My first Mac!

In the days before the candy coloured iMacs and iBooks, or for that matter, anything in the Apple lineup that started with the letter "i", there was the Power PC. The Mac was a completely niche product, and Apple was viewed as being a dying brand worldwide. Back home in Dubai, Jumbo was making a huge splash with it's tie up with IBM, and I still remember the advertisement that had been released to announce the partnership- a big, blue elephant, signifying the meeting of the "big blue" (IBM) with Jumbo's unofficial mascot. You can then imagine my father's surprise (and displeasure) when I came home one day and asked him for an Apple computer. I had been interning at an ad agency during my holidays in Dubai, learning things like Freehand and Photoshop, and was convinced my creative juices could only be tickled into flowing on a Mac and thus had to have one. For weeks much begging ensued, till the Art Director at the agency gave me an idea. Thinking like a typical adman, he told me to give a pitch to my father and SHOW him why I needed the Mac rather than just saying, "iWant!"I then went to work on an old Apple ad showing father and son, and replaced it with the faces of my father and I. Despite the shoddy photoshop job (shown below) my point was made and my battle, won. And that's how, in 1997, I got my first ever Mac whom I christened "Gianni" after my favourite designer of that time. The real Gianni is long gone, but I've been unable to part with his namesake, the ad or the memory of my sweet success ever since.