Before she won the Miss World title, Aishwarya Rai shot into limelight with a Pepsi ad in 1993.
In the commercial, which also featured Aamir Khan and Mahima Chaudhary, Rai was introduced as Sanju (Sanjana). The ad became a rage.
On Wednesday, Prahlad Kakar, the man who created the ad, and many more such iconic ads, said he wasn’t impressed by Rai when he first saw her.
“We were looking for a bombshell and just not finding one. A young man came into the office to meet Mitali (Kakar’s wife) and showed her his work. He turned up with Aishwarya in tow. One of my assistants said ‘Wow! We’ve found her’. She called me and I looked at her. I saw a scruffy looking girl... I asked her if she (the assistant) was sure. She said ‘trust me. I will do a make-up test and see what happens’”, he said.
“(After make-up) She transformed into a complete knockout. That’s how we cast her,” Kakar said at a session of the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, in association with the Victoria Memorial Hall and The Telegraph.
Kakar is one of India’s best-known ad-film directors and a co-founder of Genesis Film Production, one of India’s oldest and foremost ad-film production houses.
He has ruled the advertising world with his brand of irreverent humour and memorable brand-building campaigns.
At the Victoria Memorial, he discussed his 2023 memoir, titled Adman Madman, which captures his roller-coaster journey in life and in the world of advertising. He was in conversation with Manoj Mohanka, businessman and social-entrepreneur, on Wednesday, Day II of the literary meet.
Mohanka brought up Kakar’s complete disregard for conventional business school graduates. But two of his favourite clients in Pepsico — Kakar named another in Prestige — were also B-school graduates, Mohanka said.
“You have done tonnes of advertising across the genre, across clients.... You have this complete abhorrence of suits. You make it amply clear that you don’t suffer these fools at all, the B-school types. But both of them (Kakar’s favourites) were also B-school types. What do you think made them stand apart and understand what it is that you were getting at and producing the finest TV commercials across India?” he asked.
Kakar replied: “They were mavericks in their own way. Because once, they put me to the test, to prove myself. They never interfered after that. They would follow whatever I wanted to do intuitively, knowing fully well that I was bang on.”