Tag Archives: Anvar Alikhan

JWT’s Anvar Alikhan passes away at 66

Business & Economy, Leaders, ,

Hyderabad, TELANGANA / Mumbai, MAHARASHTRA  :

He was 66 and on the verge of retiring from his post as senior VP and strategy consultant at JWT Mindset

source: Twitter
source: Twitter

Veteran adman Anvar Alikhan passed away yesterday after a lung infection. He was 66 and on the verge of retiring from his post as senior VP and strategy consultant at JWT Mindset.

In a tragic coincidence, many of his former colleagues and associates had been preparing video messages to bid farewell to Alikhan as he ventured out of advertising, only to hear of his untimely demise.

Alikhan’s career saw him play pivotal roles at agencies like O&M, Contract and JWT, besides ambitiously foraying into what was then considered “new media” as creative director at the fledgling rediff.com. He was an erudite author on a wide range of subjects from advertising to history to the relative merits of Roger Moore and meeting author RK Narayan.

You will find links to some of his writing at the end of this piece.

Brand Equity reached out to a few of his colleagues and former associates for their memories of Alikhan:

Ram Gedela, managing director, JWT Mindset and Santha John, chairman emeritus, JWT Mindset

In 1998, we saw a real vacuum in Hyderabad: big international agencies with shell-like structure and locals with no world experience.

Anvar came up with the name Mindset in 2000, a few years after we started. He’d moved back to Hyderabad when his father had a stroke and needed him. We were fortunate to have Anvar on board and the impact was immediate. We had the contacts, and Anvar the brand value. Clients had a lot more respect for us when he came for meetings and we were invited to many more pitches. By 2004, we were Agency of the Year.

We won Coke’s regional business, a go-karting facility that was branded as Runway 9 by Anvar; Godavari Fertilisers which was looking for divestment, got us to rebrand its identity and create a mass media campaign that eventually helped them sell out to the Murugappa Group. Sagar Cement, a regional brand’s advertising with claymation characters created a lot of buzz regionally. This brand too found a foreign investor Vicat immediately after the campaign.

For a sunglass chain called Shades, which was endorsed by popular celebrities like Sanjay Dutt and Suniel Shetty, the line Anvar wrote was a simple ‘You know who, you know where’.

Towards the latter half of the 17 years with Mindset, his focus shifted to strategy. He did painstaking research with no support whatsoever, but never missed a presentation deadline.

We owe this agency’s success to Anvar. In many ways, he was a mentor to us. He would help us with tips on presentation skills, dress code for different occasions, planning pitch process etc. He conducted workshops internally and a lot of us benefited from them.

We had several suitors for acquisition. When we didn’t like a particular agency, even the refusal was well rehearsed. The eventual acquisition by JWT had many inputs from Anvar including wooing the CEO on his maiden visit to Hyderabad.

He had a great sense of humour, and also a bit of a mean streak. When he didn’t like a particular clients’ inputs on his strategy or creative he would start packing up with loud noises, making it very obvious.

He brought wisdom, wit and worldly stature to the workplace.

One year, he also bought a whole lot of cheap and fake Mont Blanc pens and these were given out liberally. In the process, his own genuine pen got mixed up with the fakes and was lost forever! He would talk about it with his usual twinkle in his eye

In all the years we worked closely together, not once did he show irritation nor a cross word ever pass his mouth

More recently, he kept in touch with calls, mails, forwards, articles but not his physical presence. None of us even dreamt the end was so near. As recently as last week, we picked his brain regarding a thorny issue and the depth he put into it, marvels us now.

His oft-quoted statement “No other agency has this many brains under one roof” was SO true, because under our roof, was this magnificent brain

From 2000, we had a New Year wishes mailer which was created in such a way, that people often retained it on their noticeboards, giving us great mileage through the year. ‘Life is what happens to you, while you are busy making other plans’ was the first well remembered card

Colvyn Harris, founder, Harris-Mint and former CEO, JWT India

I was going to record a tribute to Anvar and send it for his farewell, but now, he’s given us an entirely different reason to say farewell.

When we merged Mindset into JWT, we acquired the agency not for revenue but to complete the geography of JWT and most importantly for the three people who ran the place, who were gems. He was a phenomenal ad guy, a fabulous professional and the finest of gentlemen. They don’t make them like him any longer.

