist Jayant Rane draws the moppet in the polka-dotted dress. It is a team that obviously works very well and productively. But what happens when they don't see eye to eye? “If we can't agree on something, we don't use it. If there's disharmony between the three of us, it won't work when it goes public either,” explains da Cunha.
Certainly, they can't take too many liberties with the Amul girl. “When we put her in a skimpy outfit for a cartoon on the IPL cheerleaders, there was a huge protest on our Facebook page,” recounts da Cunha. “They will accept her in any costume if she is drawn as someone else, whether it is Mother Teresa or Mallika Sherawat. But if she's shown as herself, she can't change.”
Safe to say they wouldn't consider giving her a wardrobe makeover? “Unthinkable!” declares the adman.
Perhaps her fans want her to retain her innocence, one that is now increasingly rarer. “Yes, we want to hark back to that age of innocence and we want her to be six-seven years old forever. She can comment on all kinds of things but she has to remain an innocent child,” he says.
The Amul girl has never had a name. But does da Cunha have a secret name for her in his mind? “Yes,” he admits, “Diya.”
Any particular reason? “No, I just like its meaning.”
And what does Diya have to say about the new book dedicated to her?
She wants to know: ‘Book laggi hai ?' (A pun on the Hindi phrase for ‘Are you hungry?')
The answer is ‘Yes'.