I'm chai & she's coffee: How Harshad and Kainaz became each other's constant

It’s the early 2000s. You walk into an ad agency buzzing with filter coffee, permanent markers, and just a little bit of panic. The walls are covered in scribbles and rejected ideas, and there’s a familiar hum in the air, not of Slack notifications, but the good old landline ringing, and someone yelling “CLIENT CALL!” across the room.  

Nobody has a personal laptop. If there's a desktop for your department, you're lucky. Yes, the whole creative department shares one chunky desktop that wheezes when it boots up. It's mostly used for highly important things, like playing Solitaire, Dave, or Minesweeper. 

Except for one young writer. She shows up quietly, takes that chair while the room buzzes with chai breaks and gossip.  

“She was calm natured, always smiling,” he recalled. “And one of the few people who actually used the machine to type out her copy.”

Then he walks in. Loud, sharp, wickedly funny. 

“He was the angry, talented, and super sweet human who would become my friend for life,” she said. “My first impression of him was baffling. He was this guy who account management feared and loved at the same time.” 

They don’t share a desk. They’re not paired together, at least not just yet. But across that chaotic little room, something starts to shift. A friendship starts forming, one conversation at a time. 

Two and a half decades, many deadlines, and countless creative battles later, that same friendship still holds. Through late nights, lost pitches, standing ovations, title changes, and life’s unpredictability, they’ve stayed each other’s constants.

They’re not characters from a feel-good film about advertising.

They’re Harshad Rajadhyaksha and Kainaz Karmakar, Chief Creative Officers at Ogilvy India, who met in 2001 at Leo’s old office at Kemp’s Corner.

There was no grand moment. Just countless small ones that slowly turned colleagues into collaborators, and collaborators into lifelong friends.

How it all began

When Kainaz joined Leo Burnett (now Leo) in 2001, Harshad already had a copy partner. They weren’t working together yet but something clicked early on.

“We worked in different teams but we would have long conversations about campaigns, life and everything in between,” Kainaz recalled.

“I think we instantly hit it off as friends on the same wavelength,” Harshad added. “Even though we were juniors who worked in different teams with different people.”

Back then, the creative department was tight-knit, just under 20 people. A space so small and personal that friendships didn’t need to be forced. They simply happened.

One of those moments came when Kainaz was getting married. She hadn’t told many people yet. Harshad decided to make the announcement for her, with a marker on the wall.

He shared, “I took a big marker and drew out her wedding announcement on the wall of the creative department: ‘Kainaz weds Kalyan’—where Kalyan’s name was depicted like the Kalyan railway station board. It was quite silly, I know, but she loved it.”

That scribble stayed on the wall until they moved to the Parel office. And somewhere between jokes, jam sessions, and wedding doodles, a friendship took root.

Their first creative partnership came not from a brief, but from ambition.

“Like all starry-eyed young creatives, we first teamed up for an industry contest where the winning team would be sent to Cannes,” Harshad said.

“The first project we worked on together was a contest which we didn’t win,” Kainaz added. “But we had a great time partnering each other. We judged the jury for not awarding us.”

It wasn’t long before people noticed. Arvind Sharma, then chairman at Leo Burnett, often handpicked the two of them to work on new business pitches, even though they weren’t officially a team.

Harshad said, “Arvind Sharma was also extremely fond of our respective approaches to work. We used to do a lot of new business pitching. Arvind started picking Kainaz and me from our separate teams to work on a few of those projects together. That further helped solidify our collaboration.”

But the real turning point came in 2007.

“And the official pairing up of Kainaz and Harshad as a team, fittingly came from the man who’s been such a big influence on both our careers, our mentor Agnello Dias. Aggi had moved on to the then JWT, and he saw the potential and spark of what our partnership could achieve when he formalised our teaming up in 2007 at JWT. It’s been such an amazing journey ever since,” Harshad added.

“Aggi teamed us up,” Kainaz echoed. “And since then, it has been a ride.”

The partnership that grew with them

When two people work together for nearly two decades, the world expects a story full of dramatic turning points. But the truth, in Harshad and Kainaz’s case, is not so obvious, and deeper.

It wasn't built through big declarations or structured planning.

“I don’t think you ever have a set imagination about who will end up as your close friend,” Kainaz said. “It evolves. The best connections you have in life just happen to you. It’s a gift from the universe and one can only be grateful for it.”

Harshad echoed the sentiment: “Friendships cannot be engineered. They take place and one day you realise that you are so much richer for them.”

They never needed to define their creative roles. The work, like the friendship, just found its rhythm. “With a friend and true partner, it often becomes a process of ‘chiseling’ out the rough edges,” Harshad said. “We either discard that lump of clay by convincing the other, or once we are convinced there is magic to be moulded there, we get our hands dirty and start moulding it together. It truly becomes ours.”

The trust runs so deep, even rejection feels safe.

“There is no awkwardness in our disagreements and no agenda,” Kainaz said. “We are one hundred percent honest with each other. We feel free to cancel each other’s ideas without ever worrying about being misunderstood.”

The friendship has only helped strengthen and compliment their creative skills. 

And when things have gotten tough, on the work front or in life, that bond has only tightened.

“We would not have been able to survive and thrive if we didn’t have each other’s back on absolutely everything,” Harshad said. 

There were times when others tried to pull them apart, gently suggesting they operate as independent leaders.

