I was there!

You've seen the pictures of the car, but I'll be posting some images of the madness that ensued before and after the launch. It is a miracle I managed to shove my way inside while fists and abuses were thrown at the entrance into the press conference and while going in a Vaishnavi (Tata's PR company) rep managed to tell me that there were some 1100 journalists inside. I have never seen so many cameras or camerapersons in my life, and if I ever thought that people whose job it is capturing images worked in wolf packs, today was the day.

About the car, it is rather cute and I will reserve judgement until I drive one, but I will admit that it is a fantastic piece of engineering. I don't know how much money Tata Motors will make on the car, but that is a question for another day. About Sunita Narain and R K Pachauri's comments on congestion and pollution, while valid stink of elitism I am afraid. People will protest against this car, but they should instead go after factories, after diesel generator sets and so much more. The problem with Indian greenies is that by protesting against the wrong things, they tend to lose goodwill. Remind me to cancel my subscription to Greenpeace. Don't go after people's aspirations guys, you lose goodwill. Tell people to consume more smartly, and tell our government to spend more wisely and not allow unfettered development, but mobility and communications are the wrong things to go after.

To quote Mr Tata on the Indian consumer...

"... he will aspire for more and as prosperity improves, that aspiration will be there for more and more people, suddenly it seems like that there is a quarter of our society that seems to grudge those people that improvement in quality of their lives based on inadequate infrastructure, based on pollution, based on congestion and you wonder if that part of society has the right to determine for the rest of society..."

By the way, really liked RNT's bit where he thanked the West Bengal government and he came this close to calling Mamata names. And also, I wonder if Apple Computer will sue Tata on the 'Nano' brand, but the Tata's are a big group so they would have gone through the legal issues.

Anyway, here are some of the promised pics and guys chill out on the pro and anti 9X talk. I have some interesting stuff on the new Triveni channel tomorrow.

The crowd at the launch, though a majority were journalists, there were also suppliers and other officials. In fact, the entire Tata group was there in strength.

The car on display, this is the standard version, no AC or radio and with a sticker price of Rs 1,00,000 which translates to Rs 1,30,000 on-road in Delhi, a 70K

The press conference hall was full of desi and non-desi journos!

Debasis Ray, Tata Motors PR chief conducts the press conference.

I am so not looking forward to the 10th!

You see on the tenth, Mr Ratan Naval Tata will unveil his legacy. And while car launches can tend to become a abuse hurling match between still photographers and videographers, Mr Tata can rest assured that short of a major political assassination, the 'one-lakh' car or as the international media calls it the $2,500 car (from the $2,000 car it was 18 months ago) willbe splashed across every single front page. Even though The Economic Times carried a 'supposed' mock-up with an awfully high waistline and looking like a squashed Zen Estilo, it is unlikely that anyone will get an exclusive. But you never know.
All I do is that I will have to wrestle around the crowd on the 10th and it is going to be mad. Pictures will be posted here!

Plus I have been told that despite being critical sometimes I exude too much confidence in my own industry when PR hacks are trying to take over. I don't quite know how to answer that, I could start with the usual blah blah that news is changing, but I would assume the one reason that I am optmistic is because news consumers have more choice than ever before. The problem, as with Indian democracy, is quite simple, people don't always exercise good choices and vote for people with regressive, tribal policies, and I mean Lalu and Mulayam.
This post from last week spoke about bad choices - the people of Gujarat had to either choose between a sycophantic local press, which at least had an ear to the ground or Delhi's news channels which sent dumb bimbettes to Gujarat who found stories to fit their preconcieved notions of Gujarat (and NDTV was particularly culpable), quite blissfully forgetting the fact that the citizens of the place really liked the wide, smooth roads their Innova was travelling on.
Fair enough, sitting in our ivory towers in the capital it is quite easy to pontificate. But we miss the dichotomy of India between highly-educated upper middle-class urbanites and the traditional non-Metro middle-classes, let alone the dichotomy between rich and poor India. Until you talk to these people, you won't haver a clue what goes on their minds - and the fact of the matter is that in many parts of the country, these people will probably vote BJP. Instead they're being constantly fed Congress drivel.
The Internet has been touted as a saviour. But the story is quite interesting over there as well, and we will get to that in a future post. Before I end, I was tiold recently that I was considered 'left wing', and I really did not know whether to feel insulted or humoured. I mean seriously...