When we did meet, I tried to be nonchalant. He was plainly nervous. Nervous? And what could he want from me? Gradually, over cucumber sandwiches and the tinkle of the piano, he told me. Did I know he wrote? Yes I did. He’d like to write more regularly. Would I encourage him?
For a man who was one of Indian advertising’s pioneers, Simoes was strangely diffident. Which is why though we met many times, we never got beyond niceties. He must have been different in the board room, but as a writer he always seemed unsure.
He needn’t have been. This really is a wonderful book, well put together by Gita Simoes. In the piece The Saraswat Brahmin Roman Catholic Goan, Simoes writes, "A young man wanted to marry my sister.... Mother: ‘Family?’ Father: ‘Britto from Margao. Only son. Huge properties. Pots of money.’ ‘Does he do anything?’ ‘Looks after the family business.’ My mother sniffed, clearly underwhelmed. ‘Are they Brahmins?’ ‘No.’ ‘That’s that then’.... Years later I discovered that we were both Saraswat Brahmins... and but for a fateful twist of history, my surname would have been Naik."
It must have been this curious amalgam of cultures which made Simoes such a brilliant adman. Despite being highly westernised and steeped in the English language, he was able to produce copy which hit the right note with millions of consumers. Some of his lines are deceptively simple. ‘Only Vimal’, for example, the mantra he gave Dhirubhai Ambani and which made Reliance a household word.
His lines could also fill a D cup. "I need a perfect pair of breasts," said Simoes’ boss who handled the Maidenform Bra account. The company also handled the Liberty Shirts account and its chief knew only one formula: sex sells. Simoes’ grappling with the copy for both products, funny and wry, tells us a lot about India of the ’60s. "Sex in the Sixties," Simoes writes, "was the stuff of dreams. The mandatory condom in wallet (bought surreptitiously, like pornography, in plain wrapper) was pure fudge, regretful nostalgia for an act eagerly read about, lusted over, fantasised in solitary, sweaty guilt, lied about with lip-licking invention, rarely ever dared."
Prudishness was so prevalent even in the media that the agency had great trouble placing its Maidenform Bra campaign. To save it, "the air brush was ruthlessly employed. Curves, voluptuous in their sweep and promises, shrank visibly overnight; changes assumed a chagrined modesty.... India’s nippleless pair of bosoms in a Maidenform bra made a somewhat diminished debut".
Simoes’ skill with words is to be expected of a copywriter, what isn’t is his ability to spin out a story engagingly and compellingly. But because these pieces cover a variety of subjects and inhabit a very wide time span, they give us entertaining sociological insights into modern India. The European missionary priests who tried to literally "beat the devil" out of students, about growing up in middle-class Bombay, about the early days of ad agencies as they passed from British to Indian hands, about the emerging tastes of emerging India. In most of these, Simoes is an amused (and amusing) observer.
Having read Frank Unedited, I wish my tea meeting with him had been the first of many. I now know only the writer; I would dearly have loved to know the man.
