When Air India gave Dali a baby elephant for an ashtray

Before Air India became a cautionary tale of mismanagement, it was the gold standard of global aviation. It was a flying ambassador of India’s charm, wit, and impossible flamboyance. In the 1960s and 70s, this wasn’t just an airline. It was a cultural artefact, a brand that understood spectacle before Instagram, and surrealism before social media.

Here’s a story that sounds so bizarre, and made up, it will shock you.

Air India wanted an ashtray for its first-class cabins. (Yeah, smoking was allowed on flights.) This was an era when the airline’s in-flight experience was designed like a Wes Anderson movie: curated and oddly intimate. So naturally, they approached Salvador Dalí to design one. Yes, the Salvador Dalí.

And Dalí said yes.

The story is so fantastic, it just creates its surrealistic canvas. The ashtray, the legend, and everything that comes with this are captured in Bangalore’s own, National Gallery of Modern Art. (For anyone who says Bangalore does not have much to do, please visit the Gallery)

What followed was classic Dalí: a surreal, coiled serpent motif wrapped around a dish, both menacing and glamorous. It’s supported by two elephant heads, and a swan. If you flip it over, the elephant heads become swans, and the swan becomes an elephant. It’s a delightfully over-engineered product. We stared at it for a while, and marvelled at how this whole episode came to be.

When Air India asked Dalí for his fee, he didn’t ask for money. He asked for a baby elephant.

A… what again…?

A baby goddamn elephant!

Imagine pitching that today. “We’re commissioning a surrealist icon to design an ashtray. He wants an elephant. Should we do it?” The “procurement” team would have a cardiac event.

But this was an airline that had Pierre Cardin designing crew uniforms, actual miniature paintings in passenger kits and so much more! It turned its Maharajah mascot into a global character, full of mischief and quiet satire. (all captured in the gallery in all its fantastical glory, and some very questionable ones at that)

Of course they sent Dalí the elephant. Shipped all the way from India to Spain.

I can’t even begin to articulate how insane this is. Or how cool this is. Or… what in the world are we doing as brand custodians?! This was in 1966! Where is the fantastic? Where is the bizarre? We have templatised marketing to its absolute average.

There was a time we didn’t just “target consumers,” but seduced them.

Air India gave us a blueprint to build personality. And I guess the most effective brief went something like, “Make it memorable. Make it weird.” Sounds inch-perfect to me, in a world with dwindling attention spans, and the need for quick-fix dopamine hits.

No performance metrics. No brand safety guidelines. No six-slide decks on ROI. Just one iconic artist, one audacious airline, and a shared understanding: this is going to be fun, strange, and unforgettable.

Would I want to send a baby elephant to a surrealist painter as a modern brand activation? Probably not. But would I trade ten polished influencer campaigns for a fantastical story like this?

Every single time.