Car lust in India

Siddhartha Deb has an op-ed piece in The New York Times about car ownership in India:

A man, whom I shall call 'J', showed up at my friend’s apartment one evening. My friend had warned me that J was dropping in to talk about hard times: he had lost his job heading a television channel, was going through a bitter divorce, and had been reduced to living with his parents. But, in spite of all this and the oppressive Delhi heat, J looked neat and composed. He began talking about problems with his wife, and his in-laws: “The first instance,” he began, “was the Ford Ikon they wanted to give me.”
I was struck by the fact that his first point of reference was a car— and an American model that would not have been available in India fifteen years ago. It brought to mind how the car had suddenly become emblematic of a new India that hoped to model itself on the United States, especially in the individualism, speed, and the liberation promised by the open road.
Until the mid-1990s, cars had been mainly available in two models in India: the unglamorous, onion-shaped, sturdy Ambassador and the more aerodynamic Maruti 800. Both were produced by state-run companies (though the latter had a partnership with the Japanese company Suzuki). But when India began to open its markets, a wide range of cars became available, just as rising middle-class incomes and cheap consumer credit made buying such cars feasible.
In many ways, the marriage between the Indian middle class and the automobile culture has been disastrous. Roads remain awful, drivers continue to be erratic, and traffic in cities like Delhi and Bangalore is worse than ever. And yet the car has become deeply enmeshed with upward mobility, while also complicating that mobility. In the India of the Ambassador and the Maruti, the distinction was largely between those who owned cars and those who did not. In the India of Ford, Fiat, Hyundai, and Mahindra— where there is even a very cheap indigenous model called the Tata Nano— distinctions are parsed in terms of the model one owns.
J’s in-laws had borrowed money to buy the car as a wedding gift, but it was really his wife who wanted it, and J, knowing that his in-laws weren’t wealthy, had refused it, insisting that his bride travel to the wedding in his more modest Maruti Zen. His wife, unlike him, had been— he hesitated before finding the right word— aspirational.
I saw that aspiration frequently as I traveled around India. Even before I met Arindam Chaudhuri, a management guru and Bollywood film producer (who has filed a defamation suit against me in India), I knew about the car he was chauffeured around in, a lavishly appointed Bentley Continental, its shade of blue matching the color of his designer suits. Chak, an engineer I interviewed in Bangalore who had lived in the United States for two decades, drove a Ford SUV.
When I penetrated, with difficulty, into the rural headquarters of a seed dealer in Andhra Pradesh— a man whose aspirational mansion had been burned down, either by rampaging farmers or by thugs dispatched by a rival seed dealer— he turned out to be partial to a white Toyota Innova. To me, it looked like a suburban minivan but, to him and his associates, the tinted windows and cloth-covered seats were glamorous.
For the lower classes, cars give way to other modes of transport. The Assamese security guards I met in a steel factory in Andhra Pradesh showed me a battered bicycle they had found on a scrap heap, and which they had fixed up so they could ride to the bazaar for supplies. They pedaled away in the shadow of the new highway connecting Bangalore and Hyderabad, its flashing electronic signboards warning drivers not to use cellphones.
Esther, a waitress in Delhi, perfectly captured the transition between the lower and upper strata. We were taking a taxi to her apartment when she remarked, wistfully, how she would like to have a car someday. She then told me a story about her father, a retired official in the northeastern state of Manipur, and the bicycle he rode, sometimes carrying Esther’s mother on the crossbar. “But she’s fat, and one day they fell down, and my mother got so mad at him that she said she would never ride on his bicycle again,” Esther said.
It was a romantic image, one made precious by old black-and-white Hindi films where the modest but upright hero cycles around, his love perched sideways on the connecting bar. It made me think of the bicycles I see everywhere in New York, the expensive models made for lone riders, as well as the ones with child seats of varying sizes and shapes, and I wondered if the Indian upper classes, in their very race to catch up with the West, weren’t falling behind yet again. I thought of the electric cars, of businesses like Zipcar, of car pools, and of the slowly emerging consciousness, even in the United States, about the limits imposed by the environment and the economy on cars.
But perhaps there is no such thing as just a car for aspirers. J certainly seemed to think so that evening as he told us the story of his failing marriage, recounting the vacations he took his wife on and the money he gave her and her family. Now, he said, she was accusing him and his relatives of harassment. She had claimed he was incapable of fulfilling his “marital duties”, a charge he denied indignantly. “She was aspirational, you know,” he said as his story wound down. “She told me she wanted a red Pajero.”
He was referring to the Mitsubishi SUVs much loved by the power elite in India. “I told her that, in time, maybe we could have a red Pajero.” But she had been unwilling to give him that time, and so they had gone down the road that led to the lawyers and the courts. He was writing a book about his experiences. He was aspirational, too, in his way. “I have already written sixty to seventy pages,” J said, picking up his watch from the table and strapping it on. “I am thinking of calling it The Red Pajero,” he said, laughing. “Maybe I could even get Mitsubishi to sponsor the book. It could be important. I think people will relate.”

Rico says this would be funnier if it weren't so pathetic... (But the Pajero is a cute little SUV.)