
Wit & Chai Group onboards Saurabh Sakpal as chief creative head
Wit & Chai Group, a
creative media agency
known for crafting culture-forward campaigns for new-age brands, has announced the appointment of
Saurabh Sakpal
as its new
chief creative head
.
With over 20 years of experience across global agencies and leading consumer brands, Sakpal steps into a pivotal role to steer the agency's creative direction and elevate its strategic storytelling capabilities.
Sakpal brings with him a rich tapestry of experience from leading agencies such as FCB, Saatchi & Saatchi, DDB, Publicis, and Redder Vietnam, where he led award-winning campaigns for marquee brands like Volkswagen, MTV, Chupa Chups, Set Max, and Virgin Mobile. He has also held leadership roles in-house at House of Anita Dongre and Nykaa, where he drove creative outcomes aligned with business growth. In addition, his consulting work with firms like Roland Berger and AlphaSights speaks to his diverse understanding of branding, fashion, and content strategy.
In his new role at Wit & Chai, Sakpal will lead the creative charge across all key accounts. He will work closely with the strategy and brand teams to shape narratives that are not only culturally relevant but also business-impactful that sharply align with business goals. From mentoring emerging talent to leading integrated campaigns, his role is central to shaping the agency's creative ambition.
'As a Chief
Creative Head
, I see Wit & Chai Group as more than just an agency—it's a sandbox for fearless thinkers,' said Sakpal. 'My vision is to turn up the volume on ideas that are disruptive yet deeply human. We're building brands that resonate in the real world—work that gets people talking, sharing, and remembering.'
Sakpal plans to foster a creative culture that thrives on experimentation, agility, and bold thinking grounded in youth insights and real conversations. He aims to position the agency where creativity intersects with commerce, making Wit & Chai Group the go-to name for challenger brands, cultural & digital disruptors, and ambitious digital-first businesses with a focus on originality, scale, and meaningful market impact and noise in the market.
Speaking about the appointment, Nihar Kolapkar, co-founder and partner at Wit & Chai Group, shared, 'Saurabh's track record of
creative leadership
and disruptive storytelling brings incredible value to our team. His ability to merge bold creativity with strategic clarity is exactly what we need to push the boundaries of what we deliver for our clients. We're excited to see him shape a new era of work at Wit & Chai Group.'
With Sakpal's onboarding, Wit & Chai Group is set to sharpen its edge, expand its creative horizons, and further cement its position as a trailblazer in the Indian and global creative landscape.

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India Today
26 minutes ago
- India Today
From the India Today archives (2011)
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated June 20, 2011)"As I begin to paint, hold the sky in your hands; as the stretch of my canvas is unknown to me."—M.F. Husain With the death of Maqbool Fida Husain in a London hospital on the morning of June 9, India has not only lost her most iconic contemporary artist but also perhaps one of the last living symbols of the very idea of her modern, secular and multicultural nationalism. Born in 1915 at the temple town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra, Husain came from a lower middle class Sulemani Muslim family and rose through the ranks to become India's most famous painter of people, places and a visual artist-especially a mid-20th century modernist painter-Husain was precariously perched on the crest of a nascent and evolving national consciousness. In the post-Partition era, when he first burst on the Indian art scene, Husain became a much celebrated symbol patronised by the Nehruvian state looking to create modernist role models. Yet, that very celebrity made him and his works vulnerable to be hijacked, misrepresented and reviled three decades later by a semi-literate cabal claiming to represent the collective voice of a largely silent Hindu majority. In fact, the torrid love affair between Husain and 'modern secular' India and their eventual dismaying disengagement makes for a civilisational sociologist Veena Das remarks, this "impossible love" had an inherent fragility because the idol, the image and the word are all strongly contested entities. It is also further complicated by the illicit intimacy between history and the 'perception of history' in post-colonial imaginations. The tantalising and tragic relationship-between a nation's notion of the self and Husain's visualisation of it in his art practice-became the vexed terrain over which competing political alignments fought their proxy wars for a good two decades before it eventually led to Husain's self-imposed exile from India in 2006. Four years later, he accepted Qatari nationality, spending his time between Dubai, London and Husain was educated in the streets of Indore, a madrassa in Baroda, the Indore School of Arts and very briefly the J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai. He was an immensely talented and intelligent man with an enormous curiosity about the world who learnt effortlessly from life and people. He arrived in what was then Bombay in the early 1930s, penniless but bursting with enthusiasm and energy, traits that he retained all through his first started out by walking the streets of Bombay offering to paint portraits of people who could afford to pay him Rs 25. There were not too many commissions but some of these early