Adzap

I think Karthi Sir started it.

He and another friend, Murli, had prepared a paper for one of the college symposiums in Chennai.

Paper presentation was a regular event at almost every symposium. They had one paper — I cannot remember anymore what it was about — and they started taking it from college to college and presenting it.

What I do remember is something else.

They got OD.

On Duty.

Which meant they could miss regular classes because they were officially representing our college somewhere else.

We watched Karthi Sir do this a couple of times.

That was enough.

I don't remember any of us suddenly becoming passionate about academic conferences.

The thought was much simpler.

Why are we sitting in class?

By our third and fourth years, Chennai had enough engineering colleges that, for a few months every year, there seemed to be a symposium happening somewhere.

Our college was happy for students to participate. We were representing the college, its name was being heard elsewhere, and that gave us some freedom.

For us, it was also a perfectly legitimate break from routine.

We could visit another campus, see what students there were doing, participate in something, eat outside and spend the day with friends.

Karthi Sir had his paper presentation.

The rest of the gang needed to find our thing.

We found Adzap.

The idea was simple.

You registered as a team.

When your turn came, you walked onto the stage and were given a product or topic you had never seen before.

Then you had perhaps ninety seconds or two minutes — I don't remember the exact time now — to come up with an advertisement.

And perform it.

Immediately.

It sounded easy until we tried it.

The first time was difficult.

There was hardly enough time to decide what the product was, forget about creating characters, a story, a joke and something resembling an advertisement.

But it suited us.

All of us could participate.

Nobody had to do it alone.

There were enough parts for everyone, and enough chaos for nobody to take himself too seriously.

You could be silly.

You could improvise.

And, perhaps most importantly for a group of friends in their early twenties, there wasn't much room for inhibition.

After doing it once or twice, we realised something.

We could not start from zero every time.

So we created a template.

I wish I could remember exactly what it was.

What I do remember is that we had a basic structure that could be bent around whatever product they gave us. We knew roughly how we would begin, who might do what, where the product would come in and how we could bring the whole thing to an end.

The topic changed.

The skeleton stayed.

That gave us enough time to think about the part that actually needed changing.

And once we had figured that out, we started looking for Adzap wherever we went.

Some colleges had serious technical events.

Some had paper presentations.

Some had competitions that probably required far more preparation than we were willing to do.

We looked for Adzap.

It became our event.

There was a season to these symposiums. Once they started, there seemed to be one college after another. We would pick the ones we wanted to go to, register, get our OD and head out.

There was competition, of course.

But looking back, I am not sure that was the main attraction.

We got to visit campuses we otherwise would never have seen.

We got out of the regular rhythm of college.

And the gang got another day together.

What surprises me now is how little of the actual Adzap competitions I remember.

I cannot remember a single product we were asked to advertise.

I cannot remember the scripts.

I cannot remember most of the results.

I don't even remember exactly how our template worked.

But I remember the anticipation of symposium season.

I remember going from college to college.

I remember standing on stages with friends.

I remember that the first one felt difficult.

And I remember that after a while, it didn't.

Somewhere along the way, we became less worried about looking foolish.

Years later, I ended up spending much of my working life in sales.

I would never say Adzap prepared me for that. Life is rarely that neatly connected.

But when I look back now, some of it feels familiar.

You don't always get as much time as you want.

You rarely know exactly what is coming.

A little structure helps.

And at some point, you still have to stand up, say something and see what happens.

At the time, none of us was thinking about any of that.

We were thinking about OD.

About getting out of class.

About which college had the next symposium.

And about spending another day together.

Maybe that is why I remember it.

Not the products.

Not the advertisements.

Not even the results.

Just the gang, waiting for symposium season to begin.

A note on the gang

We have known one another since 1999.

We call ourselves the gang. Somewhere along the way, we also came up with a name built from our initials: B Square, SPKAS.

There are many more stories from those years — cricket matches, trips, symposiums, houses that became second homes, and the years after college when all of us slowly moved into different lives.

I don't know yet how many of them I will write.

This is the first.