Not that bad after all

The TATA Nano will be on display in showrooms from All Fools Day, 2009. For an outright Nano critic like me, this announcement was the height of accidental irony. yeah right; they say it is safe an environmentally friendly and economical and all that. But it is gonna be made of chart paper and some glue for the kind of price tag it has and I don't see a point in every single car being kinder to the polar bears when you can possibly replace half the motorbikes on our city streets with it.

Besides it is quite an ugly looking thing, far from being an original (as touted by Dilip Chhabria; who in my view cannot design anything more subtle than Govinda's boots); a Mitsubishi i rip off; a populist slack of the UPA government; soon to be scourge of every city commuter. Soon we will all be in our nanos, sitting pretty and getting nowhere at all.
This morning though, there was a full page ad that appeared in TOI. Beautiful blue and green water coloured theme. Nice font I thought, with the tagline; 'Yes you can'. Bit of a rip off the ad as well, I thought. But for only one fleeting second I thought I could really see the other side of the argument. For the next second, I considered the possibility that this car could be pretty clever, and not just in a replace leather with foam kind of way. It could make every vehicle, right from the Honda Dio I have now to my future Aston, better.
For another second, I hoped that maybe when I drive it, the car WILL surprise me. That I will go in with my nose pinched and I just might come out a fan. I am not so sure, but this car can be the Indian car industry's first 'look at what we made' moment.
Agreed the advertisement, like the car, was a bit of a rip off. But it was good enough to let me see something I'd rather not. The world of reality is too often not as good as the world of imagination. Lets just hope this time around, it isn't.

All the best to you, tiny car.