Speaking from the heart

By Col R Hariharan

[A review of the book “Courage My Companion” by RV Rajan, published by Productivity & Quality Pubishing Pvte Ltd, Chennai-600017, 2009. Price: Rs 295]

Rural India continues to remain a conundrum for everyone – the administrator, businessman, and the social activists. Most of us brought up in urban environment with its self-centred lifestyles find it difficult to unravel rural India. Advertising to the rural audience becomes a difficult proposition. Veteran ad man RV Rajan created a niche for himself as a pioneer in this field. “Courage my companion” the book under review is a candid memoir of Rajan’s journey through life.* It is not merely the story of an advertiser but of a boy from lower middle class background in Bombay growing up on his own strengths to found his own premier ad agency “Anugrah.”

Writing memoir is a difficult art. Authors of memoirs generally suffer from two ailments. One: they become ‘I’ specialists flogging the use of first person singular ‘I’ to death. This makes very dull reading for others. The second is inability to look at ourselves objectively. Will Rogers described this characteristic beautifully; he said “When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that's Memoirs..” However, Rajan’s book does not suffer form these common ailments.

The memoir follows the story teller’s mode, cruising chrono-logically rather than jumping from spectacular episode to episode. The advantage of the method is it is not all about advertising and how Rajan grew up to be a whiz kid in the ad world. He comes out as humble human being looking at himself with humour, particularly while talking of his early days. It contains his successes and failures, from his calf love to married life and family to early days in ad world, rise in Clarion and finally the growth of Anugrah into Anugrah-Madison.

His style of writing is direct and style is simple one-to-one narrative. This comes as a surprise because generally ad guys who use words as stock in trade. His simple honesty is so patent in his writing when he describes a few instances, like the problem with Clarion union or his marital problem when he failed to empower his wife. The tongue in cheek humour is interspersed throughout the book. His tribute to his ‘gurus’ for teaching the craft shows lack of ego when he writes about his successes.

There are very few books written by advertising practitioners in India. And that makes it Rajan’s memoir a welcome addition to this niche among business and management books.

I have only two observations on the book. One is the title “Courage my companion,” personally I would have preferred “Speaking from heart” as it reflects Rajan’s approach to memoir writing. Second is about part II – My parallel life. Undoubtedly Rajan is a man of many talents and he brought them to bear upon on many other social activities not connected with his profession. Part II is all about this aspect - life other than as an ad man. It is about his participation in the Round Table and Rotary Inter-national movements as well as in national and international ad forums. The activities are so varied and with a little tighter editing they would have knitted better.

Notwithstanding the above, the book is good value for money. After both Bill and Hillary Clinton published their memoirs American stand up comedian Jay Leno said: “Is’t this amazing? Clinton is getting $8M for his memoir. Hillary got $8M for her memoir. That is $16M for two people who for eight years couldn’t remember anything.” You cannot fault Rajan on this count. At Rs 295 in his book you get everything from life in Matunga in the 60s to his great faith in God to see him through business problems at 63.