I went up with him to his terminal.
He set me my next assignment.
My first ever Ad campaign.
He: "Why don't you work on a mouth-freshening gum?
Which is your favourite?"
Me: "Umm.. Center Fresh, I think."
He: "Cool. So go ahead. Knock yourself out. Think up a series of three print ads on Center Fresh by the end of the day.
Brief basically is, it's a mouth-freshening gum. So think of how you'd put an idea, and lace a thought around it.
To tell people how the gum camouflages all the bad odours from your mouth. And so on.. You know.. You get the drift.."
Me: "Ah.. Ya.. I should think so.."
****
He turned back to his laptop.
His spine, like a hard stick of discipline.
I started ambling towards my desk.
The string of his words hanging loosely in the air.
****
I kept going to Bodhi, every now and then, down the day, with my basket of ideas.
And he kept slashing my pages, with the knife-cuts of his words, time after dizzying time.
"Think about the brief," he softly said.
The brief.
Which felt like a tangled wire looping out of my head.
****
I stopped draining my ideas onto my laptop.
And took a walk to the end of the corridor.
Looking on blithely at the world inside.
And the afternoon office sizzle.
And spent the rest of my day in the library.
Away from the noise and bustle.
And sundown later, after a deluge of crummy ideas, 'the one' good one whizzed out of my head.
Rocketing and exploding.
Like a ribbon of gold.
Burning a hole.
Into the blackness.
Of a tired, labouring mind...
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