I saw Gerson da Cunha for the first time in 1970 when I was a stripling reporter for a lively community newspaper called Dateline Delhi. The 7th Asian Advertising Congress was coming to town; the luminaries of Indian advertising would be there. It was thrilling and electrifying to be witness to such a spectacle.
The Indian contingent had been having a dry run of their presentation a day earlier and I had been allowed to watch from a discreet seat. The best and the brightest of Indian advertising were there, larger than life — Alyque Padamsee, Gerson da Cunha, Roger Pereira, Ahmed Ibrahim and others, working together on something unheard of called a “multi-media presentation”. A rainbow of slides would simultaneously light up multiple screens, synchronised with music and voice. 

That entire afternoon, wide-eyed, awestruck and still in my first year of college, I basked in the glow cast by the gods of Indian communication. Gerson was 41 then, in the prime of his life, already a colossus of Bombay’s theatre and advertising worlds. I was a mere 18.