Though these blah blahs were supposed to be nonsensical letters, I have often tried to read them closely and found that he actually wrote some meaningful stuff, some thrashing the bosses or about some people who he did not like. Often, he would get carried away and finish the layout all by himself, even scribbling out the blah blahs that were written out as dummy Body Copies. The models were never the same, nor were the expressions that he sketched. In fact, it was at times difficult to “photograph” his characters. And more often than not, they were good to go for the artwork directly. Samir da’s scribbles were a piece of illustration by themselves. He, of course, was a colleague of Urmi’s father and so knew her as a kid. He loved his addas and since Urmimala and I were from the same social milieu, we were always welcome to sit and chat with him. He looked like one, had all the Bengali middle class attitudes and while I didn’t find him to be a football buff like our then Chief Art Director, Kanu Basu, he certainly loved playing cards. As it so happened, my role as a fetcher and carrier in my Group (that’s what Trainees do) gave me more opportunities to spend time with him as he was assigned to work on the accounts in our group. Being a hard core Bengali, I was familiar with his style of illustrations which accompanied the novels by famous Bengali authors in the annual numbers of Desh and Ananda Bazar, commonly known as the Sharadiya Shankhas. In 1976 I joined Clarion Advertising as a Trainee and that was when I met Samir da.
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