The Nano has arrived

It was with some anticipation that I waited for the birth of a baby conceived in the dreams of a man who, by most traditional reckoning should have stopped dreaming, nay, as the most critical of them all would say, stopped thinking altogether.

Not this man.

Ratan Tata, all of 70 years of wisdom, coupled with a persistence which in any other man, or if you didn't know better, feels so much like arrogance, went on about his business as if nothing else mattered more than to prove the critics wrong.

I remember a day not so long ago, when my father would ride his second hand Bajaj Super with me standing in front, ma holding my kid brother on her lap at the back and the eldest brother taking a bus ride so that we could attend a wedding about 50 Km away from our hometown, Ranchi.

Ratan Tata too remembered, and decided to do somthing about it, in the face of intense ridicule from experts of all kinds. Car manufacturers who were not taught anything about paradigm shifts, environmetalists to whom a single man sitting on a Chauffeur driven, filthily priced car with a fuel efficiency of 7-8 kms per hour is less of a pollutant than a family car, priced at a middle class affordability with Euro IV Norms at 20 Kms to a litre!!! How cheap can you get!

I remember that scooter ride, tears flowing down my cheeks because the wind was too cold and biting. I remember my brother taking that lonely bus ride, when he was all of 10 yrs, I think. I remember my mother and younger brother falling because the roads had humps the size of a minor mountain because some environment friendly guy in the PWD had decided to protect cattle on the road. Cattle which had no business being there anyway! I remember. The same way I will remember Ratan Tata for the rest of my life.

Cheers to you Sir!