Forget Sonia, Italy has a new Gandhi connection

After the opening shots, the film cuts to a series of recreated scenes from the 1940s, realistic, but full of anachronism: crowds thronging Times Square to watch Gandhi on a giant LCD screen, a couple watching the broadcast on their mobile phone, people on streets listening to the speech on headsets, even tribals glued to laptops.

The advertisement closes with the message that flashes on the screen: ‘‘Imagine the world today, if he could have communicated like this.’’ The spot by Young and Rubicam, Milan won the EPICA 2004 award Europe’s premier creative prize for excellence in advertising few week ago.

The sound excerpts used came from Gandhi’s speech at the Inter-Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi where the Mahatma spoke about Asia conquering the West through the message of love.

‘‘Did I believe in one world? Of course, I believe in one world. And how can I possibly do otherwise, when I become an inheritor of the message of love that these great unconquerable teachers left for us?’’ Gandhi says in the speech made on April 2, 1947. The excerpts in the advertisement have been cut and pasted in the context of communication for the advertising.

An Alcatel commercial that turned Martin Luther King Jr into a pitchman and his famous ‘Have a Dream’ speech into glib sales talk a few years ago had touched the raw nerve of several African-Americans.

In the advertisement, King Jr was shown speaking to an empty mall while a voice-over informed the viewer:‘‘Before you can inspire, before you can touch, you must first connect. And the company that connects more of the world is Alcatel, a leader in communication networks.’’

If Alcatel had hired George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic to remix King’s revered ‘‘Dream’’ speech, Telecom Italia through Young and Rubicam hired Spike Lee, one of the industry’s best brains, to direct the spot.