“WHY SO SERIOUS? — The Making of Gautam Gambhir”: Cricket legend & Team India coach Gautam Gambhir in conversation with CNN-News18 Senior Anchor and Managing Editor (Special Projects) Anand Narasimhan.
“It’s always the captain’s team. The coach can give inputs and play a supporting role, but it’s the captain’s call finally as he is the one running the team,” stressed Gautam Gambhir, the head coach of the Indian men’s national cricket team that recently brought home the ICC Champions Trophy. He was speaking at Goafest and responding to a query about his contributions as a coach. Faced with some tough questions on his career choices, his equation with Virat Kohli, his decision to join politics and then not continue that innings but return to the cricket field and his ambitions, Gambhir took them on in the same gritty manner he played on the field.
The former India captain insisted that he had no differences with Kohli. To thunderous applause, Gambhir said that if he were not a cricketer, he would have been a soldier, and he rued not joining the armed forces. Gambhir said he always played for the common man who acknowledged contributions emotionally and from the heart, and not for the gallery.
Gambhir was not alone in giving a patriotic spin at the annual three-day ad and marketing fest, which on day two saw cinema star Suneil Shetty saying that if he were to direct a movie, it would be titled ‘Bharat’. The actor, whose web series, an action thriller Hunter Season 2, is streaming on Amazon MX Player, sounded utterly flummoxed when he was told by the moderator Aruna Daryanani, Director, Amazon MX Player, that the series was considered “brand unsafe” by advertisers due to the gory scenes in it. He strode down into the audience and made a passionate and melodramatic pitch to the advertisers in the audience to support the show, much to the amusement of everyone.
Earlier, the ad industry had several introspective sessions on creativity, brand building, tackling gender biases as well as masterclasses on working with data and AI. Aptly themed IGNITE, this edition ignited plenty of debate. In a heated discussion on creative leadership and whether it should be led by the heart or mind, Bobby Pawar, former chief creative officer of Havas, declared that CCOs are instigators and the ‘right brain of the organisation’. Sonal Dabral, who in the past led the creative function at Ogilvy, felt that the chief creative officer of today was competing with the transformation officer as agencies chased non-creative work. “Agencies are bending over too much in the chase for growth,” he said. On the other hand, Senthil Kumar, Chief Creative Officer at VML India and Lulu Raghavan, President, APAC at Landor, strongly batted for the creative function, being the beating heart of the agency. While Kumar called the CCO the playing captain, Raghavan painted the CCO as a unifier of brand vision and a Chief Culture Officer.
There were other thought-provoking sessions on how generative AI reshapes the advertising business and how agencies need to reclaim the brand-building space as clients push more for performance marketing. From the conversations on the sidelines of the event, it was clear that the industry is at a crossroads. The stage was set on day one of the event, wherein the opening keynote, Rishad Tobaccowala, author and senior advisor to the Publicis Groupe underlined how AI’s real impact is yet to unfold and soon knowledge and experience would be free, making it imperative for organisations to reinvent themselves.“AI will become like electricity—essential but not a differentiator,” he said. “The real edge will come from HI—Human Ingenuity, Intuition, Inspiration, and Inventiveness,” he said.
Published on May 22, 2025