He had a very versatile writing style, with depth and knowledge. Even recently when he had written a piece on Sir Martin Sorrell he reached out to get the nuances right.

When we went to the office around the time of the merger, he’d framed strips from Dilbert — a personal favourite of mine — all over the place. There are very few quintessential ad guys without brashness and aggression. His death is a big loss to advertising and I was fortunate to have worked with him.

Pratap Bose, founder, Social Street

When I first saw Anvar, the first thing that came to mind was that he was a really distinguished gentleman; the sort you don’t see too often, especially in our business. Ogilvy was my first agency and I had no idea what agency life was like. Over the years, I used to ask him for advice and he shepherded me through. We did not interact too many times, but he was there for me whenever I needed him. I remember meeting him a few years ago; it was his first time at Goafest and we spent an hour talking about books and movies. He was very well spoken and knowledgeable; not just about advertising but life in general. He was one of the last true gentlemen in the business.

A selection of his writing from scroll.in.

source: http://www.brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com / ET Brand Equity / Home> Marketing & Advertising News> Latest Marketing & Advertising News> Advertising / by Ravi Balakrishnan / December 27th, 2017

How Netaji’s aide coined the slogan Jai Hind in a German POW camp

Amazing Feats, Community Involvement / Social Issues, Leaders, World Opinion, , , , , , ,

Abid Hasan’s grandnephew recounts the story behind creation of a salutation to replace religion-based greetings for Indian soldiers.

Image credit: Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan | Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose with his aide Abid Hasan during their journey to Japan from Germany in 1943.
Image credit: Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan | Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose with his aide Abid Hasan during their journey to Japan from Germany in 1943.

Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose had a problem. It was 1941. He was in Germany, and was spending a lot of his time in the Konigsbruck prisoner-of-war camp, trying to recruit Indian soldiers captured by Rommel’s army in North Africa into his new Azad Hind Fauj.

But what troubled him was that the soldiers of the Indian Army had historically been organised into regiments based on ethnic and religious lines – the Rajputs, the Baluchis, the Sikhs, and so on. And even here, in the prisoner-of-war camps, they tended to cluster into their own little ethnic and religious groups.

Netaji, however, was very clear that his new Azad Hind Fauj would be a completely integrated army with men of every community and caste fighting shoulder-to-shoulder for an integrated India. After all, how could it be any other way?

But to integrate the soldiers was a complex issue that had to be tackled at many levels. For starters, each community greeted each other with their own salutation: the Hindu soldiers said, “Namaste” or “Ram, Ram ji”; the Muslims said, “Salaam alaikum”, and the Sikhs said, “Sat Sri Akal”. Netaji believed the first thing he had to do was to replace these religion-based greetings with a common salutation that would help bond everybody together.

And this task he entrusted to his aide, Abid Hasan.

The great rallying cry

Hasan was a Hyderabadi who’d been a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi as a teenager, and had spent time at his Sabarmati Ashram. Later, when his contemporaries all went to university in England, Hasan chose to go, instead, to Germany. And it was there that, in 1941, he met Netaji, and dropped out of engineering college to became his aide.

Now, pondering over the task Netaji had set him, Hasan was wandering around the Konigsbruck POW camp, when he overheard two Rajput soldiers greet each other with “Jai Ramji ki”. And that triggered off in his mind the idea of “Jai Hindustan ki”.

This, in turn, led to the shorter, more rousing “Jai Hind”.

Netaji was delighted with Hasan’s idea, which worked so well that “Jai Hind” soon went beyond its original brief to become a rallying cry of the Indian National Army. Later, of course, it would be adopted as the national slogan when, at the time of Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru raised it, stirringly, at the Red Fort.

It is ironic now, in the time of the Bharat Mata ki Jai controversy, to think that Jai Hind was a slogan created specifically to help unite the people of India, rather than divide them.

Later, in 1943, when Netaji was searching for an anthem for his Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind, or the Provisional Government of Free India, he decided on Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, Jana Gana Mana. But to make it more accessible to the common man, Netaji wanted it translated from Tagore’s classical Bengali into simple Hindi. And for that, once again, he turned to Hasan, along with two other INA officers, Mumtaz Hussain and JR Bhonsle, while the tune itself was composed by Capt Ram Singh. Netaji’s vivid brief to them was, apparently, that when the anthem played, it should be so rousing that auditorium itself should shatter in half to reveal the sky above.

