Arun Nanda: The last Mohican who made advertising our mythology

Today the industry lost a keeper of its myths. I did not work closely with Arun Nanda, nor can I claim the intimacy of long corridors and late-night edits. But for those of us who grew up on the romance of Indian advertising, he was one of the last of the Mohicans—the sort of leader who made the business feel larger than commerce. He walked into rooms with the quiet authority of someone who understood not only markets, but moods.

He helped build a house called Rediffusion and filled it with phrases that outlived media plans. “The Zing Thing” did more than sell an orange drink; it taught a generation that language can dance. “Gimme Red” turned batteries into attitude; “Express Yourself” made a telecom brand a teenager’s diary; “Whenever you see colour, think of us” gave paint the swagger of art. An agency is really a library of incantations, and his shelves were full.   

What made that library possible was a mind trained both to count and to conjure. He was the first-batch gold medallist at IIM Ahmedabad, who then went to Hindustan Lever and left his fingerprints on Rin’s famous “lightning strikes” mnemonic—numbers learning to hum a tune before the tune learned to sell. Later, with Ajit Balakrishnan and Mohammed Khan, he set up Rediffusion and proceeded to bend popular culture toward memorability. He has even been credited with pioneering political advertising here, advising a young prime minister through the 1980s—proof that persuasion, in the right hands, is public work.    

I did not have many moments with him, but I treasure one. He once introduced me to C. K. Prahalad with a smile that mixed pride and mischief: “CK, meet this bright guy. He is from our institute. By the way, CK and I were in the same class and between the two of us we used to occupy the top two ranks in the class.” In that one aside was a whole education in grace: confidence without theatre, affection without noise. (And yes, CK was IIMA’s pioneer batch too—those corridors clearly minted dangerous minds.)  

If advertising at its best is the alchemy of culture, he was one of its quieter alchemists—turning briefings into ballads, deadlines into folklore. The myth of Indian advertising—of scripts that became sayings, of jingles that became geography—owes him a debt. I did not know him well enough to mourn like family; I knew him well enough to feel the day dim.

Arun Nanda made the business look intelligent and slightly glamorous—an unlikely marriage of spreadsheet and stanza. The campaigns endure, the students endure, the vocabulary endures. For the rest of us, who still believe an idea can change a brand and a line can change a decade, his passing is a nudge to keep faith with craft. The lights on the edit table are a little softer tonight. But somewhere, in that great archive of Indian memory, a voice still says: express yourself—and mean it.  

(The author is an ad veteran and a senior advisory professional)