UNDER CURRENT

Do four wheels make an automobile? Or is there something more to it?

- Kartik Ware

It was a moment filled with the irony of ages. I was following in the green car with the window down, as the red one’s rorty exhaust filled the EV’s cabin with the sweetsmelling aftermath of internal combustion. Every movement the red one made seemed like a mischievous event, while the green one chased it shouting, ‘Me, too! Me, too!’ Somehow, the fact that both wore the same badge seemed to be irrelevant, because these cars were decades of context apart. The MG Comet EV is the newest green kid on the block, but its ancestor, the MG Midget 1500, was clearly the one that hit all the right buttons (at least on this Xennial’s heart and mind).

The Midget has a name that would probably get it cancelled in today’s day and age, but it is still very clearly what I think a car should be — topless, low-slung and light. And red, of course, which this one was. It belongs to Amal Tanna and, like his car, he seemed to be serious about fun. What’s more, he’d booked a Comet EV and was more than mildly interested in the car that looks nowhere as fetching as the Midget. As Srinivas Krishnan, exMotoring editor pointed out during the shoot (after noting the absence of a glovebox) ‘Well, the whole thing is a glovebox on wheels anyway.’