A Junior Writer from JWT.

I got fired from my first job on a social media messenger app. I'd been out of college for all of three months and had somehow managed to land an internship as a content writer at a small company that operated out of a ramshackle building in one of the lesser known Okhlas.

The job was dull as dishwater and paid next to nothing. I used most of my free time to Google Russell Peters and deliver a hyena-esque laughter that resonated through the two small rooms that made up the office.

I have to say, getting fired on social media, even from a place like that, hurt like hell. I had stopped taking money from home and now depended on meager stipends to get by. My expenses back then were neatly categorized into three clear sections: rent, transportation, and debauchery (not necessarily in that order of preference).

I looked for another job for a few weeks before a friend of mine (now Insta-famous for helping people navigate their messy lives and feelings) directed me to McCann, my first big agency.

McCann was titanic in every way, and I was hooked from the get go. The job paid much less than my first agency, but it was legit, and more importantly, nobody would fire me for binge-watching anything. It was the Horn of Cornucopia where creative minds were welcome to thrive.

In fact, creative cultures like the one at McCann encouraged employees and trainees alike to explore all of their weird and pointy edges. I spent about a year and three months at McCann, loving every nano-second of it. I was a newbie, incredibly in love with the wild creative pursuit of things.

There was all but one tiny problem. I was caught in the wrong job.

Due to a lack of opportunities, I had hastily accepted the first good internship (meaning McCann) that had come my way. However, the requirement was that of a Servicing Trainee. And so it seemed to me then, that in my hurry to get a job, I had somehow wound up at the wrong end of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

'Servicing' or 'Brand Management,' as the role is now called after much protest from the 'Servicing' department, is a creative role by proximity. What that means is that you can, of course, out of the goodness of your heart tap into the tiny vestiges of creative energy stored within your soul and conjure up an insight, an idea, or a hook that could potentially solve a brand problem. But by role and by definition, you aren't obligated to do so.

And so, for the first three or four years of my advertising career, I came close to what I wanted to be, but not quite. I spent a lot of my time wishing for the opportunities that came easily to my peers, the only difference being that they had actively sought out the more suitable role. In fact, I now understand that for a long time, I didn't even realize that I wanted to do something else, i.e., something other than sending emails and binge-watching the first three seasons of Game of Thrones.

Three years later, I was offered a chance to officially join the JWT creative team when a Creative Director realized that I could craft a pretty neat manifesto in a matter of few minutes, especially after a drink or 45. Manifestos, as it turned out later, are quite challenging to write and mine was an okay-ish first draft.

I believe, even to this day, that was the very specific and decisive moment that changed my life.

I went from being a lackluster, bored-to-death servicing kid to the new writer on the block. I wrote films, poems, manifestos, and even Facebook updates with the zeal of a young writer who had just been handed her dream job on a platter. I clung to every comma, exclamation point, and full stop for dear life, and I actively sought out the comfort of booze to write all of the bizarre and beautiful things that lit up my brain.

I was finally a writer, and I was madly in love.

I've taken on a few very exciting roles since. I've been an advertiser, a strategist, a marketer, a corporate slave, an arrant knave, the king of hearts, the ace of spades and so on.

But through it all, I am now and shall forever remain a Junior Writer from JWT.