Ambassador to India

I don’t know of a single person who grew up as a member of the Indian middle class through the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, who doesn’t have an Ambassador memory. Speak to them and what you’ll get is a plethora of anecdotes from an India that is unrecognizable today. An India that was far away from the customer’s market it is today. Choices were limited, waits were long and there was genuine joy when your new set of wheels came home. No joy however was as momentous as an Ambassador coming home, for this was the car that signaled to the world that you (or the family you came from) had indeed arrived.  That sense of achievement aside, you’ll find wild variations in the anecdotes you will be told and retold. Some, fondly, others not so much. Take our own family Ambassador for example. I remember the day dad got it home. It was a decently maintained example, bought from the Indian Railways in Kolkata sometime in the early ‘90s. The cream coloured car itself was obviously much older going by the registration number it bore – WBJ 5091. I remember his slightly puffed up stance and the beaming