Mudra's Ramesh Ramanathan, chief creative officer, puts in his papers

Ramesh Ramanathan, chief creative officer of Mudra Communications, has put in his papers. The news comes as a surprise as Ramanathan had barely completed five months as Mudra's chief creative officer.

While Ramanathan could not be contacted, sources in the know have confirmed his departure. Sources also unequivocally indicated that Ramanathan is not joining another agency. Rather, he plans to start a school for training creative people.

Details such as the launch date of the school, its location and of course, the specifics about the course could not be gathered as the man at the centre of this enterprise was incommunicado.

Mudra will now have to find the successor to Ramanathan. It had taken some amount of persuasion on the part of Madhukar Kamath, managing director & CEO, Mudra Communications, to get Ramanathan on board, when Kaushik Roy's appointment as head of marketing at Reliance Infocomm in mid-2003 had vacated the slot of chief creative officer.

After Roy's exit, Mudra had employed the services of executive search firm Korn/Ferry to identify prospects. Kamath had made it abundantly clear that he wanted an exceptionally good candidate as Mudra's chief creative officer. Kamath pursued creative duo Ramanathan (then, national creative director at Saatchi India) and Ryan Menezes (who was senior creative director at Saatchi's Bangalore office).

Things thankfully fell in place for Mudra, when Ramanathan relented and Menezes joined as national creative director.

Kamath, it seems, has to start his search all over again. Unless, he already has someone in mind.

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