Tata Nexon Electric: A layman’s review after a test drive

If you didn’t get here while searching for information about electric cars, it’s quite possible that you’re a layman like me who just didn’t realize electric cars had suddenly become mainstream, or is about to. Till recently, I thought electric cars in India are one of those things that will come some day, but that was before I read there are more than 10 electric cars from different manufacturers releasing this year. Looks like 2020 is going to be as cool and futuristic as it sounds.

I also thought electric cars with the exception of Tesla (another ‘someday’ thing for India) look like a cross between an auto-rikshaw and a Tata Nano. I don’t know if you feel differently but I HATE the look of a Reva. To me a Reva looks like one of those ugly little dogs some women carry in handbags. I acknowledge that they exist and there are people who are into it but wouldn’t be caught dead with one. In fact, I hate the Reva so much that I stopped typing for 5 minutes to try and think of a more insulting analogy. I couldn’t but I’m going to come back and edit that in if I think of something later. Because Reva had reserved the top slot in my brain’s image search for electric cars in India, I didn’t even bother reading up much about the space till I saw the MG EV and the Hyundai Kona and realized there were companies making electric cars that actually looked like cars. The second shock was that these cars now have ranges of 300-400 km on a single charge, which makes it feasible go a week in the city without worrying about range. You’ll need a home charging point which was another hurdle, but all manufacturers are offering free charging point installations even in apartments, provided you get approvals from the society and let them do the wiring. I was finally taking electric cars seriously, and out of curiosity started looking for cheaper ones than the MG and Hyundai, which led me to the Tata Nexon.

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Why Kejriwal, the fallible mortal must win

Ask anyone from the urban middle class in India (sans Delhi) about how their political preferences evolved (chronology samjhiye), and they’ll probably tell you a story about how they once supported Kejriwal before he ‘sold out’. I too was one of those people. After a while though, I started to question this universal truth we all seem to have accepted. We seemed to be judging Kejriwal by a different standard than other politicians who can break promises at will and suffer no long-term credibility loss. Of course, the easy answer is that expectations were higher, but I don’t buy that. People had expectations about India becoming a superpower by 2020 and 15 lakhs in their account too, but falling short of lofty expectations wasn’t a high crime in those cases.

What explains this dichotomy, I wondered. One possible answer is that Kejriwal was a mortal hero. He was slapped multiple times, had ink splashed on his face on live TV, did stupid things like resigning without consulting the people, sharing a dias with Lalu Prasad Yadav and then most damning of all, he apologized multiple times for mistakes, giving conclusive proof of his fallibility. In short, we wanted a God and he just wasn’t. Legendary heroes don’t get slapped in public, not once but twice.

Stream of consciousness blogging

Do you know how awkward it is to start writing in a blog you haven’t written in for nearly a year? Its a little like that neighbor or colleague you should have smiled at a year ago and find it weird to say good morning to anymore. Everytime I think of writing something I feel like I should have something momentous to talk about which justifies asking for someones attention after so long. Its nothing more than complacency and inertia of course, but complacency is a bigger road block than anything else in life I guess. Anyway, I had this epiphany the other day – instead of trying to come up with great content, why not just write a stream of consciousness variety of blog posts when I don’t have a fleshed out topic to write about? It reduces the burden of research and thought required, extensive proofreading, etc. and might branch out into more substantial, well thought out blog posts at some point. Most importantly, it reduces the entry barrier, or in my case, re-entry barrier to writing or blogging. It is possible that a reader might think the quality of posts is going down, but my last post was in April 2019. Its hard to go down from absolute silence. At least one other person seems to have had this idea before me – I DuckDuckGo’d ‘stream of consciousness blogging’ and found this nice post: http://webtrafficroi.com/how-to-write-stream-of-consciousness-blog-post/