Boredom that brought colour

Piyush Pandey during a party organised to celebrate Mumbai Indians’ victory in the 2017 Indian Premier League in Mumbai. PIC/Getty Images

The early days after retiring from professional cricket can feel strangely empty. No morning nets, no travel bags packed for the next match, no team meetings. Silence replaces the sounds of leather on willow, and applause turns into the hum of ceiling fans in familiar rooms.

In the mid-1990s, my days drifted like that. Evenings were predictable - squash or swimming at the Bombay Gymkhana, followed by a few beers at the bar. Life seemed uneventful. But sometimes, boredom is just life waiting to introduce you to extraordinary people.

That's when I met Piyush Pandey and Sonal Dabral, his distinguished colleague at Ogilvy.

We would swim, sit by the poolside, talk cricket, advertising, and life - and we laughed a lot. Piyush was different. He looked at the world through a colourful lens. His stories wandered from the dunes of Jaisalmer (he played first-class cricket for Rajasthan) to a casual observation during an inter-advertising agency cricket match - an observation that would eventually become Cadbury's iconic Kuch Khaas Hai campaign.

What fascinated me most was how uncomplicated his creativity was. Cricket had taught him to observe. And being a wicketkeeper, he had mastered it early - watching batsmen, studying fielders, reading rhythms of play. Except, I realised, he wasn't only observing the game. From behind the stumps, he was also observing people - consumers, emotions, habits (in an educated, complicated world, they call it the study of human anthropology)

Everything his brands would one day need.

Tea-tasting was his first job. Destiny, thankfully, rerouted him. With his instincts and imagination, tea rooms and smoky colonial bars of old Calcutta clubs would never have been enough. Advertising was where he belonged.

Words came naturally to him - not just spoken, but delivered with timing, warmth, and precision. He started calling me "Haathgaadi." At first, I thought it was a jibe. Then he explained - slow, careful, assured, committed. Suddenly, that name became less of a nickname and more of a compliment.

Piyush was a close friend of Arun Lal - the gritty Test cricketer who left St Stephen's, Delhi, for Calcutta and became the face of Bengal cricket. Piyush would speak romantically - and knowingly - about the influence of princely states in shaping Indian cricket. Patrons, palaces, and princes building cricketing legacies.

He enthused himself with anecdotes, finding some of them enduring like the products in his campaigns.

"He [Piyush] loved the story of Arun Lal and Krish Srikkanth, with the late Pakistani President Gen Zia-ul-Haq and would laugh heartily even at the umpteenth hearing of it. There must be something in the air where he and Arun studied, for just like Piyush never had anyone badmouth him, Arun, along with GRV [Vishwanath], must be the only two cricketers who do not have anybody in the cricketing world utter an ill word about them," wrote Sunil Gavaskar in this newspaper last Sunday. I can't wait to hear the full story from my former Bombay captain. Presumably, this emerged from the 1982-83 tour of Pakistan, where Arun opened the India innings with SMG in the first three Tests of that Imran Khan-dominated series.

Back then, Piyush's stories sounded like yarns from another era. Now, it feels like he had seen the future. The Maharajas had, unknowingly, sown the earliest seeds of what we today call the IPL. Piyush already knew where fame, money and cricket were heading.

Fame sat lightly on him. He wore it as casually as he dressed - a pack of Classic cigarettes from ITC, a loose Baghru vegetable-dyed shirt, and worn-out jeans. That was his uniform. From there, he could hold his own with a boardroom CEO - or sing "Dhoondo Dhoondo Re Saajana" to a batsman fishing outside off-stump.

He sold dreams in advertising, but he never lost touch with reality.

Where did Piyush learn advertising? He revealed on TheBarberShop with Shantanu podcast that it was cricket. He spoke about the journeys. "University cricket and under-22 cricket… even Ranji Trophy cricket… we travelled unreserved in second-class, third-class compartments for 48 hours. Sometimes from Delhi to Chennai, Chennai to Bangalore, Bangalore to Mysore City. That's where you were seeing India. That's where you were seeing people. That's where you were meeting people. That's where somebody gave you a paratha rolled up. That's where I learnt advertising," he revealed.

Observation was his habit. Humour was his language. Emotion was his product. Sitting in an office selling dreams, he still stayed connected to the dust, sweat, and simplicity of the real India.

Maybe that's why we connected.

Maybe that's why Haathgaadi didn't feel like an insult anymore. It felt real. Rustic. Honest. Just like him.

Shishir Hattangadi is a former Mumbai Ranji Trophy captain and opening batsman. He tweets@shishhattangadi
Clayton Murzello's Pavilion End will be back next week
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.