When he was seven, he walked up the hilly paths of Almora with his grandmother, listening to stories and picking up dry leaves, unaware that he was playing with words in his mind. A decade later, he had put the words together in a book. Almost three decades later, his words again — this time as a son’s ode to his mother — had won him a national award.

At 41, Prasoon Joshi has been recognised all over again. He now has two national awards in his kitty, a couple of Cannes Lion Awards and over 200 other film and advertising awards.

Recognition isn’t new for Joshi. The Cannes Lion Award in 2003 catapulted the ad man-cum-lyricist-screenplay writer to an international level with his advertising campaign Thanda Matlab Coca Cola. In 2008, he became the third Asian to head the outdoor jury at the Cannes International Advertising Festival and he remains the only Indian to be a part of the 10-member Titanium and Integrated Cannes jury at the Cannes Lions ad fest.

But the national honour — awarded recently to him for the lyrics of a song in the film Chittagong — is closest to his heart, he says.

“I am still a middle-class man. For me the government honour matters a lot,” Joshi stresses.

This is his second national award for the best lyrics for a film. He was first awarded in 2008 for the song Ma from Taare Zameen Par. Joshi, in Delhi for the award, is nostalgic about his old city. “Delhi is where I spent several nights outside Kamani Auditorium, post late night classical music shows, as often I missed the last bus home,” he says, fondly recalling his postgraduate days at an institute just outside the capital.

In the Mumbai film world, Joshi is a bit of a maverick. When the popular chartbusters are songs with lyrics such as My name is Shiela… I’m too sexy for you, his old-school lyrics stand out for their rustic or simple content.

“There is always a thin line between the derogatory and the witty. One has to tread carefully. We as creators and consumers need to realise what is right and wrong,” he says. “Not everything that sells is good, or vice versa,” he adds.

And Joshi knows what sells well. Often called the Ad Guru of India, he is at present the executive chairman and CEO of McCann Worldgroup India, and president, South Asia, McCann Worldgroup, the global advertising agency. Under him, the firm is known to have acquired top business accounts and won several prestigious awards. Among Joshi’s best known award-winning campaigns are those for Coca Cola, Happydent, Cadbury and Chlormint.

But conceiving ideas for ads is just one of the many hats that he dons. In January, he was attending the literary festival in Jaipur, where he was a guest speaker. Dressed in a black kurta-pyjama and a black jacket, he sat quietly in a corner eating an orange while his seven-year-old daughter played with his iPad. His wife, Aparna, was busy organising signed copies of his latest book of poetry, Sunshine Lanes, to send to the festival bookstore.

The book, published by Rupa Publications, is a collection of his songs and poems translated into English along with small stories on what went into the writing of each song. Ma, a song of separation where a child expresses his deep fears, was a reflection of his own fears as a child — of darkness or of being left alone. “I was worried about being too personal in describing my feelings in this song. But my childhood fears and apprehensions echoed with so many people that I was amazed,” he writes.

We get talking about his latest project, a biopic on athlete Milkha Singh, which is due for release in July. “I spent so many hours with Milkha Singh, asking him all kinds of questions, that by the end of it he was bored of me,” Joshi laughs aloud. He has written the script, screenplay and dialogues of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra.

For his research, Joshi went to the neighbourhood where Singh grew up and met his friends, family and associates. “Exploring a sportsman’s life for a biopic is tough. I went to as many places as I could. It was important to listen not just to him but also others who knew him. Fiction could have been easy but not a real-life character,” Joshi explains.

But then, by his own admission, Joshi doesn’t like things that come easily to him. “I think I am cursed in a way,” he admits candidly. “Some people are able to do things quickly. But I like the agony and pain that comes with a project.” And his pen effortlessly transforms his pain into words — which form the lyrics of so many songs from films such as Rang De Basanti, Taare Zameen Par, Ghajini, Chittagong, Hum Tum and Fanaa.

He’s such an intrinsic part of Bollywood now that it’s difficult to imagine that as a young man he seldom watched Hindi films. “I hardly knew any actors by their name even a few years ago,” Joshi confesses. Childhood, for him, was all about books. His love of poetry and prose prompted him to start a lending library called Prasoon Bal Pustakalaya. The books were circulated among friends, family and neighbours for Re 1.

As a young man, the works of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, left a deep impact on him — which led him to write Main Aur Woh at the age of 17. The book was published by his father’s friend.

The atmosphere at home was a mix of academics and culture. His father was a civil servant in Uttar Pradesh’s education service while his mother was a school principal. His father’s postings took the family all around the hill stations of Garhwal and parts of Uttar Pradesh. Trained classical musicians, his parents ensured that he and his two sisters played at least one musical instrument as a child. “We woke up to ragas emanating from our parents’ tanpura. That was our alarm clock,” he fondly reminisces.

“The strict academic background at home ensured that I followed the conventional route to a career,” he says. “Poetry is like fresh water and no one is going to pay for it. I knew I could never make a living out of selling poetry.” Sunshine Lanes, however, is on the bestseller list.

After his postgraduation in physics from Meerut, Joshi studied management at the Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Ghaziabad. “Working in the sales team of a company didn’t excite me. It was then that the magic world of advertising opened up for me. I realised that it would pay me for my creative ideas.” Joshi joined Ogilvy & Mather — and continues with the ad world even with one leg firmly entrenched in Bollywood.

It, however, took a few years for Joshi to fit into the advertising world. “Initially, I was an outcast who wasn’t from south Bombay or south Delhi. These were the people who were doing their job for fun but I had my needs. I had to fit in,” he emphasises. “Luckily, it was also a time when we needed to connect with the masses. But there was still this feeling that you were not like them — not having been brought up in south Delhi or south Bombay,” he adds.

Joshi stresses that he can never be a Sobo — as south Bombay is known in chic circles — man. “I am still the boy trekking in Almora,” he says. “And that’s perhaps why the only form of exercise I enjoy doing is trekking,” he smiles. “It was a free and trusting society where I grew up, nobody locked their houses. Today, the world has become less innocent. I feel bad for our children.”

Which could explain why he has been dealing with social campaigns with a fanatic’s zeal. At present, along with actor Aamir Khan, he is working on a series of short films on malnutrition, at the behest of the Prime Minister. He has also devised campaigns for pulse polio, the national literacy mission and the United Nation’s anti-poverty campaign.

His camaraderie with superstar Khan is well known. “Aamir and I gel well because we do not compromise on our work,” he says. Not surprisingly, some of his best works have been with Khan — from Rang De Basanti and Fanaa to Taare Zameen Par. He also wrote the songs for Khan’s much talked of TV show Satyamev Jayate.

So who is the real Joshi? The friend, the poet, the adman or the scriptwriter? At the end of the day, perhaps, he is still the boy in the hills, who thought of words while his grandma told him stories.