A fond look back at the car that forever changed the way India drove
All of us in Chanakya Puri knew the Pitts S-2A biplane, could pick the tiny speck out of the sky, ducked when the pilot flew a shade too close to the shallow rooftops or did a risky set of roll-and-dives over Palam Airfield. On that June day in Delhi, the insistent mosquito buzz of the biplane could be heard by the last of the morning walkers as it brushed the tops of the gulmohar and amaltas trees. It took a few seconds for us to register the sudden absence of sound, a pause that opened up and then never ended, that marked the end of the Sanjay Gandhi era.
And there was the chauffeur factor. In a country where you measured your importance by the distance between master and servant, the Maruti 800 forced an unruly democracy. It was built for families, for teenagers gingerly exploring this new concept called dating, for couples with the requisite two kids; the most comfortable seats were the driver and passenger seats in front, and those in the back had to put up with a certain amount of jouncing, especially when the speedometer crept past 80 kmph. Besides, a chauffeur-driven Maruti looked silly. It just did, and that forced a social change — it became slowly acceptable, even fashionable, for even senior bureaucrats and corporate chieftains to drive themselves. (This would reverse itself in a generation, when other car companies opened shop in India offering bigger, more luxurious saloons.)
(This story appears in the 28 August, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)