Blog Meet-2011 --- Cars and Girls......

Had an interesting time this afternoon with lots of fellow bloggers form Chennai at the Hyatt Regency hotel at the Indi-blog Meet organised by Tata Motors to launch the Tata Grande......

Ok...thats that.....My obligatory tribute according to the contract is over and done with- lets get to the meat of the matter.

For the past two days, a babe with a sweet voice (gomathi something?) had been pestering me that she really wanted to meet me on sunday at the Hyatt hotel...now before you speculate further (as i too did)- it turned out that she was just promoting a product placement by Tata Motors by organizing a Blogger meet. Seems the people behind Indi-blog Co- have sold Tata Motors some snake oil that people buy cars after reading reviews on Blogs, EXCuse me? you heard right, dudes......YES....I see you nodding your heads in agreement- A sucker is born every minute- but an entire company????? wasnt there atleast one guy out there who said "hold on, the emperor has no clothes on?" Well no one did, and I got to attend a Launch Party with free ride/food/the works....

The brief was to be at the Tata Motors showroom at Mont road where a free ride on the new car was awaiting us. When i showed up, there was just one more guy there - Ashok- in the hopes of hitching a free ride.....it just goes to show that the average Chennai'te seems to have woken up. We spent a relaxing half-an-hour with their General Manager who seemed to agree that "the customer is always right"....every sentence of his started with the words "as you rightly said sir....." well, nothing gets my goat like someone quoting me indiscriminately...- so I spent more and more time making outrageous claims about his company's car, trying to provoke him into some sort of heated discussion- but he withstood all temptation to contradict me and I guess, he won that round....

We were next taken around and shown the car- which was nothing but your old Tata Sumo with a minor facelift- they have stuck a little chrome gilding here and there and renamed it Tata Grande....dont get me wrong, I have nothing against the Sumo..it was a fine, old vehicle when it came out a few years ago- the favorite of all those directors who wanted to show bomb-blasts and faction fights (enn kitta 10 sumo'la allunga erukkanga, unn kitta?)in their movies- by lining up the Sumo's and blowing them up spectacularly....what the company is now attempting is to reposition it as a family friendly (as opposed to gangster-friendly?) vehicle.......

We were then offered a test drive to the hotel for the launch party- which I wisely refused to take...(new vehicle, why take the risk?) and we reached the Hyatt Regency....the first thing I noticed on reaching the Party venue was- it was a very Family-Friendly event......by which i mean that a lot of the female sex present was the family type.....Blogging world is supposed to be filled with the wild types, right, so where were the wild girls? the ones I had come to meet.....hell, I didnt lose my sunday siesta to trade FB Id's with a lot of aunties.....Tata Motors- there goes one star...Crowd quality=Poor.

And after relaxing my usual strict standards (on the kind of girls I look at) - I circulated a bit around the room to get a better view...and I had to change my mind and retract my earlier statement..the aunties of chennai are sportive folks( a big hand to them, guys)...there was a generous display of cleavage on view, with tight fitting clothes etal.....and three cheers to their absent husbands too- who had (with pleasure?) permitted their wives to liven up the Tata Car Launch...(was it a corporate sponsorship deal?) I moved around from group to group (always trying to find the best viewing angle's) and there were serious discussions going on about Chennai's Environmental(?) Status, Garbage Problem (?WTF....), Cooking tips blogs and heritage walk blogs....I realized that, holy hell, these guys were serious....there was one particularly serious discussion going on about monetizing blogs and their blah, blah, blah...and the best female crowd seemed clustered around it...just goes to show, that pannam'na ponnamum vaya polaakum...(Roughly translated- even the dead open their, err,....mouths for money).

After some yawn inducing promotional videos screened by the company- we were asked to take part in click-a-best-picture competition....in effect, licence to Klick(anything...) despite the inadequate pixel rate on my mobile camera- i got quite a few artistic shots of well developed assets from vantage points....and then asked us all to share them with the organisers....hell, if they had seen my photos...the exec's from tata would have had an heart-attack (collectively)....

After a bit of tea, we were let loose to socialize and ogle at close-up range whatever had attracted our attention earlier... By then it was time for me to exit gracefully, as i always do......and i did.

In conclusion although this event wasnt upto my usual standards (for example, no one got drunk and vomitted)...it was all in all a 3-star event....1 star for the car, 1-for those sportive women and 1-for their generous husbands (kodai vallalgal)- who brightened a sunday afternoon for the rest of us......