It was bound to happen. If not today, then next year or the next. Like all the others, like Neelamegham and Buni Pillai, Vijay Kumar and Ratnakar…the older generation of advertising stalwarts had to make way for the newer legends…

If you thought some people would be immortalized in their chairs, you can’t be blamed. Those people were special indeed. They possessed character strengths most of the ‘aam janta’ did not have. They had natural charm, poise, perhaps even superior brains. And they had something which is rarely seen nowadays…a rapport with their clients, some of whom partnered them in a relationship for decades.

So what’s so different about Santha retiring? Isn’t she but another unbeaten (can’t say unchallenged I suppose) champion hanging up her gloves? Just a year back Vijay Kumar walked out of Breeze into a white bearded Grandpa role and doesn’t seem to have any regret. Buni Pillai retired to a Hyderabad-Mussourie existence and started a campaign to promote Dhakkai Parothas… Neelu on the other hand couldn’t keep his mind & body quiet and settled down into a consultancy. Ratnakar went a step ahead and took the helm of a television channel.

The first time someone told me about Santha I was told that she had a Ph. D…and I continued to be impressed till the alphabets wre explained to me…something to do with Santha’s ‘pallu’ being ‘heavily dropped’. Then I got angry…how could someone accuse a successful entrepreneur of adopting such unsavoury tricks to improve her business prospects. I saw soon enough that she was completely aware of the wagging tongues and decided to treat them with the disdain they deserved.

Now, after so many years of knowing her, after seeing her in so many avatars, this is where Santha takes a step that puts her in a different plane altogether. And she is flying First Class as usual. She’s going to be a Life Coach…now, while I honestly don’t know what exactly that term means…all I can say is that to learn about life from Santha is surely going to be fun.

Santha’s track record is impressive…she nurtured people like Gnaneswar, Satish Kocharekar, Ayesha, Rohini and Kumar (and many others I am sure)…and each one of them evolved into bigger personalities with bigger roles in bigger domains. She even absorbed a brilliant Anvar Ali Khan and eased his entry into our village (remember he came to us after a successful stint in Mumbai and many other places in the world).

It was said once upon a time that Ogilvy, Benson & Mather (OBM) was a lucky mascot adverting agency. Even the most mediocre of campaigns got away with murder simply because the products or services they represented did phenomenally well.

From FD Stewarts to Sista’s to Word of Mouth to EYW to Mindset and then finally to JWT, Santha too has been responsible only for a few examples of brilliant advertising (that I know of…but then I have been out of Hyderabad for a long while and also only peripherally involved with advertising for quite some time) but she has been consistently at the forefront. Outstanding creatives that I remember for instance include a biscuit campaign where biscuits were arranged to look like a milk bottle, a campaign for a cement that created a character called Damu (no, he was not Rohini’s ex-husband) and a campaign for Tata Cellular but I don’t remember much else.

But in doing this she proved that there was no need to be consistently brilliant while it was imperative to remain brilliantly consistent. And she has consistently been the most successful agency in Hyderabad for a few decades.

Today as she goes to work for the last time in her present career I am sure she has much to look back at and a lot to feel proud about…I for one wish her all the best in what she has chosen to do…and who knows, she may teach me a lesson yet.

And by John…I’m prepared to learn!!!