Joshi

Pom-poms at Tom’s – A true story

In the nineties, he spent many an afternoon standing in the blazing sun outside a restaurant in Richmond Town called Tom’s. Inside a hot-shot Creative Director had brought his fold for what was meant to be a beer or two and lunch. But you know how it is with advertising people and booze. Once they so much as smell it they just have to have it in Olympic proportions. (Bangalore’s advertising industry has single handedly changed the fortunes of local breweries – although they’re paid to change the fortunes of their clients.)
He’d gaze greedily at the crowd inside as one beer would lead to two, which would lead to three and four and so on. And after each round this would happen less and less grudgingly. And more and more shamelessly. The same would hold true for the rum and cola and whisky and soda drinkers. By three, the Creative Director would say, there’s no point in kidding ourselves now, let’s just go for the booze. No one really needed that invitation, everybody was already half way to that miraculous stage where holding your body upright seems like rocket science. By four, they’d invariably decide that there wasn’t too much point in returning to office, since the day was almost over and in any case they were all too drunk to do anything worthwhile now. So everyone would get in or on their respective vehicles and fly out of town to some remote lake by Whitefield. Where, needless to say, more flying would ensue.
Once at Tom’s they created a special cocktail for an Account Executive – it consisted of half a glass of beer topped with water. They told him this was a popular French cocktail called the Pom-pom. God knows what that tasted like but the poor guy drank it all up. Today the same guy is a Vice President in a global agency. (Disproving the myth that you have to have brains to make it in advertising.)
And what happened to our friend outside Tom’s?
Well, he’s still a bike.
And his owner? Thanks to the wonderful world of advertising he’s now a brain-dead vegetable connected to a tangle of cables, electrodes and pipes (drainage I think) in a local museum.