It is a mark of the kind of man Netaji was, to combine such a wide sweep of vision, with such minute attention to its details.

Chalo Dilli!

So what became of Abid Hasan?

When Netaji made his historic escape from Germany to Japan by submarine in 1943, he took Hasan along with him. It was the longest submarine voyage in history till then, beginning in the Baltic Sea in a German submarine, transferring off the coast of Madagascar into a Japanese submarine, and then sailing across the Indian Ocean to land in Sumatra, nearly four months later (a voyage that is interestingly portrayed in Shyam Benegal’s The Forgotten Hero, with Rajit Kapur playing the part of Hasan). From Sumatra the two of them were then flown in a Japanese Air Force plane to Tokyo.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose with his aide Abid Husain on their famous voyage from Germany to Japan in 1943. Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose with his aide Abid Husain on their famous voyage from Germany to Japan in 1943. Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan

Hasan (by then Major Hasan) fought in the historic Battle of Imphal in 1944 – which Netaji believed would be the INA’s great breakthrough into the plains of India at the head of General Mutaguchi’s 15th Japanese Division, culminating in his dream of “Chalo Dilli!” But, unfortunately, everything went wrong.

A spy code-named Silver tipped off the Allies about the attack. The Allied defenders fought back with unexpected desperation; the monsoon broke early, and torrential rains cut off the INA’s and Japanese supply lines, while the Allies managed to supply their troops by air. The expected defection of Indian soldiers from the Allied side to the INA didn’t happen; instead, demoralised INA soldiers and officers began to surrender to the Allies. Also, significantly, the Japanese, invincible until now, were, for the first time, under real pressure on various fronts, both geographical and metaphorical. The tide of the war had imperceptibly, but decisively, turned.

The four-month-long Battle of Imphal (along with the Battle of Kohima nearby) has been voted the greatest battle fought in the history of the British Army. But what that meant for the Indian National Army was that instead of leading to an advance upon Delhi, the battle ended with the long, dejected retreat back to Rangoon, which Hasan orchestrated.

That last, fateful flight

In August 1945, Hasan was one of the key aides whom Netaji picked to accompany him on his final flight, along with SA Ayer, a minister in his Cabinet; Colonel Habeeb-ur-Rahman, his secretary; Colonel Pritam Singh; Colonel Gulzara Singh and Debnath Das. The plan was that they would fly together from Singapore to Tokyo, via Bangkok, Saigon, Taipei, and Manchuria.

But at Saigon Netaji suddenly asked Hasan to remain behind to finish some work, and meet up with him in Tokyo. Ultimately Netaji took off in a Japanese Mitsubishi Ki21 bomber, accompanied only by Rahman.

And the rest we know.

Or don’t know.

It all depends, essentially, on your point of view. (Although it is interesting to note that the top INA officials who were closest to Netaji say that he died in the crash.)

At the end of the war, Hasan was imprisoned by the British and, along with other close Netaji associates, was grilled by British Intelligence about Netaji and his plans. But like the others – including Habeeb-ur Rahman, Pritam Singh and John Thivy, founder of the Malayan Indian Congress – he refused to talk. Some of them were taken away and never seen again; nobody knew whose turn would be next.

After Independence, Hasan joined the newly-formed Indian Foreign Service, and took on the surname Safrani (after the saffron colour in the Indian flag). He would ultimately retire as Ambassador to Denmark – the coast of which he had quietly slipped past at the start of his secret submarine journey to Japan in 1943.

After Independence, Abid Hasan joined the newly-formed Indian Foreign Service, and took on the surname Safrani. Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan
After Independence, Abid Hasan joined the newly-formed Indian Foreign Service, and took on the surname Safrani. Photo courtesy: Anvar Alikhan

He also happened to be (and it’s now time for a disclosure) a favourite grand-uncle of mine.

I asked him once, in an unguarded moment, what really happened to Netaji, and he said, “Arre beta, yeh sab bilkul bakwas hai.” This is all complete nonsense.

But was he telling me the truth?

Or was it just a cover-up for some secret he didn’t want to reveal?

I suppose I shall never know.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Remembering History / by Anvar AliKhan / Sunday – April 24th, 2016