HE has notched up a slew of advertising awards. His short stories and articles have been published in various magazines. He starred in a Kumar Shahani film. And now, Sumanto Chattopadhyay is taking centrestage as Buddha.Cast as the Enlightened One in Lushin Dubey-Bubbles Sabharwal’s The Life of Gautama Buddha, this Senior Creative Director, with Ogilvy & Mather Advertising in Mumbai, insists that most things have happened to him by accident. The MBA-graduate from Montreal’s McGill University admits, “I was a confused soul. I began with advertising in Kolkata. And though my degree qualified me for client-servicing, I preferred the creative side. I enjoyed going tie-less, growing my hair, behaving eccentrically and having people say, ‘Yeh creative aadmi hai’!” Well, he has won his fair share of accolades for doing so. The recent campaigns for Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (comparing state destinations with those abroad) and the Deccan Odyssey train (with a ‘train’ of elephants/boats/palkis) fetched his team a couple of ABBYs. The Asahi float-glass ad (where distortion makes the bride seem pregnant) won at the Asia-Pacific Festival. And the recruitment ad for O&M, Sri Lanka, snagged a CAG award. “I love writing,” he states expansively, including ad-copy, newspaper columns, travelogues, and an interview with Bipasha Basu too! He has even published a short story, Palm Fronds, about a woman deeply attached to her home and father. “It has the flavour of Old Calcutta. And the house is inspired by my old home which isn’t there any more,” he reveals, adding that he’s just penned another, Revenge of the Words: “It’s about a copywriter who wakes one day to find his clock has real hands, his eyes have real bags. it’s like the vengeance of the words he manipulates.”He has also been an occasional model, but it’s his experience in Kumar Shahani’s Char Adhyay, that he best remembers. “I’ve grown up with Rabindranath Tagore’s stories, poems and songs,” he points out. What’s more, Chattopadhyay’s great-grandfather, Surendranath Tagore, was the first to translate this Tagore novel into English and publish it in New York. And his grandmother had shared the stage with the great poet himself, in Shantiniketan. “Kumar encouraged us to use our eyes, to keep body-language minimal. After all that subtlety, my next acting project was a commercial stage comedy,” he laughs, about Hosi Vasunia’s adaptation of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park.Yet, it’s Buddha that continues to haunt him, especially as preparation involved intense reading, meditation, chanting and, of course, rehearsals. The play premiered in Bodhgaya and showed in home-ground Kolkata, before touring the US. Fusing Indo-Western music, dance, yoga, shlokas and theatre, it will tour again later this year. “A friend felt I’d received this role only to discover Buddhism. And I think I’m a much calmer person now,” he muses for a moment. before fielding a call, checking out a drawing board and getting right back to ‘being creative’.
