The Red Letter
Aninda Sardar
Mumbai-based finance professional Suman Kumar lives in a bit of an on-off world. Monday to Friday, his eyes are locked on to screens, reading numbers and analysing all kinds of financial information that would be code to you and me. Weekends however are screen-free. It’s a difficult balance to maintain in a world where even cars overwhelmingly offer a screen-led feature package to owners. Which probably explains Suman’s choice of wheels – a battleship grey top-of-the-line Thar Roxx, which he has named Airavat. While Suman remains very much a mortal, his Airavat, like the celestial elephant of the mighty god, King Indra – lord of thunder, lightning and rain, takes him into his professional battles trampling potholes, bumps and every other roadblock that Mumbai can throw at him.
But don’t for a second think that this is all that Airavat gets to do, because Suman is also an off-road enthusiast. In fact, he was there at the same Trail Survivor event in Igatpuri where our man Rohit was introducing his sister to the subtle art of off-roading. With his wife, no less. By his own admission, the two screen-free days of the week, he tries to go off-roading as much as he can.
Suman’s own introduction to the world of Mahindras started early on in life, even if it wasn’t at the age of a year and a half. “My father used to work in the mining industry in Odisha. So, from an early age I was used to Mahindra vehicles like the MM 540. My first memory of a family car was when my father got an Armada,” Suman tells me. In fact, with the arrival of this particular Mahindra, Suman’s own vocabulary also grew. “I got to know the meaning of the word Armada, a convoy of ships, after we got the vehicle. That’s when I realised why that Mahindra had a ship emblem on the dashboard.”
Needless to say, Suman has done an entire battery of courses and adventure activities with Mahindra. And of course, there are the inevitable road trips too. Suman and his wife are waiting for the 18-month-old Riddhi to turn two before heading for… hold your breath… Kashmir.
But this isn’t the meat of the story. The real story started long before Suman started a family or owned a Roxx. Many moons ago, as a fresher straight out of B-school, a young MBA graduate got into Mahindra’s General Management Cadre (GMC) training. “It was a prestigious thing to get into,” he remembers. “One of the high points of the induction process was a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Mahindra himself at his office. At the meeting I had mentioned that I saw a gap in the product line and that a five-door family version of the Thar would fit in nicely. Dr. Pawan Goenka had told me then that I would need to wait and watch since something exactly along those lines was in the pipeline. That was 2018. Six years later we had the Thar Roxx in 2024.”
“I knew I wanted one the moment the Roxx was launched,” he says. By then Suman had moved on from being a rookie with a point of view to a seasoned professional in another firm. “We decided to get a Roxx once we started a family.” Soon after Riddhi’s birth, a Roxx was duly booked. Not just any Roxx but the top-drawer LXT 4x4 with an automatic transmission and a niche colour.
Unfortunately, the specific Thar that Suman wanted could only be his at the end of a long wait. “I was told that I would have to wait anywhere between 10 and 11 months. Especially since I wanted the battleship grey.” Black, red or white wasn’t a problem but the one he wanted, was. And Suman didn’t have the patience to wait another almost-a-year to get his dream set of wheels.
So, four days after he made his booking, Suman took a fateful decision. He wrote an email to all the top management of the company, Mr. Mahindra included. “I was not expecting an answer to be honest,” he admits. At this point I’m super curious to know what he might have written. “The subject line actually said Voice of A Customer. The email started with an appreciation of why I loved SUVs and why I loved Mahindras. It eventually culminated with the fact that I had made a booking and while the official waiting time would be counted from the booking date, I had actually been waiting all my life for this car,” he says with a chuckle.
“I repeat, I was not expecting a reply. But imagine my surprise when the next morning there was a reply from Mr. Rajesh Jejurikar at 4am! The email basically said that he was looping in someone who would expedite my order. At that point I thought, okay, so the guy at the dealership had said 10-11 months, now I should get it in two or three months.”
That same day, Suman got a call from the dealership. The guy wanted to know how Suman had managed to get an allotment. At this point, Suman was astounded to learn that his car had left the Nashik plant and was on its way to Mumbai. “As soon as the car reached Mumbai, it would be ready to be delivered, I was told. I couldn’t believe it,” he remembers.
When an awestruck Suman reached the dealership to finally take his car home, he was informed that it didn’t even need a PDI. “You only need to check the VIN. When I went to do that, that’s when I saw the date and the manufacturing timestamp on the vehicle,” he tells me. “It was just one hour after I wrote that email.” Putting my jaw back in its place, I ask the obvious question. What was your email like? Was it a rant? “I was not ranting at any point. My email was not written from a point of frustration or desperation. I wrote it in excitement. I was excited to finally get my dream car. What I wrote was that if there was something that could be done then I would be grateful. It did not come from a place of negativity. The closest parallel I can draw is of a child writing to Santa.”
And in it, hangs the moral. It’s not what you say but how you say it that might change your garage.
