The Making of Advertising

The book is edited by Syeda Imam, who has worked as a Senior Executive Creative Director in the JWT group of companies (HTA and Contract) that Subhas Ghosal so carefully nurtured and led over these years. The book also has reminiscences, letters and speeches made by Ghosal on various occasions on subjects as wide ranging as rural advertising and the plea for India as the venue of the Asian Advertising Congress. It also has beautifully crafted pieces by felicitous writers such as Gerson Da Cunha, Anvar Alikhan, Ivan Arthur and so on. The book reveals happy and warm moments revealing Subhas Ghosal's character, summed up in his own definition of an "austere elite": "You need to be elitist if you are going to set standards in your work, in your life and in the way you touch other people's lives. By elitist I mean rigorous in analysis, precise in language, aesthetic in taste."
The brief and unique facts about Ghosal's career have been well recounted elsewhere. To this day he remains the first and only case of an apprentice who paid to be trained by EJ `Peter' Fielden, the man identified with establishing JWT in India at the top of the profession from where it has never since been dislodged.
Born to a successful practising doctor of Patna, from a scholarly and reputed Brahmo Samaj family, Ghosal was related to illustrious people such as P. C. Mahalanobis, the statistician who launched planning in India, and the legendary Satyajit Ray. He seldom dropped names, however, and has astonished generations of young upstarts in the field by his remarkable accessibility and lack of airs.
He came to the rescue of the company when it was threatened by near bankruptcy in the '70s. Taking up arms against a sea of business troubles, he won his way against what was certainly outrageous fortune. Throughout the 400 delightful pages of this book there is a sense of partaking of something straight ; out of the top drawer.
There is no cloying sentimentality of commemorative volumes,... [continues]

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