And cauldron bubble

WHIZ: Here's somebody who embodies a leading cola brand's creative effervescence.

Quick: here's a phrase association test. Who do you think of when you hear "Oye Bubbly"?

Tick-tock, tick-tock... Rani Mukherji? Kareena Kapoor?

A-ha "" you're clearly not part of the Indian advertising industry's creative fraternity. The correct answer, dear reader, is Anuja Chauhan.

She personifies the Oye Bubbly girl almost perfectly "" young, vivacious and cool. And if you visit JWT, the ad agency on the Pepsi account located in Gurgaon, near Delhi, you might catch her walking about the office in tattered jeans with a tee slipped over and a tote bag. Let her get-up not fool you.

Chauhan is vice-president and executive creative director, JWT, Delhi. More importantly, hers are the creative grey cells that go into overdrive every now and then to turn your TV screen fizzy with Pepsi's irreverent sense of humour.

Meet her, and you'll know it's infectious. So too her enthusiasm for her latest work. "I had great fun doing the Pepsi TV teasers," she says, "and the main commercial with all the speculation it created."

She had just about everybody scratching their head over what "Pepsi TV" might be. But after all that breath quickening, wasn't the actual idea a damp squib? She brushes the thought aside.

"Just wait for more. The first one simply set up the concept. Pepsi TV will continue to unfold until June."

Okay. Chauhan understands a thing or two about waves of effervescence, having been on the Pepsi account, churning out ideas, for over a decade now.

It was her college peers (while at Miranda House) who got her into advertising, convinced that it would be more than just the right choice.

An internship at RK Swamy BBDO, a year's advertising course in Melbourne, and she joined HTA in 1993 as a copy trainee.

Then came her big aha moment, "Nothing official about it", and she was set for life. This was followed by a trail of mindspace blasters, including Zor ka jhatka, dheere se lagey for Mirinda Lemon and Yeh dil maange more for the World Cup and Yeh pyaas hai badi, among others.

However, it is "Oye Bubbly" that has catapulted Pepsi's advertising to a rocking high. "Everybody used to ask us while Coke is thanda what is Pepsi?

I realised we needed a single word to describe Pepsi and a script to depict the intense craving for the drink," recounts Chauhan. Hence: "Bubbly".

The Bubbly ringtone got 2,00,000 downloads on day one, she says. Yet, her favourite Pepsi commercial "" no, not a film star in a cricket stadium "" happens to be Mera number kab aayega with Cyrus Broacha.

"Because it represents a pure Indian insight. There's no dig at anyone or a retaliatory punch to it," she says.

So, what does she do her grey cells to get them crackling? She scratches her head in child-like abandon: "I can't write very well in office.

So I usually crawl up with paper and pen as soon as I put my three kids, aged three to 12, to sleep."

Aha "" so is that the secret of the overturned bubbles? As the bard himself put it, "thrice to thine and thrice to mine, and thrice again to make up nine"?