The 1 Lakh Tata car and the how-many-ever lakh Scorpio mHawk

Two car stories today:

One more article in the Hindu today regarding the Tata's 1Lakh car. Ratan Tata brushed off a question of the environmental impact of a horde of new cars on the road saying that it will be one of the greenest of cars.
For some time now I have been whining to my wife that I want to get out of B'lore and relo to a saner place. In general greenies like me complain a lot about how things are so bad and what with climate change things will get worse and so on. But in actuality we don't do so much. Probably because the concerns are at the level of the mind and don't go deep into the consciousness. But reading about the 1 Lakh car ought to get anyone not just a greenie into a panic. Can you imagine making cars purchasable to some multiple (say 2 or 3) of people who have the purchasing power to buy a car right now ? Anybody with any sense will retreat to the hills. I will mark the date for the release of the 1 Lakh car on my calendar and plan my escape (where to, is a whole other matter).

There is a elitist perspective in the above ('I-drive-a-car {though one getting a little seedy at this point}, and-I-don't-want-the-great-unwashed-to-do-the-same), but clearly that's not the point. If cars can be made cheaper, that is by itself okay. The problem is of course the inadequacy of the infrastructure. So we have an interesting problem of economics here where so far it is the pricing aspect that have kept the roads motorable. Now that barrier is being torn down. The right economic solution would therefore be to allow cars to be priced at whatever the manufacturers can price them, but to make buying a car a lottery kind-of-thing simply because the roads cannot manage the load. You have to wait for your turn to buy a car. What say ?

The other thing in today's Hindu was a full page for a new Scorpio, the mHawk. You can see some of their collateral at mahindrascorpio.com. I automatically (I'm proud to say) looked for any green features and found absolutely none. I got irritated enough to shoot off a feedback at their website, conveying my peeve. I encourage you to do the same to build pressure on them. Besides the basic stupidity of their car, there is the additional stupidity of an ad that is like a dinosaur while everyone else is chattering about global warming. (What, you aren't ?)

For a while, I've had a great deal of congnitive dissonance with the real estate ads in the papers and billboards. On one side, the ads are nice and attractive and I feels like buying one of the fancy places and feel envious of those who can afford one. At the same time, I used to have a real uncomfortable feeling which I was not able to pin down. It had something to do with the paradox of terrible urban infrastructure and crowding and the contrast with the fancy picture of these ads. And also that there are so many green things that one can do in building houses and apts and none of these people do them. So I end up wondering if I am the stupid-ass unrealistic idiot and should I get with it. And then one day it struck me -- absolutely not ! These bozos spend so much money on doing all kinds of fancy things in the apartments and they can't apply themselves to do the most basic green stuff. They should all be kicked on their ass, and as soon as I build up a critical mass of right-thinking followers, I will do just that.

H-Dog OUT !!!

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