Never Mind the Bullocks (24 page)

Whereas the Nano encapsulated this within engineering, other entrepreneurs around the country were exercising the same principle in different arenas. He cited the example of Dr Devi Shetty, who was performing open-heart surgery in Bengaluru for less than $2,000. ‘That's a classic case of the you-do-not-have-an-option principle,' Reuben said. ‘You can price it at $100,000, but there aren't going to be any patients. You have to price it at something that people can afford. So you are forced to innovate.'

Frugal engineering is currently quite a buzzword in India. It seemed to make sense, the way the country's economy was developing, that industries would be focusing on bringing down the costs of manufacturing and services in order to target the millions of households who were emerging into the arena of expendable incomes and aspirations. Most of the hype surrounding the Nano in the run-up to its launch wasn't centred on the fact that it was set to be the cheapest car in the world, but rather that its price had been fixed
impossibly
cheap. How could a car be sold for £1,000 and still leave its producers in profit?

The story goes that the price itself was a bit of an accident. It emerged at a press conference with Ratan Tata back in 2002 when he announced plans for a new low-cost car. Journalists pressed the CEO for a figure, which he declined to disclose, given that the project had hardly entered the first phase. Determined to fix a price, one journalist asked whether one lakh rupees would
be a viable target, to which Mr Tata responded guardedly that yes, it might be possible. The story that hit the headlines the next day was that Tata was set to launch the one-lakh car, a fact that hadn't been confirmed. But instead of calling the papers to correct the error, Ratan Tata decided to go with it and set one lakh rupees as the price target for his new car.

All around India, those headlines must have been read with gasps of incredulity. How could it be possible to manufacture a car for so little? The Maruti 800, at the time India's most affordable car, was priced at more than double that. Would this new car be half a Maruti? And what would that look like?

At Tata HQ, the team that had been assembled to realize this seemingly impossible task started off by thinking quite laterally. They referred to the auto-rickshaw. A brand new Bajaj three-wheeler cost about three-quarters of a lakh; it seemed that with the remaining budget they might just be able to tack on an extra wheel and carve out a bit more storage space. In fact, the first drafts of the Nano did indeed resemble a four-wheel tuk-tuk. The golf-cart concept slowly evolved into a more glorified version, which eventually developed into something that looked like a car, pushed at every step by Ratan Tata, who had a very personal stake in creating the vehicle. His vision was that the Nano be a bona fide car with competitive specs that met national safety requirements, not some comedy buggy to be ridiculed on the roads.

The Nano's exterior came to resemble a car. Its architects – a group of engineers that eventually swelled to 500 in number, led by promising young engineer Girish Wagh – dispensed with the original roll-down plastic curtains and rickshaw-style tarpaulin roofing, and instead gave it a steel finish and glass windows. All through the process, the Maruti 800 was used as the benchmark for the minimum standards of performance that the Nano had to live up to, and preferably exceed. Size was
one aspect in which the team excelled: the Nano turned out to be a few centimetres shorter than its competitor, but with 21% more space on the inside.
²⁹
The story goes that the drive for increased interior space was largely fuelled by Ratan Tata's own considerable size: the six-foot chairman was keen that tall people should not feel cramped inside the small car and that he himself would be able to emerge nimbly from the vehicle at the time of its launch.
³⁰
The fact that the team had decided to place the engine at the back also proved a big saver – when an engine is located at the rear, the drive shafts do not need as many joints and so are much simpler and cheaper to produce – while the tubeless tyres made the car lighter and perkier on the roads.
³¹

However, the engine still left a lot to be desired. Designers had been experimenting with low-cost motors sourced externally, but since not one engine fitted the stringently tight bill, it was concluded that Tata would make its own one using only a few third-party components. This brought the price down considerably, and along with various other alterations to individual parts, the car was finally able to go on the market for the promised one lakh. The gamble had paid off hugely for Ratan Tata, who marked his own massive boldness at the car's launch with the tagline ‘A promise is a promise'.

‘Fancy a shot?' Reuben raised an inquisitive eyebrow as he flashed me a glance of the vodka bottle he had stowed in a messenger bag. He had to shout to make himself heard over the twangy beats of the music that was wafting across the lawns in celebration of the latest wave of graduations. It turned out I had hit the college at an auspicious time, two days before the class of 2010 would get its round of diplomas and be unleashed
on a country ripe for the well-trained entrepreneurial minds this institution had nurtured. The Future of Education in India was on the brink of becoming the Future of India, and it would not be long before it was India's reality. These happy few were set to be the ones to push their country's economy further onto the global stage to new heights, and I had little doubt they would succeed – but how would they do it? Social responsibilities like the eradication of poverty were high on their professor's agenda, if not also their own, but at what cost would these changes take place? Would Reuben and his students really have the villages bulldozed and cities megapolized in the name of progress and economic expansion? With what degree of sensitivity would the new economic order handle the remains of centuries of tradition, undesirable as they sometimes might have been? I guess what I was really getting at was, were these guys the goodies or the baddies?

‘Hey, Reuben,' I asked, over our third shot of Absolut Ruby Red, ‘so you like the Nano, right?'

‘Damn right, it's pretty cool.'

‘So, would you ever think about actually buying one for yourself?'

‘No way, man!' he cackled rakishly in a way that made it hard to know if he was serious or not. ‘I don't own a car! I'm pretending to be carbon neutral.'

On a dark, moonless night, the day after I had left Hyderabad, I pulled into what I hoped – but had no means of proving – was the deserted, locked-up and turned-in-for-the-night village of Nagarjuna Sagar.

