This Week's Driving - Jan 23rd, 2000 - Log 16

Hola! The other day my taxi driver taking me from home to the airport asked me if making a web-page for their taxi stand was a good idea, people would call for cabs on the Internet. Cost- Rs 3000/- with maintenance of Rs 300/- per month. In the aircraft, the business magazines placed so tantalisingly in the Business Class you avoid while entering, waiting to be pilfered by coach type entrepreneurs, scream about forthcoming billions, and the ads for assorted cyberspace related seminars take your breath away by their sheer audacity. As I get towards Pune in the train from VT, sorry, CST, all I see from outside the window is training institutes. Headlines in the Pune Times talk about a training institute scam where students teach other! Dream time on easy street, India, right?

And then I head for our own little software export set-up, tucked away quietly in a leafy backstreet in one of Pune's most conservative localities, where hard-working young men and women would work 24 hours a day 7 days a week if we didn't force them to shut office and take a break. The only dream they have is based on sheer improvement of their own technologies and their own selves. This one is for you, people. The sloggers of the earth, who will always inherit.

Big buzz on e-commerce is that you cannot take a ride on a plane, in a taxi or even walk along the streets without bumping into solution providors and starry eyed sellers of dot-com dreams. The bigtime magazines, the same ones that pushed teak plantation and holiday resorts, and their cousins, the newspapers with the eye on the dot-com ad budget, are no better. If you read some of the moronic articles coming out lately on projections, it will sound as though we are all going to make a front-end web-page for 300 rupees (about 6 dollars) and install a one-way slot machine at home which will always ring. With hard cash dropping on our laps so that we can all go and buy those little big cars.

Therefore, we at cybersteering.com have dreamt up the ultimate dot-com site which we will soon launch, and are passing the idea around, so that all of you can buy those snazzy jalopies. This is how it goes:-

>> First we register a site and call it, say, hubcapsindia.com. 70 dollars please, for two years.

>> Next we start selling hubcaps on them without any sales tax, excise, or records.

>> Third we hire all the urchins in the country to flick all the hubcaps they can find and throw them back at sub-agents of hubcapsindia.com

>> Fourth, ofcourse, we resell all the hubcaps by placing sales agents with palmtops at busy traffic crossings.

>> Fifth we go public in Hyderabad and Ranchi.

>> Sixth we ask our New Jersey vaale auntie to tie up with our neighbour's Canada vaale uncle and find a town called "Silicon Valley", having located same on a borrowed road atlas, we launch a company there. Or anywhere.

>> Seventh we go public again, but add automobile radio antennae to the product list.

>> Eighth we tie up, globally, with roadsidegolgappa.com

>> Ninth we go to Bahamas on holiday in Bermudas, while you serve golgappas on hubcaps.

>> Tenth, Bahamas is not in Bermudas, a bit long of the shorts, though.

The dot-com dreams or nightmares that we are going through in India are amazing! We are software people running a motoring site as a hobby, and we know better than many people that this is a 7 day a week, 24 hour a day, hot black coffee and cold hard roti kind of business. We know that there is no fully secure 100% guaranteed transactional software for financial moves across the board on the Net as yet. And yet, especially with motoring sites in India, the earth is being promised?

Oh well!! We live on, this is a motoring editorial, remember? Buy shares in cheaperpetrolindia.com . . . soon to follow the astounding success of hubcapsindia.com

The Auto Expo-2000 is over, most of the big-time motoring journalists and editors advanced their travel plans and left before it was over, a million people came and looked at shorter skirts and horny cabarets, there was no new technology on display except the electric three-wheelers and some gas conversions. But it was great fun. We saw a lot of colour, song and dance, and a lot of "kulture". The automobile component industry, especially, is where we saw the maximum potential, and even though we are now cyber-people, if I was equity kind of people, I would put my money on this sector. About time the component guys got their act together and put up a serious fair of their own instead of playing spare wheel to the manufacturers.

Our advice to the component industry:- take lessons from the IT industry, strike out on your own, and the big guys will come knocking to your doors. There are many of us who went around your stalls quietly, saw how you, the providors of the nuts and bolts and much, much more, have improved your product, technology and most importantly packaging. Here is a salute to ACMA, then, their association.

