He was the creative brain behind “Touch the pickle” campaign of Whisper. Also Ariel’s “Dads#share the load”.

Ad guru Josy Paul, whose campaigns carry a social message, was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the Advertising Club Calcutta Honours 2020 in association with The Telegraph at Calcutta Rowing Club on February 8.

The club honoured veteran author Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay with the Best Storyteller Award.

Josy Paul, chairman and COO of BBDO India, trembled when he received the award just like he had when he got his first job. Born during an earthquake, Paul apparently has a permanent tremor. There are more stories to him like how he started BBDO, India, the Indian arm of the New York-based ad firm BBDO from the backseat of a car.

Paying tribute to the people who touched his life as an adman, Paul named Ogilvy’s Suresh Mullick, who gave him a job without seeing his portfolio. “When I met him for a job I didn’t have a portfolio. I was trembling. He said to me ‘don’t be nervous’. And I told him this was not nervousness but a creative tremble. So, Mullick started me off with a tremor.”

Upset when a group of people rejected his film at a client site, Paul was set to jump off a window. “A marketing fellow from the group convinced me not to jump and I went back to office. Mullick held me by the ear and told me Philips, the client, had called to say they had accepted the film but did not want to see me again.”

Kersey Katran hired him, along with Neville Dsouza, for Lintas. Paul at 26 was the youngest creative director in the industry then. Katran gave him “the freedom to fail”.

Paul moved to find a start-up David RMG. “I think David Ogilvy had chosen the wrong name for his agency. David is the belief in challenge, it is the David of David and Goliath.”

He went to David Ogilvy’s chateau in France and dug his grave to slip a note. “So intense was my energy as I stood on that sacred soil on June 20, 2005,” the adman said. And soon he got a call from BBDO’s Chris Thomas to start something new in India.

The Best Storyteller Award was instituted by the club last year when it went to Rituparna Ghosh. This year, the club chose Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, whose writings from Manab Jamin to Durbin to Manojder Adbhut Badi have enthralled the old and the young.

“I was initiated into literature by my mother who would recite from Chayanika to me in the afternoons. I write not to please readers or editors,” the author said. “I write for myself. I am not just an individual but an amalgamation of individuals. And what I write is what comes out after a self-investigation of my various avatars.”