Very smooth, very powerful

11 years ago I interned at a famous ad agency. The one that made THAT ad. You know the one. I thought I was going to make culture. Shape desire. Sell dreams to millions. I was assigned to Audi dealership recruitment ads. For Dehradun. DEHRADUN. Someone needed to convince businessmen there to invest in 25,000 square feet of showroom space. Nobody else in the agency wanted to do it so that someone ended up having to be me. My boss — a man who believed in advertising the way some people believe in God — said I needed to test-drive an Audi before writing about it. "Feel the car," he said. "Understand what you're selling." I nodded thoughtfully. Reader, I COULD NOT DRIVE. Not "I was bad at driving." I mean I had never operated a motor vehicle. Ever. In my life. I grew up in cities. I took autos. I took the metro. Driving was something other people did. I did not mention this to my boss.

Instead I recruited my neighbor's driver. His name was Raju. He had never been in an Audi. He was absolutely thrilled about the whole thing. We could not take my neighbor's car. The neighbor would ask questions. So we took the metro. Two people. One a copywriting intern who cannot drive. One a professional driver. Traveling by public transportation. To test-drive an Audi Q7. This is called "market research." We arrived at the dealership on foot. The showroom was air-conditioned and immaculate. The salespeople wore suits. The cars gleamed like they had never known dust, never known traffic, never known the chaos of actual Indian roads. The salesman watched us walk in from the direction of the metro station. He had questions. He did not ask them. His expression was doing a lot of work. Raju got behind the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat with a notebook, like a man conducting serious automotive journalism for a major publication.

"How does it feel?" I asked.

"Very smooth, sir," Raju said, as he navigated the traffic — autos, bikes, buses, a cow, someone honking for reasons that will never be known. "Very powerful."

I wrote this down. I was taking notes. This was research. He had a lot more to say but this is what stuck with me. Very smooth. Very powerful. This was Raju's professional assessment. He had driven cars his whole adult life. He knew what smooth was. He knew what powerful was. This was the most honest piece of feedback anyone generated in that entire campaign.

It did not make it into the ad.

I wanted to say something like "people love these cars, maybe it's a good idea to sell them" but it got shot down. Raju's review — true, human, direct — was not what the client and agency wanted. They wanted something polished, global, aspirational.

Anyway here are the ads. "Can you Vorsprung durch Technik?" "India's No. 1 is looking for the one." They are rhetorically cute but empty and soulless. I wanted it to be about the humans who drive the car but the client wanted it to be about the cars and the German-ness itself.

So my boss and I finalise the copy and some mock layouts. The real work wasn't done by me. There was a production team. They sat in a separate office. They did everything — final layouts, retouching, the actual making of the thing. The craft. I wrote words. They made things.

When I was feeling uninspired I'd wander over and watch them work. Watch the ad take shape on their screens. Watch something emerge from nothing. I remember standing there, twenty years old, thinking: this is so cool. I don't want to write about the thing. I want to make the thing.

I didn't have words for it yet. I didn't know "product design" was a job. I just knew there was a room where things got built, and a room where people talked about things getting built, and I was in the wrong room.

The internship ended. I went back to college. The copywriter I reported to has absolutely, 100%, without question, forgotten I exist. But I kept thinking about that production office. The screens. The making.

Through a series of decisions I still cannot fully explain to my parents or myself — applications, rejections, one acceptance, several existential crises — I ended up in design school. Now I make things. Or at least I move rectangles around in Figma and call it making things.

Raju went back to work. Somewhere in Dehradun there may or may not be an Audi dealership that exists because of an ad I contributed to. I'll never know. But whatever happens I won't forget that ride — it was the one honest thing in this whole enterprise.

This is where the rest of the story starts.