“If I had a penny for every time people said ‘Why don’t you work as two independent leaders?’, I would have a condo in the Bahamas,” Kainaz said. “The answer is ‘Because together we’re more than two.’”

Harshad said, “Come what may, either well intentioned questioning of your process, or in less favourable situations, ill intentioned attempts trying to pit you against the other; nothing affects or shakes you up when you have unflinching backup from the other.”

Table for two 

Ask either of them which campaign best defines their creative partnership, and they’ll gently refuse to pick just one.

“There’s not one campaign that can define our work or our friendship,” Kainaz said. “It’s a collection of work, conversations, and growing together—from carefree juniors to stressed-out Chief Creative Officers. No one campaign or even one brand can capture that.”

Harshad agrees. “There are far too many to single out.”

The magic, they’ll tell you, is often in the little things, ideas judged (and misjudged), deadlines missed and made, and breakthroughs that happened not at desks, but over cappuccinos and chais in quiet corners of Bandra.

“Our best work,” Kainaz said, “is done in cafes across Bandra.”
“I am chai and she is coffee, cappuccino, specifically,” Harshad added. “Those are our constant fuels.”

Their work rituals are simple. Just shared notes, long silences, and the occasional caffeine run. At the heart of it is deep trust, knowing when to push, when to listen, and when to hold the silence. And yes, every now and then, a little stubbornness.

“Harshad is one of the very few people in my entire work life who knows how stubborn I am. How firm I can stand,” Kainaz admitted. “Most people at work know me as quiet and amiable. Most people don’t know me.”

But Harshad does. And over the years, they’ve come to know each other’s quirks and boundaries, what powers them through the chaos, and what simply cannot be compromised. “Kainaz knows that not getting a brief lunch break in the midst of any crazy work day is a deal breaker for me. To have a less irritated Harshad around, we try to ensure the sanctity of the lunch break,” he said. “Just as I know that the world does not want to face a Kainaz deprived of her Cappuccino!”

The real keepsakes

There are wins that stand out, like India’s first Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. 

But what Kainaz remembers more vividly is what happened after.

“Just after we won the award, Harshad got the news that his flight to his holiday destination was cancelled,” she said. “We left the Palais and spent a considerable time trying to arrange alternative ways for him to travel. All the while holding that super heavy black Lion. Only several hours later, when we were saying goodbye, did we really take a moment to register what we had won.”

For Harshad, a different moment lives rent-free in his mind: their first-ever new business pitch with Piyush Pandey.

“We won the pitch,” he said. “And before our flight back, Kainaz and I spent the entire afternoon at a bar in Bangalore chatting with Piyush. He had interacted with us at work for the very first time. Thoroughly impressed, Piyush asked the two of us, “Where was a brilliant team like the two of you hiding from me all these years!” 

When the brief is friendship

Even when they're not neck-deep in brainstorming sessions or deadline sprints, Harshad and Kainaz’s bond carries its own creative rhythm, rooted in quirks and inside jokes.

Ask Kainaz what makes her laugh, and she’ll tell you it’s Harshad’s party punctuality. “He always arrives at the exact time mentioned on the invite,” she said. “And he’s usually the only one there that early!” 

Harshad, on the other hand, can’t get over Kainaz’s superpower: falling asleep in any moving vehicle, no matter the chaos outside.

He said, “We might be in a hurricane or an earthquake, a storm or a downpour, a 10 minute drive or stuck in traffic for hours; but the moment we are in a vehicle, Kainaz’s ability to fall asleep in a jiffy is something that never ceases to amuse me.”

When the deadlines pause and the decks are done, their friendship slips into a quieter, but no less delightful rhythm.

Harshad ends his day by forwarding reels to Kainaz, trusting that she’ll get the joke without needing a shred of context. Meanwhile, he’s busy badgering her for updates on her cats, lovingly dubbed the ‘vanilla scoops.’ “He’s very fond of them,” she said.

It’s the kind of friendship where punchlines don’t need explaining, and two furry felines have somehow landed a starring role.

The values that hold it all together

Ask them about what makes their partnership tick, and the answers come quietly confident, rooted in shared values, not showy declarations.

“We’re two very different individuals with identical value systems,” Kainaz said. “Like in the show The Bear, we have a list of non-negotiables. Being fair is at the top of that list.”

Harshad echoes the sentiment, pointing to the importance of ethics over ego. “There are no compromises when it comes to excellence, accountability, and fairness, and that’s what gets passed down to our teams too.”

As for advice to others trying to build a creative partnership? “You can’t build one by trying,” said Kainaz. “You’re either that lucky, or you’re not.” 

Harshad agreed: “It can’t be arranged by force. If it’s meant to be, it will flourish naturally.”

Did either of them see this bond coming? Not really. But that’s the thing about some of life’s most rewarding partnerships, they unfold quietly.

“I don’t think you ever have a set imagination about who will end up as your close friend,” Kainaz reflected. “The best connections you have in life just happen to you. It’s a gift from the universe.”

For Harshad too, the friendship was “effortless.” It wasn’t something he sought to engineer. “They take place, and one day you realise you are so much richer for them,” he said

Work brought them together. Shared values kept them there. And over time, something rare happened, they stopped being just a great creative team and became each other’s chosen people.

This isn’t the story of two colleagues who became friends. It’s the story of two friends who built a creative legacy together, spent years swapping stories, lifting each other through creative blocks, trading dreams over countless cappuccinos and cutting chais, and quietly building something that will outlive even their best campaigns.