The Legend of Kenny: Adman, Cupid, and Caribbean teacher

My friend Kenny was from Ooty. Owing to the cold weather there he had never seen a refrigerator till he came down to Bangalore, when he was twenty-five.

Kenny had worked earlier in Ooty as a salesman in the store of a five-star hotel and spent most of his time being rude to Bollywood stars who showed up in the hills for a shoot. Every time they liked a particular item in his store he’d tell them it was for display only and not for sale. He also pretended to not know their names or the fact that they were celebrities. Thanks to their bloated egos, this pissed off the stars no end, and of course amused Kenny no end.

Kenny got to see, for the first time, refrigerators and ACs and fans and miniskirts and other things found in warmer climes once he came down to Bangalore. He also saw an ad (not for the first time) and decided he wanted to get into advertising. Which he did. It was like love at first sight.

Kenny’s brand of advertising was rare. He believed that you should create brilliant, witty, intelligent, effective, perfectly crafted, and art-directed advertising on every brief you get from the client. (Agencies normally reserve this kind of passion for special ads that are printed in obscure papers just once a year and that are tailored just for awards. So rampant is this practice that we even have a name for it – Scam Advertising.) Anyway, Kenny got into advertising and in no time at all managed to change the way we approached advertising in India. Suddenly people began to work with a lot more passion and honesty, dumb celebrity advertising became a thing of the past, and ads were now full of wit, charm, and intelligence. The golden age of Indian advertising dawned under the brilliant leadership of Kenny. 

Sorry, but none of the above ever happened. Instead advertising continued to be its old ass-licking, compromising, mostly absurd and occasionally tolerable self. And what did Kenny do? He had a ball.

Kenny, a common friend (dressed always in black), and I decided that if we couldn’t beat the system, we’d at least have a good drink, or two, or twenty. Which we did with liver-busting regularity. We partied nightly. Kenny was our Designated Cupid in crowded pubs. The role suited him perfectly not so much for his nature as for his stature. At 5.5’ his ears could be placed precisely adjacent to the average girl’s steadily jabbering mouth, thus enabling him to hear her with Dolby clarity. 

According to Kenny, the secret of tapping a girl is listening to her. Kenny would listen to the 5.4’ beauty then guide her us-wards. Given the noise levels in a pub and the fact that despite wearing six-inch heels the girl would invariably reach up to our knees (okay navel), we could never figure out a word of what she was saying. For the very same reason, these girls could never hear us either, and so she would never know that we had no wit, no intelligence whatsoever. Which of course worked perfectly in our favour. Thus Kenny effectively provided the dumb with deaf company. 

Once in a pub called Toto’s in Bombay, we saw a touching scene of a young man having an innocent pint with ‘what appeared to be’ his recently acquired wife and simultaneously acquired pop-in-law. The latter being a cute elderly gent of eighty or so. We were sitting at the next table. Kenny turned towards me and said, ‘See that guy there? They’ve bought him out for his last drink.’ After that I couldn’t look in their direction without cracking up.

Another time in a club called Spinn in Bangalore, we saw a group of foreigners rolling a joint. Kenny told them that he was the manager of the place and they’d better stop rolling their joint, or he’d throw them out of his joint. The foreigners sheepishly began to put their pot away. But then Kenny told them he was in a magnanimous mood that night and wouldn’t mind if they smoked as long as they gave him the first few puffs.

The visibly pleased gang quickly rolled a reefer and handed it to Kenny to be lit. Kenny took a few long drags, passed it around to us, took a few more drags, then, with a flourish, handed it back to the foreigners and said, ‘With compliments of the management.’ At that very moment the manager of Spinn walked over to us and we had to leave in a huge hurry.

One night in Bangalore, Kenny, flying on a few hundred (okay, a few dozen) tequilas and equal numbers of Red Bulls and vodkas and god knows what else, went down on his knees and proposed to his sweetheart of many years, who, being at a somewhat similar tequila-propelled altitude, accepted. They went on to become a happy couple. They then extended the Hereford lineage by having a stork home-deliver a baby boy, after which Kenny cut down on his marauding revelries. But his angst regarding the sorry standards of Indian advertising continued.

So a year or two later, Kenny resigned from his agency, sold his car, his furniture (according to Kenny, he was about to sell his house too, but then realised that he was living in a rented apartment), and flew off with just his wife, little son, and a handful of dreams to the Caribbean to see what life would throw him. It was very much Indian advertising’s loss. Because did I mention, Kenny is one of the finest writers I’ve known? Every word he wrote shone with talent and sincerity. And wit. To wit, here’s a line he wrote for a Valentine’s Day ad for a jeweler: “If your girlfriend doesn’t listen to you, get her a hearing aid.” The picture next to this caption showed an earring dangling from a girl’s ear.

Kenny was going to teach the Caribbean people English. The idea never stood a chance since all they knew was Spanish and all Kenny knows is English. One day in Santo Domingo, Kenny was walking down a road and saw a board that said Ogilvy & Mather. He stepped in and was soon the only Creative Director in the Caribbean without any knowledge of Spanish whatsoever. Very soon though he picked up important Spanish words like pub-o, beer-o, food-o and what-o price-o. And had mucho fun-o. For 6 months Kenny taught the Caribbeans little-known things about our culture. He would tell them, Ganesha is Hanuman’s son, Shiva used to live in a hippie commune, elephants cost Rs. 300 in India and everyone has one, and Indians are very chill about sex, we do it anywhere, people are constantly doing it in malls, bus stops, barber shops, offices, roads, post offices, that’s why we have such a large population – 24/7 copulation.

Kenny is now a citizen of Australia. He once told me that if you can tell a joke well, you can be a success in advertising. He added that his pet dream was launching an agency called Hereford Academy of Humour in Advertising – HAHA. I guess in Australia he’ll call it HAHAA.