portraits still survive. In 2008 in London, I saw a portrait Husain had done of Lord Ghulam Noon's elder brother in a Bhendi Bazaar sweet shop. Soon, he moved to painting cinema hoardings, first for V. Shantaram's Prabhat Studios and later for New perched high on bamboo scaffolding, Husain learnt to be able to concentrate amid the noise and chaos of the street below. He used to paint 40 foot hoardings for four annas a foot under the blazing sun in Mumbai for many years. From painting hoardings, he progressed to designing toys and painting children's furniture for Rs 300 a month. "But even at that time I knew I would be an artist one day," he used to say, adding, "there was a time when I painted furniture by day and my own art by night. I painted non-stop." Cinema held a life-long fascination for Husain and decades later, he went on to make several much-talked about films. Of these Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival but the most well-known is Gaja Gamini (2000) that featured Madhuri Dixit as his muse. In 2004 he made the semi-autobiographical Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities with Tabu in the lead role which ran into trouble with Muslim life started to change radically around the time of Independence. Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002), the prodigious enfant terrible of Indian art, spotted Husain's talent by chance and immediately included him in his Progressive Artists Group (PAG) in 1947. Husain's work was noticed right from that first showing and with the encouragement of Rudi von Leyden, the German Jewish art critic, he held his first one-man show in Mumbai in 1950. With prices ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 300, the exhibition sold out. As Husain told me with a chuckle, "I was a best seller right from start."advertisementWhat differentiates Husain from his Progressive contemporaries is his deeply rooted 'Indianness' and his celebration of Indian life and people. While his contemporaries were busily assimilating European art from Byzantium downwards, Husain sought inspiration in temple sculptures (Mathura and Khajuraho), Pahari miniature paintings and Indian folk the mid-1950s Husain got national recognition with two very seminal canvases 'Zameen' and 'Between the Spider and the Lamp'. 'Zameen' was inspired by Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (1955) but instead of bemoaning rural poverty and indebtedness, it presents a symbolic celebration of life in rural India with a vibrancy that had never been seen before. "I realised one did not have to paint like Europeans to be modern," he maintained. Nor did he, at any time, understand the angst of existentialism."Alienation as a concept is alien to my nature," he would joke. The next year he painted the more enigmatic 'Between the Spider and the Lamp'. This painting, considered by cognoscenti to be his best of all time, features five women reminiscent of ancient Indian sculpture with an oil lamp hanging from the top of canvas and some unintelligible words in a script that looks like ancient Brahmi, Magadhi or some long forgotten dialect. From the hand of one woman, painted as if frozen in a mudra, hangs a large spider by its thread. Some critics have suggested the women were the pancha kanyas (Ahalya, Kunti, Draupadi, Tara, Mandodari) of Hindu mythology. When this painting was shown, despite the ripples it created, no one came forth to buy it for Rs 800. It now hangs at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, on loan from the Husain became a living icon of Hindu-Muslim, gangajamni culture, his art acquired a quintessentially Indian form and content while being global in its relevance and appeal. Moreover, Husain invariably brought relevance to his paintings by making them topical. He was ever ready with the 'image of the day' whether it entailed painting the 'Man on the Moon' in 1969 or Indira Gandhi as Durga after the Bangladesh war in modern Indian art gained wider acceptance through the 1970s and 1980s, Husain was steadily scaling up his prices and using the media to create hype around his colourful persona and his escapades. "Life without drama is too drab," he used to say. Detractors screamed commercialisation and friends frowned in exasperation; but Husain insisted that "the fiscal worth of a painting is in the eyes of the buyer". And buyers came in Badri Vishal Pitti, the Hyderabad businessman for whom he painted 150 paintings, to Chester Herwitz, a handbag tycoon from Boston, who bought up anything that Husain produced through the 1970s. Two decades later, Kolkata industrialist G.S. Srivastava struck a deal for 124 Husain paintings for Rs 100 crore; not for love of art but as good investment. Indian art was appreciating at a higher rate than most stocks and brand Husain was now Husain Inc. After his emigration from India, Sheikha Mozah of Qatar was his last great all his fame and wealth, Husain was personally untouched by both. He could be as comfortable in a dhaba as in a five-star hotel relishing an expensive meal. He stopped wearing footwear as a tribute to the Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh in 1974 and he used to walk barefoot into the most exclusive and august gatherings as well as clubs the world epic saga is ever perfect. And Husain had more than his share of controversies and brickbats. However, it is in posterity that Husain's art and persona will get a truer reckoning. Perhaps the best tribute the Indian state could give would be to set up a museum devoted to the life and art of this most talented son of the to India Today Magazine


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