JOIN USTraffic jams are not always bad; allows your mind to jog around. The new vehicle from the leading manufacturer’s stable got me focusing on ‘car names’. The car’s label read ‘Ertiga’. Was it derived from a Hindi word? Or, is it Spanish? May be the engineer who designed this car had a little one who was fond of Winnie-The-Pooh and hence ‘Err Tigger’ the ever-bouncy tiger character. Did the ‘Err-Tigger’ become ‘Ertiga?’
It then occurred to me that when the traffic eased up, I needed to speed up and live up to an image, no, not my own, but the name of the car I was driving — ‘Swift’. I made a swift resolve that I should never be caught driving slow, albeit earn the wrath of the public! But then in my mind I was confused if it is the ‘swift’ or the ‘rapid’ that is meant to go fast on Indian roads.
Only then did I realise the reason for my state of ‘confusion’. A car slowly inched past me with the tag ‘Fusion’, the marketing team deemed it smart to drop the ‘con!’ Would ‘fission’ have been more appropriate?
Then appeared the new ‘Amaze’, the end product of a mazed design team! What happened to ‘Innova?’ — did the designers forget to take it through the full cycle of ‘innova’tion? Was the cute car ‘Eon’ conceptualised a long time ago that the design team was elated their design found the light of the day. Does one have to put an accent when they step out of their ‘Accent?’ Why not a ‘punter’ instead of a ‘Punto’ when you know it’s a gamble with any new car from that stable; a ‘pal’ instead of a ‘Palio’, or is Palio friendlier than a pal?
‘Xylo’ could have been an inspiration from xylophone, and do we start drawing inspiration from other musical instruments? Would the ‘Polo’ have sold more cars if they had given a box of Polo mints as a free promotional item with a tag line that read “Smell fresh in your new mint car.”
If I had told my friends that my future car would be a ‘Duster’, they would have called me insane then; not anymore, since it is a popular car now; or, is it one-too-many ‘insane drivers’ on our roads? I was skeptical to buy a ‘Beetle’. What if the archetypal Indian would spit the red betel-leaf juice to ‘belittle’ the shine on my car?
I spotted a good old ‘800’ and thought that was the best approach. I was convinced that the big car companies that roll out the status symbol cars — we see too many of them these days, is it now a ‘status quo’? — have mastered this art and use ‘alpha-numbers’ such as A4s, Q7s, X1s, 5-series, C-class etc.
A host of other names ‘Verito’, ‘Etios’, ‘Santa Fe’ and ‘Pajero’, which sounded so Greek, Latin and Spanish to me resulted in this question: can they not bear Indian origin names? What about names like ‘Vedanta’, ‘Advaita’, ‘Chanakya’? Or, will it confuse us even more? Do we need to stand up for our Indian names or do we sit down to enjoy our plush new cars?
Is there too much or too little in a name? “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet...” Thanks, Shakespeare, and why this mayhem of names for cars on our Indian roads?