Mass delusion? Ogilvy & Mather professionals turn up at the Abby's dressed in black

At first glance, Sandeep Goyal looks like any hardnosed task-driving corporate executive. You know, the sort who'd first and foremost demand clarity on the 'objective' of the POA, even if it's about taking a walk round to the coffee machine. He doesn't, most certainly, carve out the picture of a devil worshipper, regardless of his wiry mane and fluffy moustache.

You wouldn't guess it, but Goyal, the former Chief Executive Officer of Zee Telefilms, has a pet obsession. That too, an obsession you cannot help but notice: the number 666. Three digits that have assumed an all-pervasive presence in his work life. All his cars, all his cellphones, any numerical tag that he has control over, they all have a hallowed place for the three digits. It's a passion. But it's a passion that Goyal likes to rationalise. "My life revolves around '666'," says he, with seriousness that only a former adman can conjure up, "since the role of a marketing and advertising professional is that of the Devil's Advocate."

Quirks And Quills

Idiosyncracies are not new. The classic kinds are so old that they're not even worth noticing. The business of showbiz, for example, is so filled with assorted dos and don'ts that it's downright idiosyncratic not to pick a title with a certain alphabet and then ensure it's of a numerologically consistent length.

The rest of the world of business hasn't exactly been immune, though. Take the case of Chetan Seth, cigar czar and Managing Director of Optic Electronic India Pvt Ltd. "I'm always into 4s and 8s," he confides, "and so if I have a very important letter to write, I'll pre-date it to a 4 or 8 combination." Incidentally, the birth dates of all his three daughters add up to either 4 or 8. Last year, claims Seth, "I bagged a Rs 360-crore contract on March 26." It's his biggest ever haul. And, as he sees it, it's all in the numbers.

Repetition and over-exposure, though, have already taken the punch out of the alpha-numerical sort of quirks. Thankfully, there are dozens of other interesting ones. Even ones that stand out for their utter uniqueness.

Psychiatrist Sanjay Chugh tells the story of a 38-year-old investment banker who came to him for counseling, confessing that he always kept an inkless pen in his shirt pocket. "Whenever he had to place a big order in the stockmarket," recounts Chugh, "he would take out his pen and attempt to write with it. On failing to do so, he would grab the nearest pen that could write, and this, he believed was the secret of his success." The banker claims to have been on a winning streak ever since he started it, and that's that.

From write-anxiety to sight anxiety. There's an entrepreneur who won't tolerate a docket lying at an angle on a table. There's a dotcom survivor who'll only have pictures of people he can't stand as office pin-ups. There's an adman who keeps the cord of his desk phone looped into a sort of infinity sign. There's another who never lets a spider be disturbed spinning its web, even if it's blocking a passage. There's a punter who lays off stocks he's heard uttered out in the open (not just by shoeshine boys).

Look around your office, and you'll begin to detect quirks that make you wonder. What's happening? Anxiety, say behavioural analysts. Pause for a second and think of all the crazy changes, the loss of old certainties, the relentless pressures of work, the dizzying pace of technology. Too busy surfing your cellphone to answer the computer? Join the gang. People are getting stressed out without realising it.

Then, before they know it, some synapses go whizzle-crackle, some patterns get formed in the head, and they're doing something they can't explain-and don't want to. And they demand that they be granted the space to do whatever it is, for whatever reason that nobody knows.

Trick Or Treat

The trick is not to analyse it, lest you drive your quirky colleague, or boss or whoever, into a fit of defensive anger. It can, though, be analysed, according to Chugh. "There are certain people identifiable with such behavior patterns," he elaborates, "who would probably have gone through some rough patch at one point in life, didn't know how to come out of it, and then purely through chronological coincidences, associated success or happiness with some personal belonging or uniquely personal event."

Ogilvy & Mather (O&M) is famous for its executives turning out in large numbers at advertising awards dressed in jet black. Piyush Pandey, President and National Creative Director, O&M, traces this little agency quirk back to the Bombay Ad Club's awards in 1993. Three top honchos happened to be in black. And they swept the awards that night. Since then, black has been the awards-night uniform, and the awards haven't stopped rolling in.

And it's spreading. Or at least O&M India hopes that it is. In 2000, when the agency's Asia-Pacific Chief Miles Young dropped by for the Annual General Meet (AGM) along with the agency's Global CFO Steve Goldstein, the date happened to coincide with the Ad Club's Abby Awards night.

Now, the two guests were caught unawares by the hopes the agency was pinning on the camouflage, and were forced by the sheer pressure of team spirit to hurriedly acquire the appropriate evening gear. Did the 'black magic' work? Like coal at 120 degrees. Last heard, rival agencies were conspiring to ambush Team O&M and drench it in insta-bleach.

"Thereafter," Chugh continues, "this object or event is likely to become a personal talisman, or a good luck charm, and the person would increasingly resort to the use of these charms to ensure his continued happiness and success." And in a way, it can be reasoned out too, if the quirk doesn't incur anything by way of cost. "The question they ask themselves is-why take a chance?"

Mahendra Nahata, Group Chairman of Himachal Futuristic Communications Ltd (HFCL), doesn't like to take a chance the other way round. He hates black, and wants to have nothing to do with it. Whenever he spots a black outline, square, or for that matter, anything black on paper, he tends to get frazzled.

Nahata is not alone. Magazine publishers will tell you that if you want news-stand sales to halve, put out an issue with a black cover. It's foolproof.