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TATA unveiled the one lakh car today and it met many people’s, including yours truly’s expectations. Instead of a toy car, TATA showed a very practical vehicle which will help many Indian families to upgrade from two wheelers. The reaction to this car has been mixed. As I wrote earlier, many people were worried about the consequences of introducing this car on Indian roads: Further congestions on the already jammed Indian streets, the questionable safety aspects of the car and the resultant increase in fuel prices. Tata has answered many of these questions convincingly.

I am writing this post mainly for the friends from western countries who question the need for such a car. Most questions are directed towards the safety aspects of it. What one should understand is that this car is for a family like the one below, who cannot afford to buy a four wheeler. As far as they are concerned, the TATA Nano is much much safer than driving on their two wheeler. The Nano is priced at Rs. One Lakh (US$ 2500), which is a very affordable price point for most Indian middle class families.

The traffic on Indian cities move at a pretty slow 25 mph most of the time, because of which fatal accidents are very low in number. The Nano has passed several crash tests, which should address the safety aspects very well.

Once again, kudos to TATA for achieving something which was dismissed as impossible by competitors.

Scooter Photo from http://nh80.eximie.net.

In a few hours from now, Tata Motors - the prospective owner of Jaguar and Land Rover, will unveil the world’s cheapest car. With this small car, TATA is trying to achieve something which has eluded many car manufacturers in the past. The previous efforts tuned out to be damp squibs with either poor passenger comfort or questionable durability or both. When TATA set out to build a sub $2500 car, which is fondly called the one lakh car in India, their goals were pretty clear: a car which is bigger, safer and more fuel economical than the Maruti 800, the cheapest car in Indian market. Note that the Maruti 800, once the largest selling car in Indian market, costs $5000 upwards. That means TATA had a real challenge at hand.

If rumors are to be believed, TATA has achieved what no other auto manufacturer has done in the past. Not only they are successful in creating the car, they are going into mass production in just months from now.

There are people who believe that this could create major problems in the Indian roads as more people will now be able to afford cars. This is a very negative way of seeing things as traffic congestion is a problem that the local government needs to solve, not TATA motors. Needless to say, with this car, the small car unit of TATA will be surviving on a wafer thin margin and won’t be making a lot of cash, which makes it clear that profitability is not the motivation behind building it.

There will be other interesting outcomes one this car goes into production. While the word on the street is that this car will give other manufacturers like Maruti a run for their money, I beg to differ. It is Bajaj, makers of the ubiquitous 3 wheeled auto rickshaws on the Indian roads, who will be the most affected. It is very likely that the TATA’s small car will turn out to be an interesting alternative for the auto rickshaws as the price difference is negligible, just like the way the Indica replaced the venerable Ambassador as the preferred Taxi vehicle. Another possibility is that the number of houses which own two cars will increase manifold. I already hear from a lot of my friends and colleagues who say they they will buy this as a second car for their wife or children.

TATA will unveil this car at the Indian Auto Expo which is just hours away from the opening ceremony. The whole nation is waiting for the unveiling of the car, which has sidelined the other important launches like Skoda’s Fabia hatch and TATA’s own Fiat Linea launch. Personally, I am eagerly looking for the Linea’s launch as it could turn out to be my next car.

That was quicker than I thought. The migration to WordPress from Drupal has been complete. For my blogging needs, Drupal was becoming an overkill. No doubt it is one of the best CMS out there, but it was getting difficult for me to maintain the blog with a complex system like Drupal. The migration was an interesting experience, which I will document in a later post.

For now, there is load of stuff coming from CES and you can expect a series of posts in this regard- not to mention the leaked screenshots of a pretty interesting looking Windows Mobile 7 OS.

PS: Your RSS feeds should be taken care automatically. If you are seeing a refresh of the previous posts, don’t worry, it will happen only once.

Pocket Informant is one of the best replacement PIM suite for Windows Mobile. MobilitySite is giving away this suite free for today and tomorrow. If you are a Windows Mobile user, you should not have reasons not to use this offer.

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 Some people have predicted that 2008 will be the year of information overload. Why not start the year with a lighter load?

Do these NOW:

• Open your feed reader and mark all items as read. You can start from a clean slate now.
• Most likely you are using Google Reader for your RSS reading. Go to Google Trends and mercilessly remove all the feeds you have not read in the last 20 days.
• Remove all 'similar' feeds. For example, if you have subscribed to both Gizmodo and Engadget, remove one. 80% of the news they cover are the same.

The above 3 steps will take about 10 minutes to complete, but will save you hours of time in 2008.

Happy new year!

Related: Coping with information overload.

If your web pages are taking too much time to load or pages are timing out, chances are that your ISP has a crappy DNS server. This is especially true of some Indian ISPs like BSNL. In case you are suffering from such a problem, you can reconfigure your router to use the OpenDNS servers. All you have to do is type in the following two IP addresses for the DNS server in your Wi-Fi or LAN router:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Apart from providing a faster DNS, OpenDNS also provides you automatic typo corrections. For example, if you type www.jaganath.ner instead of www.jaganath.net, OpenDNS automatically redirects you to the correct URL. It is also a safer way to browse for your grandma because it filters many phishing websites. So go ahead and change your DNS server entries even if you are not facing any problems from your ISP at this time.

Wishing you all a merry christmas and a happy new year!

RSS, while a great way to pull content from several places to one single application, off late is becoming a burden for most people. RSS, kind of becomes a habit and one keeps adding plenty of feeds to the already overflowing reader. For example, it almost takes one full day to finish all the news that are consolidated by my feed reader. Many people take pride in saying that they have 400+ feeds subscribed in their favorite reader application! 

Here are some of the ways to optimize your time spent on your RSS reader.

…yes I am. Lots of updates and will post them in a couple of days. A major update is that I "upgraded" my classic N95 to the new N95 8 GB model. Believe me, the black beauty is worth every penny. It is faster and fixes most of the annoyances from the original model. Especially, the hissing during music playback is completely absent! I will write more about the phone in a future post.