We also had our argument with the big bad guys of CII, Ajay Khanna and Jayashree Jayalalitha of the Delhi office presiding, who tore up the press card of our correspondent K. Prasad apparently because he looked like a "meek South Indian". That was fun, it is always interesting to get people like the two above mentioned factotums at CII, who are by nature bullies, down to their knees, apologising. That they had to re-issue our press cards again is another matter. That the next Auto-Expo will see cybersteering as a bigger force, hopefully, is also another matter.

But that we are now "advising" three different large auto manufacturers on cyberspace and motoring in India, by-passing their india offices, and one large Indian manufacturer, all with CII affiliations, is the best fun. CII itself is a great organisation, I've been involved with them in one way or the other for the past 2 decades even when they were CEI, but of late the people who work there as employees have begun to think that maybe they run the country. Which is sad, considering the fact that the industrialists who head CII, some of whom have become personal friends in the course of life, are the epitome of humility. Maybe somebody from industry reading this needs to tell the paid staff at CII that.

There was nothing on road-safety at the Auto-Expo. It does not exist, a few hundred thousand people who die on our roads and millions who get injured do not exist it seems. Killer buses with front bumpers at chest level, stud 4-wheel drive off-roaders with bull bars designed to maim if not despatch to hell, powerful '90s engines mated with half-century old gear-boxes and drum brakes bolted on any old how to ladded chassis built up with wooden and tin frames, these are the public transport vehicles on our roads which contribute to the maximum amount of damage.

Full marks to that favourite whipping horse, the Delhi Traffic Police, as well as the well-thought out park and ride facilities from CII. This edition of Auto-Expo was, thankfully, without traffic jams of the horrendous nature witnessed last time around in 1998. The fact that public buses were permitted to bring people up to the very gates is to be commended, I saw more than a few really very senior people hop on and off DTC buses thanks to the convieniently located bus-stops.

Now all we need, sarkar, is that a little bit of research be done on pedestrian traffic flow and the parking scam valahs be moved off the pavements. In this context, Mumbai is always ahead of Delhi. So is the rest of the country, actually.

cybersteering.com visited the mercedes-benz factory on a media cum software visit, both of which we can't really speak about too much. We saw how they make their new cars, and we looked at their processes. We ate a very pleasant vegetarian meal, oh boy, that is the best part of visiting automobile factories, eating simple and tasty food in the staff messrooms, reminds me of my days under training for the Merchant Navy! Who needs heavy 5-star glop drowning in gravy?

But what we really liked about the Mercedes-Benz plant, which is accessed through the TATA plant where they make the Indica, is the sheer cleanliness. This has obviously rubbed off on the neighbouring TATA plant, too. There is not a single flaw anywhere. This is unlike other automobile plants in India, where the horizon is littered with people walking about apparently aimlessly, factory vehicles in highly damaged shape dotting the roads and grease as well as packing material all over the shopfloor.

They have a lovely boutique at the entrance to the factory, I wish we could afford some of the stuff there!

Who is the real customer for the automobile manufacturer, the dealer or the person who buys the motor vehicle? An interesting debate on this subject evolved at the first ever FADA (Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations) meet in Delhi last week. Prima facie it does appear as though the manufacturers would like to keep their relationship up to the dealer. Those of us who have been through the doubtful joys of automobile ownership in India have, at some time or the other, been a victim of the dealer points finger at manufacturer and manufacturer throws ball back to dealer kind of run-around. Happens all the time, and the only reason for that is that the eventual customer, you and me, are not really taking up our own cause.

cybersteering offers all of you, buyers, dealers and manufacturers, an open forum at feedback. We will bring in a few more inter-active features as we evolve, but interim, how about hearing from you?

Way to go . . . . remember, we are and will always be an independent motoring site, not dependent on ad income, atleast from manufacturers. Our revenue model, as we've explained often before, is the fact that we are software people who also like automobiles.

Drivers Log
Veeresh Malik
The Edit Team
bluepencil@cybersteering.com

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