Obituary: Remembering Doing Think's Adip Puri

Adip Puri's colleagues and friends remember him as an affable person with a great understanding of human behaviour.

Adip Puri, 51, founding partner, Doing Think (Mumbai) passed away on September 16th suddenly. He is survived by his sister and brother-in-law.

Puri started his career over two decades ago as brand manager. One of the companies he worked was Eureka Forbes. He later joined the ad world as a planner and worked Rediffusion Y&R for eight long years before moving to Saatchi & Saatchi. His last assignment, prior to setting up Doing Think with V Shantakumar, was as global planning head for Unilever detergents at JWT. He had been working with Shantakumar for the last four years.

The 'About Me' section of his personal website Adipthinkcafe.com reads 'I would like to define myself as a Consumerologist - one who not only studies people but is interested in the triggers, hot buttons and contextual changes in the environment that makes people buy or consume a product; service or ideology."

According to Colvyn Harris, CEO, JWT India, Puri was an insightful planner and an easy person to work with. "He played a huge role at JWT. An affable person, he always had a smile on his face. He was too young to go." For V Shantakumar, who has known Puri for 15 years and treated him as a younger brother, his absence is shattering. "I met him first at Saatchi & Saatchi when he was the national planning head. Over these years, we've become good friends so much so that we decided to start an entrepreneurial venture together called 'About Think'. I would like to dub him as my 'Think' partner." According to Shantakumar, Puri was old-fashioned, almost in the Victorian sense of the word. He was a voracious reader and loved watching movies incessantly.

His Twitter profile mentions that he was a movie buff, scriptwriter and a wannabe director. Fondly remembering one of his habits, Shantakumar says that they loved collecting useless information about anything and everything that interested them. "Eventually it turned out to be useful at some point. I'll miss the daily bulletins that he shared with me," he notes.

Describing him as a brilliant 'consumerologist', Shantakumar says that Puri had the ability to extract information and insights on human behaviour and use that to create an idea. "He had phenomenal wit. He could have been anything a creative director, head of an agency, but he chose planning because of his love for thinking and ideating," he adds. He understood consumer behaviour and was brilliant as a planner. Clients loved him. "There were so many occasions when he would meet an old client and it seems like they are friends. He was really good with people," reminisces Shantakumar.

People are my passion - talking to them; observing them; hearing their stories/anecdotes; training them; teaching them and always, always learning from them. I guess - storyteller is the other way to describe me. That's Puri's bio on his website. It is the best way to remember him too.