Hari Kunzru: Transmission

Tomorrow * was, he liked to say, different from other agencies. It produced results

In a glittering career Guy had raised awareness, communicated vision, evoked tangible product experiences and taken managers on inspirational visual journeys. He had reinforced leading positions and project-managed the generation of innovative retail presences. His repositioning strategies reflected the breadth and prestige of large portfolios. His communication facilitation stood out from the crowd. Engaging and impactful, for some years he had also been consistently cohesive, integrated and effective over a spread spectrum.

At the heart of GS: TM lay a philosophy (or, as Guy preferred to put it, a ‘way’) he had synthesized from a study of the great marketing masters. He called it TBM, which stood for Total Brand Mutability. During his twenties he had dabbled in the youth sector, helping the agency he worked for to develop the well-known CAR triangle, whose three corners are Cool, Attitude and Revolution. Having helped to sell an unknown quantity of sporting footwear, alcopops, games consoles and snowboarding holidays to CAR-starved under-thirties in Britain and Continental Europe, he had experienced what he described as a personal epiphany, the realization at a full-moon party in Thailand that his future lay in the science of ‘deep branding’, the great quest to harness what in GS: TM he termed the ‘emotional magma that wells from the core of planet brand’. ‘Humans are social,’ he would remind his clients in pitch meetings. ‘We need relationships. A brand is the perfect way to come together. Human input creates awareness and mines the brand for emotion. In a real way, the more we love it, the more powerful it gets.’

For Guy, love was the message. Love the brand and stay ahead of the curve. Much of GS: TM was devoted to the nature of the curve and the crucial importance of adopting a forward position in relation to it. Even so, the document’s 800 bullet-pointed words and Hokusai Wave intro-graphic left much unsaid about Guy Swift’s personal relationship with the future. In certain places — on moving walkways, at trade shows, in car showrooms — he felt it was physically connected to him, as if through some unexplained mechanism futurity was feeding back into his body: an alien fibrillation, a flutter of potential. Heading, say, towards the Senator Lounge at Schiphol Airport, he would feel it coming on, a chemical lift that would grow as he checked in, blossoming into full presence as he stepped through the dimensional portal of the metal-detector into the magical zone of TV monitors and international-marque goods. Surrounded by people on their way to other places, he would feel cocooned in the even light and neutral colours of a present that seemed to be declaring its own provisionality, its status as non-destination space. Then it was a time to grab things: a bottle of Absolut Citron, an open-face prawn sandwich, a magazine. Like the objects buried with ancient kings, these items had only a temporary purpose: to help him get from where he was to where he was going, to ease his transition into the next world.

When, like Guy, you put yourself ahead of the curve, you live in the future. Literally. How else are you to understand it? It is as if you have become subject to a freak physical effect, a blurring which stretches you out beyond the trivial temporality of the unpersonalized masses of the earth. Unlike the package tourists, the high-street shoppers and all the other yearners and strivers, your existence is extreme. The thrills are tremendous, but they come at a price. When Guy slept, he dreamed of tall buildings. He knew that the tiniest lapse of concentration, the smallest failure of response, could send him tumbling down towards the place of discount clothing outlets, woodchip wallpaper and economy chicken pieces. Sometimes at night his twitching took on a regular myoclonic rhythm, a constant cycle of fall and recovery. Boom and bust.

Over the years Arjun had given a lot of thought to Silicon Valley. As a prime daydream-location, it had gradually been elaborated into a lost world, a hidden ravine lined with fibre optics and RadioShacks, where surfer girls accompanied you to films viewable on day of international release and the number of available flavours N was always n +1, where n was the total when you last looked at the menu. The Valley : so exciting that, like Lara Croft, you had to rappel down a cliff-face to get in. One up. Player Mehta, proceed.

The first obstacle was the visa application process. He spent days gathering supporting documentation, days sitting for portrait photos and filling in forms, then more days at the American Embassy, submitting the whole bundle in a formal-looking brown envelope. At the embassy he stood in line, part of a jostling crowd of applicants kept in order by a pair of uniformed guards. In every eye there was the same determined blankness, a thousand-yard stare directed at HIB migrant status, at a dollar-denominated future.

Next he had to face the wrath of Khan. Since graduation, Arjun had been employed on a part-time basis by Indus Fancy Products Pvt, a firm owned by the brother of one of his college professors. To Mr Khan, the discovery that his employee preferred America to the export of a wide range of marble and onyx handicrafts was a frank betrayal. ‘There is the matter,’ he growled, wagging a bony finger in Arjun’s face, ‘of loyalty. And the matter of patriotism. Who has trained you to do this work? India! Who has provided the schools? What do you think it means for you to take yourself abroad, instead of using your talents for the good of the nation?’

Arjun replied (silently) that if India had wanted him for something it would probably have asked. Aloud he mumbled that he wanted to earn more money. Mr Khan’s pockmarked face turned an unnerving purple, and he embarked on a speech which commenced as a taxonomy of those who rejected the nurturing breast of Mother India (the ingrate, the coward, etc.), then broadened to touch on Pandit Nehru, hydroelectric power, the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the insemination by one another of apes, pigs and dogs. When he began to shout, Arjun beat a retreat, watched by a startled group of clerks.

His mother was behaving erratically. She was (according to Priti) attempting to stave off anxiety by shopping. Whatever the cause, she insisted Arjun trail round after her as she bought the sweaters, scarves, hats and ayurvedic medications that would be necessary if her boy’s delicate constitution were to withstand the American climate. Occasionally, in the face of some violently patterned piece of knitwear, he would try to introduce the possibility that his baggage allowance would be very small, or suggest that California might not be as cold as she thought. She dismissed such notions out of hand.

In the evenings Mrs Mehta’s twin preoccupations were sewing on name tags and the problem of Priti. As she sat with her work-box, she fretted that paid employment would expose her daughter to undesirable influences and dent her marriage prospects. Mr Mehta was inclined to agree, until he realized how much Priti would be earning. Abruptly he started to incorporate the notion of a call centre into his image of himself as a modern man. ‘My dear,’ he told his wife, ‘it is all a question of the presently booming service sector. What training could be more appropriate for a girl?’ In this way the matter was settled. Quietly, without fanfare, Priti started to make the daily commute to DilliTel.