From icons to relics

Imagine we were back in the 1980s and you asked me to offer odds if you bet that the Ambassador would disappear from India’s roads.

“A hundred to one,” I would have said, laughing heartily.

At that time, one couldn’t think of India without the Ambassador, a vehicle that had ruled our roads for half a century. If owning a car itself was a luxury, owning an Ambassador – the vehicle used by ministers and secretaries, commissioners and generals, executives and tycoons – was an unabashed statement of wealth and prestige. If you were lucky to be born into an Ambassador-owning family, you probably rode the same car to kindergarten, high school and college. Thrift, that majestic Indian virtue, did not reduce with wealth. If anything, the rich had more possessions to practise frugality, using their toothbrush even after its bristles were puffed out like broccoli and employing the same refrigerator for two decades (hopefully changing the food inside more frequently). The Ambassador, with a sturdy engine sitting in a bulbous body of steel, was built for endurance (if for little else). Repairs were cheaply carried out by hundreds of roadside mechanics using inexpensive – if somewhat dubious – spare parts.

But you’d have won the bet. Today the Ambassador is a non-entity. 7,500 Ambassadors were sold in 2009, less than 0.5% of the 1.8 million car market (Honda sells 5,000 City cars every month).

Finding Church Bollywood

I was surprised to read in The New York Times recently that many Indian tourists are visiting Switzerland, accounting for 325,000 hotel nights annually. The article opened with the story of a couple from Mumbai travelling there for their honeymoon.

Switzerland is of course an age-old tourist destination. People flock there to breathe the clear cold air, soak in the beauty of its pristine mountains and gaze at the majestic banks holding much of the world’s not-so-pristine money. Skiing enthusiasts zoom down Switzerland’s snow-laden hills for a week and rave about it for a year. Food lovers dig into popular Swiss dishes like sauerkraut and fondue.

But these don’t appear to be attractions that would attract Indians. The prospect of a cold holiday – rendered colder by sliding down mountains at high speed – leaves us cold. If we want to see buildings that are stacked with cold, hard cash, we can walk along Juhu in Mumbai or Raj Path in Delhi. As far as food is concerned, we’re unlikely to be enticed by sauerkraut and fondue; when we travel abroad, we carry our own food (along with utensils to cook it). And we can simply appreciate the beauty of Switzerland’s mountains and gardens by watching a Bollywood movie.