Actionaid: Nation

Another lot of bleeding heart ads from the Grand Panjandrum of Public Service Advertising. Does Indira Sinha ever do ads for products on the supermarket shelves, or is that a socially unacceptable question?Talk about the overprivileged!

Dear Ravi, these ads are not by me. I contacted Ivan to tell him this. I have never worked in India, all my work was done in London. It is astonishing to me that anyone in India remembers my name, even incorrectly (it is Indra not Indira) as it's eleven years since I quit Collett Dickenson Pearce to be a "proper" writer. Since then I've written virtually no ads except for the Bhopal Medical Appeal, a cause which could do with more support in India. Please visit www.bhopal.org for details.

As regards public service, I believe I have only ever won one award for a charity ad, in 1995 for the Bhopal Medical Appeal, which I helped found here in the UK. My first D&AD silver was, I am ashamed to say, for a commercial for Shell UK Oil, the second for a whisky, the remaining few I can't exactly remember, but three I believe were for the Metropolitan Police which was a recruitment brief.

During my time in advertising I worked for dozens, perhaps hundreds of commercial clients. In 1990 Neil Godfrey and I won a pitch at CDP for Amnesty International and our eyes were opened to the cruelties and injustices that were happening in many parts of the world. We asked Amnesty to let us use full pages to do justice to the stories and pictures they had collected and, in order that they should not suspect our motives, said that we would not enter the ads into awards unless they asked us to. My Amnesty client of those days, Karen Sherlock, is still a close friend, and we have since worked on a few other things together, none involving advertising.

Although it may seem that writing for a charity is easier than for, say, a peanut, it is not really so. There are after all thousands of charitable causes, millions of suffering people, and a great weariness among givers. Charities are underfunded and under-resourced, struggling against the weight of public apathy, yet they are the custodians of vital causes, doing the most important work there is. All charity advertising has ultimately only one task: to force people to make a decision about whether or not they will take responsibility for the way things are in the world. The difficulty is that people know this and armour themselves against it. Piercing their carapace takes every ounce of your courage, ingenuity and strength. Charities are founded in pain. You have to feel this pain, and struggle with your constant failure to express it, because you will fail. Words will fail you. Pictures will fail you. There will seem to be no way to convey the anguish, the desperate need, the importance, of your cause. After your best, inadequate, effort has run, the only thing that matters is how well it has worked. Awards are gratifying, but worthless. I don't miss them, nor do I particularly miss advertising.

Recently it occurred to me that I might in all these years have accumulated some ideas, insights and techniques worth passing on so I am thinking about offering a course in creative writing via the internet. If I decide to do it, the details will be on my ryze.com page. If it happens, I hope it will be fun, inspiring and useful. One thing it will not do is guarantee entrée to the world of the privileged, much less the overprivileged. That, as ever, one has to do for oneself.

All good wishes

Indra

Oops, sorry Indra,mea culpa and all that. Should've known from the limp (albeit,earnest) wordage that the ads weren't yours. Feel like a 'bowel nosode' for making the booboo.

Anyone wanting to contact me can do so via my website www.indrasinha.com