A hilarious trip to ’80s ad world in Kolkata

Pratik Basu’s hilarious, rip-roaring novel The Arty Farty Party takes you to the wacky world of advertising in the Kolkata (then Calcutta) of the 1980s. You can smell the book’s insouciance and irreverence (towards well, towards everything to do with the bad, mad, ad world in general, and the arty types of the Calcutta of the yore in particular) from its very title. But when you read it, you discover the many ways Basu makes the book bristle with credible (is that an understatement ) characters and his inimitable humour. You get to meet the inveterates of advertising, like Jymmie Hafesjee, “the Great Pretender” or God, “as he prefers to be called among his minions in High Advertising (HA, if you want to be complimentary and HA HA if you don’t)”, the incredible Mono Mitter who, in a different lifetime, “would have been a fighter pilot battling the Luftwaffe, if he wasn’t going “screechers”, “getting pie-eyed that is”, or the quintessential Sudesh Sarkar, master of doublespeak. The book is peopled by “crazy, individualistic, idiosyncratic and entertaining” real people, full-bodied and full of life. But if someone were to “find a resemblance with people real and known, then the fault must lie with that person’s deductive abilities,” and not Basu’s imagination.

Excerpts from an interview:

Q. Your novel harks back to an era in advertising you have been a part of. Has the book been in the making for long A. In a manner of speaking, the book’s been in the making for five years — when I embarked on Clueless & Co, I’d already decided on doing a trilogy spanning the narrator’s misadventures across three distinctive career changes — from sales and marketing through advertising to entertainment television. So, when Clueless & Co. was done, it was inevitable that The Arty Farty Party would follow. However, apart from the narrator, the two books have no common elements. Neither are they required to be read in any particular sequence. They are standalone novels and reading one does not require you to have read the other, although I’m hoping that readers will get around to doing just that.

Q. Is the narrator’s voice close to your own A. By a strange coincidence, the chronicler’s career does seem to resemble mine. It is possible, therefore, that those who know me well might find in the narrator’s voice some echoes of my own. I have no hesitation admitting to the closeness so long as the echoes they hear are funny, whimsical and irreverent, without malice or animus towards anyone.

Q. How would you like the book to be seen as: a work of “faction” A. No. Just pure entertainment.

Q. How have your friends who can be identified in the book reacted A. At the risk of confessing my creative inadequacy, I must admit that the protagonists of The Arty Farty Party, including the main protagonist, Mono Mitter, were inspired by the crazy, individualistic, idiosyncratic and entertaining people who populated the world of advertising in my time. Their defining behavioural traits do find reflection in the dramatis personae of the book. However, for comedic effect, I have so exaggerated and twisted them that they bear only passing — and that, too, coincidental — resemblance to the original. As to their misadventures, those are wholly figments of my imagination. Therefore, I don’t think there can be many people — if any at all — who can point to a character in the book and say with total conviction, “That’s me!” Nor would they want to, I dare say, given the bizarre situations that the characters, including the narrator, find themselves in.

Q. Was it important for you to get the book’s humour right A. Absolutely critical. Of all the fictional genres, humour, in my view, is the most difficult to get right. Which is probably why there are so few writers of humorous fiction. Internationally, only P.G. Wodehouse, Richard Gordon, Douglas Adams and Tom Sharpe leap to mind. Others, like Joseph Heller with Catch-22, have had a runaway hit with one novel but despite its success, hesitated to adopt the genre full-time. As far as Indians writing in English go, they have, on the whole, steered clear of humour, probably because it doesn’t meld with the perceived seriousness of their endeavour, the Indian (expatriate) psyche or, despite being the most difficult genre to master, it usually doesn’t qualify for critical acclaim — in the novel writing business, humour isn’t the best medicine. Amongst Indian writers, I can only think of Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet Engine Laugh and, to some extent, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s first, English August. So, having chosen to go against the grain of conventional wisdom, I had to be extra cautious that I didn’t muff it — that I stayed on the right side of the thin line between funny ha-ha and funny-peculiar, or funny-bad taste.

Q. What were the best aspects of the industry back then and how has the city’s advertising spectrum changed over the years A. Back then Kolkata was still important as a commercial centre and the relevance of advertising still high. Bombay (now Mumbai), of course, was way ahead of the game but in terms of creativity and pool of creative talent, Kolkata was very rich. (This was, of course, some months before the migration of clients and talent started). Advertising, as a profession, was distinct and separate from the corporate mainstream and had its own unique (and, on the whole, entertaining) identity. In the process, it spaw-ned some unique, entertaining and iconic personalities often recalled more for their non-advertising pursuits than their advertising ones. Today, advertising is an insider — an inherent and integral part of the marketing machine. Like any cog, it is more mechanical, buttoned-down and accountable and, consequently, given to fewer excesses of the behavioural, or any other, kind. Advertising is more a discipline than the undisciplined way of life it once was. In Kolkata, it struggles to survive more than it strives to be unforgettable.

Q. If you could tell me something about your literary influences, both early and now A. With a few exceptions, unabashedly pulp. Conan Doyle, Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Richard Gordon, John Mortimer, Leslie Charteris, Ian Fleming, Peter O’Donnell, Frederick Forsyth, John le Carre and, more recently, Dan Brown, Lee Child, Steig Larsson and some poor James Bond pastiches.

Q. Finally, what are you currently working on A. The plotline of the third and final instalment of the trilogy. Untitled still, but who knows The Mild Misanthropes might make a comeback, although I’d hesitate to use the word “mild” for the world of entertainment television on which the novel will be based.