AP Gandhi at home next to a spinning wheel, which looms in the foreground as a symbol of India's struggle for independence

Monday, April 13, 1998
A thin Indian man with not much hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black-and-white photograph takes up a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full color, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there's a slangily American injunction to "Think Different." Such is the present-day power of international Big Business. Even the greatest of the dead may summarily be drafted into its image ad campaigns. Once, a half-century ago, this bony man shaped a nation's struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Now Gandhi is modeling for Apple. His thoughts don't really count in this new incarnation. What counts is that he is considered to be "on message," in line with the corporate philosophy of Apple.

	David Ben-Gurion Ho Chi Minh Winston Churchill Mohandas Gandhi Mikhail Gorbachev Adolf Hitler Martin Luther King Ayatullah Khomeini V.I. Lenin Nelson Mandela Pope John Paul II Ronald Reagan Eleanor Roosevelt Franklin D. Roosevelt Teddy Roosevelt Margaret Thatcher Unknown Rebel Margaret Sanger Lech Walesa Mao Zedong Categories Artists/Entertainers Builders/Titans Scientists/Thinkers Heroes/Icons

The advertisement is odd enough to be worth dissecting a little. Obviously it is rich in unintentional comedy. M.K. Gandhi, as the photograph itself demonstrates, was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suit, the plowed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he would almost certainly have found it abhorrent. The very term word processor, with its overly technological ring, is unlikely to have found favor.

"Think Different." Gandhi, in his younger days a sophisticated and Westernized lawyer, did indeed change his thinking more radically than most people do. Ghanshyam Das Birla, one of the merchant princes who backed him, once said, "He was more modern than I. But he made a conscious decision to go back to the Middle Ages." This is not, presumably, the revolutionary new direction in thought that the good folks at Apple are seeking to encourage.

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