Word: indianism
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...pictures of Diwali, the Pan-Indian festival of lights...
...Delhi in the early 1970s, my family traveled by scooter in the classic, death-defying Indian fashion. My father would drive, with me, a toddler, standing on the floorboard in front of him and my mother seated pillion, cradling my infant sister in her arms. My father was a civil engineer and my mother a nurse, and in India at that time, cars for a young family were far out of reach...
...More than 30 years later, I recently listened to Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company for the sprawling Indian conglomerate Tata Group, describe a family just like mine as the inspiration for the Nano, the ultra-cheap "people's car" that the Tata Group company Tata Motors launched on March 23. "What sparked it off was riding in a car and looking at them and saying, Surely there's a safer way that these people can be transported," he recalls. (See the 12 most important cars of all time...
...which has four doors and seats four adults, doesn't feel like a lightweight on the road. I drove one on an empty test track at Tata Motors' main plant in the western Indian city of Pune and found that, while the interior is spartan, the Nano handles as well as any of the other low-end minicars available in India. The brakes lack feel and there's little storage space, but the car turned heads. Our photographer drove a bright yellow Nano - this one fully equipped with air-conditioning - through the highways, cobbled avenues and side streets of Pune...
...Tata Troubles While the company seeks to redefine the low end of the market, Tata Motors is struggling with its attempt to gate-crash the luxury-car segment. Last year, the Indian carmaker made auto-industry waves when it spent $2.3 billion to buy Ford Motor's lossmaking Jaguar and Land Rover (JLR) business. Since then, demand for luxury vehicles has tanked, sales of Tata Motors other models have softened, and the company faces a looming deadline to refinance $2 billion in loans for the JLR deal. "That's a major cash-flow crunch for them," Jajoo says. The company...