"You really don't want to wait too long for the car, because it is like waiting for a pretty woman - you wait for too long and she becomes fat and old," he said.
-- Mr Ratan Tata at the launch of the Nano, as quoted in today's Hindustan Times.
And fat old women exist just to look after the rest of us, not to have any self-respect of their own, n'est-ce pas?
8 comments:
Lighten up Sunil, don't you have a sense of humour?
(This comment is posted by myself in alter-ego mode).
I might have said that to you in another context (I believe I did ;-) ) but not in the present one. After his tasteless and self-obsessed comments after 26/11, it's difficult to respect Ratan Tata any more and pretend that he is different from the other billionaires of our country.
Oh my! Mr. Tata has not consulted the mirror in many a year, nor been with his relatives, near and dear. This much is crystal clear!
or they may end up looking like Mr.tata :)
Rahul, which 26/11 comments of Ratan Tata are you talking of ? I dont remember taking offense during that time :)
Ramanan: I had a blog post on this which gives some links so you can look at that. I must say I found him seriously deficient in the human element.
Thanks Rahul for the link. However I have as much apathy for him as before. What I mean to say is that I wasnt too surprised that he didnt thank anyone etc. I remember - when he introduced the Nano the first time, long back, he started saying "it was traumatic" and all that. Total lies. His comfort will not go down whatever losses the Tatas claim to be making in the first few years.
Ramanan: I think that's not totally fair. When an industrialist describes himself as "traumatised" over achieving some goal for his company, it's obviously not in the sense that he'll have to go without food or shelter if things fail. The tension of getting things to work out can still be genuinely traumatic - just as for me it would be traumatic if I failed to complete a research paper I'd been working on. Here too my comfort, in physical terms, would not go down.
Getting back to the original point of my blog posting, uI can't help quoting a nice letter published in today's Hindustan Times: "This refers to the comment by Ratan Tata comparing Nano with the life of a woman, which was highly patriarchal and sexist in nature. Not only did it reduce women to commodities, but also exposed the industrialist's outlook on females. Who says money teaches you everything?"
-- Gautam Navlakha
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