Authority on wheels

Is it the end of the road for Ambassador? It may well be, if the reported move to change the oldest rule of the road for government office...

Is it the end of the road for Ambassador? It may well be, if the reported move to change the oldest rule of the road for government officers goes through. Not everyone can contemplate with a light heart the proposal of the Ministry of Heavy Industry to promote Maruti of all makes in government offices. Not certainly anyone to whom the antediluvian automobile would already appear a fit case for national nostalgia. Consider. Whole generations of Indians have grown up and passed into history without even hypothesising the advent of any other car in the country.

It was the same lumbering jalopy that lorded it over all our motorable roads through long decades, and without letting any upstartish, callow innovator interfere with its ancient design in any considerable detail. The challenge came at last but, even as the first Marutis rolled on to the road, few still anticipated the fate in store for the chariot of record fuel inefficiency. Like everything, it had to come to an end the Age of Ambassador, the Rath Yatra after the Raj, the post-independence and pre-quot;people8217;s carquot; twilight of undiversified automobile traffic.

Hope was, however, not lost for the last of the monopoly-built mounts for the powers-that-be. The Ambassador might become an uncommon sight elsewhere so did its diehard admirers comfort themselves but not on the pathways of the powerful. The hope is in danger of being belied by the ministry8217;s move. The tacit assumption is that government officers would prefer a more functional transport. The assumption behind the assumption is that the Ambassador would cease to be valued as a symbol, a vehicle of authority.

The bureaucrats might indeed fancy better comfort, but would they do without stateliness as well?

The Ambassador had never failed to entertain the nation, but it made a solemn presence and point, too. Product of an imported plant of acknowledged obsoleteness even in its heyday, the car produced its own corpus of jokes and yet commanded respect as a manifestation of state-protected monopoly and static authority.

It may have been marvelled at as a sum of parts, all of which made sounds except the horn, but it was also extended wide public recognition as a sign of a not widely popular establishment. Some may snigger at the continuing export of some of the ol8217; beauties for their vintage value, but no laughing matter has been the loyalty the brand has enjoyed despite everything among the bureaucracy that a bold ministry now seeks to convert to a more contemporary driving culture. The Ambassador may have failed in its efforts to repackage itself as the quot;family carquot; better suited to Indian conditions such as the size of families?, but an alternative to it as the automobile of authority has yet to be found.

Will Maruti make it? It may not exactly have proved to be the quot;people8217;s carquot; that it was billed as in those days when Ambassador8217;s place in the Indian city traffic did not seem seriously threatened. Will the ministry8217;s drive to sell the younger car to government offices do, without Maruti matching the efforts by modifying itself for an appropriately dignified passage through corridors of power? Can there be Ambassadorisation of automobiles of other makes on the political analogy of Congressisation of other political parties?