An hour and a half before midnight is a relatively chipper time in India's larger cities, with vendors, rickshaws and late-night diners still going about their business under the yellow glow of halogen streetlights. But nights in rural India are a different situation altogether. It's hands down the darkest darkness I've seen: a menacing blackness; an empty, closed-down, boarded-up void. I drove up and down several roads emanating from the main square and could see nothing in the way of the hotel the guidebook assured me should be there. Was I even in the right place? I consulted Delilah, the sum of whose visual information on this area was a thick yellow line on a white background that gave no quarter to the surrounding side streets or even the name of the village. I checked my phone, but there was no signal. The only person available for directions was an inebriated lorry driver contemplating the stars from a curious position underneath his steering wheel.

My options were limited, and for the first time since setting out from Mumbai, I realized that bedding down with Abhilasha might be my only choice that night, a thought tinged a deep shade of dread. Although my direct experience so far had been entirely to the contrary, most people I encountered seemed to be of the unshakeable opinion that a single female on a solo road trip was a brutal assault and murder waiting to happen. It was by no means an outrageous perspective: women on India's roads do face some very real dangers. Kidnappings and carjackings are more likely to happen to female targets, as are the risks of falling prey to police impersonators and sexual predators. General advice ran along the
lines of keeping a can of pepper spray to hand and practising general good sense, like not stopping to withdraw thousands of rupees from a deserted ATM in the middle of the night.

My own attitude to safety was light prudence (I opted for hair-spray rather than pepper spray and made sure I always had at least a vague idea of where I'd be staying the following night) combined with pragmatism based on statistical likelihood. It was a stance that allowed me to breathe easy most of the time. But plans would oft go awry, journeys would take significantly longer than anticipated, and before I knew it I was a potential victim in my own Hammer Horror scenario – like this night in Nagarjuna Sagar.

Courage, Thunderbolt: if the truck driver could sleep at the wheel, then so could I (my lack of a quart of Bagpiper notwithstanding). I pulled up at the side of the road and switched off Abhilasha's lights to test the situation. We were thrown into darkness. I forced a yawn to simulate relaxing, then pushed back the seat and wound down the backrest to see just how peaceful a position this could be. I curled up on my side and tried to extend my legs over to the passenger seat without impaling them on the gearstick. About a minute of murky discomfort passed before my imagination began to twitch. It started with an eerie feeling that someone was watching me through the window, and very quickly amplified to a roll call of the cast of every horror movie I had ever watched. Opening my eyes, I saw nothing but a profusion of shadows, one of which I was convinced belonged to that dwarf from
Twin Peaks
who has been a regular fixture of my more wobbly moments since I first encountered him in my early teens. I winced and turned the lights back on, full beam this time, in order to dispel the last of the demons.

Sleeping in the car was not going to be an option. I reached for my phone to dial Thor's number, but there was still no signal. Besides, I reasoned with myself, what could he really have done for me right now, except maybe stay on the phone until sunrise?

All that remained, I thought as tears welled up in my eyes and a childish despair gripped my throat, was to be brutally murdered by the sleeping truck driver who was bound to wake up at any moment.

This disagreeable thought coincided with the sudden appearance of an actual face at my window. I shrieked as I saw a pair of dark eyes looking in, framed by copious dreadlocks and bundles of beads, and it took me a few seconds to register that I was looking at a tall, half-naked sadhu – a wandering mendicant. I exhaled and wound down the window an inch, praying he was a good and true sadhu and not one of the fake ones I'd heard about who would spike tourists' tea with opium and then rob them for every penny they had. The man, who I now noticed was also sporting an impressive collection of homemade tattoos that with any luck were not occult symbols of bloodlust, was quickly joined by a group of five ladies so intricately adorned with beads, piercings and coloured headgear that I concluded they had to be tribal women.

Hilarity ensued as I rolled the window down further and enquired whether anyone spoke English. Piled on top of the wave of insecurity that had gripped me, the women's feral laughter deepened my fear and triggered irrational thoughts of cannibalistic tribes roaming the barren lands of Andhra Pradesh at night in search of fresh meat for the village pot.

‘Um… hotel?' I blathered, trying to banish images of myself on a slowly rotating spit.

More laughter. Cackles, even. The sadhu stepped forward and held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

‘No English!'

What did he mean by that? Was he trying to communicate his ineptitude with the British tongue, or was he expressing some morose local prohibition of my nationality? The women kept on laughing as I hastily rolled up the window and launched Abhilasha forward around a corner from where, incredibly, partially obscured
by a large set of gates and some trees, I spied the celestial words ‘Nagarjuna Resort'.

The resort was a drab concrete block, but never had drab concrete appeared so beautiful in my eyes. As I pulled into the car park, a light came on from inside the building and a couple of guys emerged bleary-eyed from the entrance with a small dog called Puppy in tow. I wanted to embrace them all, restraining myself at the last minute out of a sense of social decorum and a desire not to contract fleas from the persistently scratching Puppy.

One of the lads proudly showed me to a room that was unequivocally the least-inviting accommodation I had witnessed on the trip so far. I spotted a few ant-like bugs crawling over the off-white sheet on the bed; mysterious clumps of black hair lay like dead rats on the bathroom floor. The constant sound of running water from an unseen source could be heard from every corner of the room, while the curtains and other random bits of upholstery around the place bore stains suggestive of bodily fluids gone a-scatter. Worst of all was the apple of the hotel guy's eye, the fridge-sized air-conditioning unit wedged into the far wall, which contained enough black dusty
Legionella pneumophila
-infested crud along its ventilation panel to wipe out an entire foreign regiment. My stomach turned in anguish, but my brain stepped to the fore: this was a one-village lake and a one-hotel village, and my choice was to spend a night in the company of bed bugs and bloodstains or to sleep in the bottomless darkness of a sweltering car with one hand on my keys and the other around my can of hairspray.