A True Global Business Newsmaker

At first I wasn't impressed - I was expecting a Maruti 800 or a smaller version of Indica type car. But the more I saw it, I really like it. I think Nano is beautiful. It's an extraordinary design. It looks a bit like Mercedes Benz's Smart car, but is really in a different design league.



Almost a century after Ford started making Model T, cheap black coloured mass market car, in 1905, which upper-middle class Americans could buy, and almost half a century after VW Beetle, cheap rear-engine fun car, in mid-1960s, which everybody in U.S. and Europe could afford, Nano comes alive. It's going to change everything in Bharat. The way people live, the way people interact, and the way people see themselves. Today is truly a historic day, if Tata can pull off Nano as a viable business, as Sri Ratan Tata says can be done. Every family, other than the really poor, can buy this car. It's great!

2008 started with a bang for Bharatiya business. Although the economy itself is strong and most global companies have interests in India, usually not too much business news of global significance comes out of India. Mittal was it last year - but Mittal is a British company, not an Bharatiya one. The news of Nano, covered extensively by world news agencies, is a great start for 2008 and for the next decade for Indian businesses.