Media thought-leader Paritosh Joshi, Principal – Provocateur Advisory, always arrests you with his thoughts and brilliant expression, and with a forthrightness of the highest order. The man who’s helped champion and co-create multiple, significant industry bodies that have been empowering the media and advertising marketplace, and has empowered many media networks with his powerful professional advice, now looks back at his learnings from 2020, in this exclusive year-ender piece for MediaBrief.com.
Paritosh eschews the ‘banality-quotient’ and speaks about the collective debt to the Indian Republic — to uphold Justice, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
Read on:
“I learned to recognize that life is fleeting and that every moment must be lived fully and deeply.”
“I learned that life is all about learning and discovery, and I need to be a lifelong student.”
“I learned to appreciate the value of relationships, and the need to sustain and strengthen them.”
No, forget it, that is three false starts already. Yes, they all sound PC (politically correct), and one can drone away endlessly, on the anodyne vacuousness which they trigger. What’s more, others will have done one or more of them already, so I have nothing to add to the banality-quotient here.
Life is political. Life as a citizen of a democratic republic is political. Life as such a citizen is more acutely political, when all the ideas and beliefs upon which the democratic republic was erected, are under irrevocable notice of demolition. Under the irrevocable notice of erasure, like they never existed.
Business managers in general, and marketing communications professionals in particular, pretend that their work exists outside the tugs and pulls of politics. That, somehow, their strategies and tactics, plans and budgets, target audiences and selling propositions, brand essences, and consumer insights inhabit a transparent but impermeable bubble, within the maelstrom of society and culture, yet strangely unaffected by it.
This, like so much else about business managers, and marketing communications professionals, in particular, is juvenile naiveté.
2020 was bookended by citizens’ protests of striking contrast. The outrage and outpouring, against the double whammies of the abrogation of Art. 370 and the passage into law of the Citizenship Amendment Act, emerged from the young and restless, in some of our leading national universities and academic institutions. The resolute determination and protests against the three, hastily and inappropriately adopted, farm bills emerged from the wizened, wise farmer and farm laborer, who toils in India’s agricultural heartland.
It became clear, at the very beginning of 2020, that I could not be detached from the tumult around me. That the forces which were colliding, in early January, on the cold pavement of Shaheen Bagh and the acrid, teargas-filled Jamia and JNU campuses, would shape the India which my children, and hundreds of millions of their cogenerationists, inherited from us.
That, before and after all else, the Republic of India was an idea. An idea of exceptional beauty and power, when it was conceived in the tumultuous years of the freedom movement, An idea of countless, coruscating facets. An idea that enshrined four eternal values: Justice, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
I was born in 1962 when the Indian Republic was a young, gawky, uncoordinated, fifteen-year-old. I can still remember the celebrations of the silver jubilee of Independent India, in 1972. And yes, I have memories of the Emergency, which followed soon after, as well as of Indira Gandhi’s unceremonious defenestration from her ‘TINA’ – there is no alternative – position by the wise Indian electorate, soon after.
Let me say this plainly. Marketing people are cowards. The recent embrace of woke causes and mildly provocative storylines in brand communication is a palliative at best, but more probably just a placebo: Paritosh Joshi
Marketing people embrace political indifference almost as a rite of passage into the workplace. I was not an exception, and from the mid-1980s, until reason dawned again, a few decades later, political consciousness was folded away into the darkest recesses of my cerebral attic.
Let me say this plainly. Marketing people are cowards. The recent embrace of woke causes and mildly provocative storylines in brand communication is a palliative at best, but more probably just a placebo.
We are marketing people and finance people and bankers and auditors and copywriters and recruiters and architects and engineers and designers and strategists and buyers and sellers and managers and directors. But before all of them, and after they are no more than memories, we are citizens of India. This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. Or passively.
We may never have taken note of it, but there was a great force multiplier that was silently propelling us along, the Indian Republic. It is a debt which, just like our debts to our parents, we can never fully repay or discharge: Paritosh Joshi
We have been fortunate to have our native talents nurtured and our efforts well rewarded by our careers. We may never have taken note of it, but there was a great force multiplier that was silently propelling us along, the Indian Republic. It is a debt which, just like our debts to our parents, we can never fully repay or discharge.
We must begin by recognizing it. And discerning the malign shadow which is being cast upon our republic by divisiveness and nihilism. And observing that divisiveness and nihilism are hegemonic projects. And recognizing that if we possess even a shred of morality and decency, we must be a part of the pushback, the resistance, the voice of dissent.
‘E Pluribus Unum’, ‘From The Many, One’, is the motto of the United States. When it speaks of one emerging from many, it is not the unity of homogeneity but the unity of a multipart harmony. This, more than anywhere else in the world, has been and has to be, true of India. Nothing would be a graver loss to the world’s cultural inheritance than India losing her magnificent diversity.
This is not a battle to be fought by one person or demographic or ethnicity or demographic. It is my battle, and yours.
And that is what 2020 taught me.
