On Tuesday, I went to see Ananth Padmanabhan’s ‘No Refusal’ at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi – photographs of the Calcutta yellow taxi that he has been making since he first stepped off the Rajdhani at Howrah in January 1998. The picture on the invite says a lot. A yellow Ambassador in a garage yard where the old taxis go to be scrapped, the boot lid up, a man sitting cross-legged inside the dickey with a cigarette, another crouched at the bumper working on something. I have been calling these cars mechanical elephants for a while now, because that is what they were for most of us, big and clunky and very basic, slow and gentle, and you could recognise one from far away.The Ambassador came out of Hindustan Motors at Uttarpara, just outside Calcutta, in 1958, based on an English car, the Morris Oxford. Until then most cars on Indian roads were imported, or assembled here from foreign kits, so for a lot of families this was the first car that felt like ours. Bombay had its own – the Fiat from Premier at Kurla, later the Padmini, and I always felt the two said different things about us. The Fiat was more personal, you drove it yourself. The Ambassador fitted into the whole hierarchy and protocol and class thinking of the time, the chauffeur in front, the owner at the back, and a red beacon on top if you were a minister or an official. As a boy in Hyderabad I remember President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed visiting the city, and a long fleet of white Ambassadors moving through Banjara Hills. In Calcutta the same car became the city’s taxi, black and yellow at first and later all yellow.Writers, journalists, travellers, so many of us have a story around this car, and for me, like most photographers, it was the working car. I came back from Boston in the early nineties with a large-format portfolio and a thin battery-powered light box for my transparencies, at a time when there were no screens around. The car shoots I hoped for never came; India was not a car market yet, and there were definitely no big budgets for car commercials. What I did get was the Ambassador. If you were going outstation it had the most legroom, a large dickey for the cases, and a carrier on the roof for light stands and tripods. Ladakh, the Northeast, Kutch, you came out of the railway station or the airport and there would be one waiting. Raghubir Singh went further and made a whole book of it, A Way into India, photographing the country through the windows and mirrors of an Ambassador.And it could be fixed anywhere, by anyone, with a spanner and a screwdriver. I remember a breakdown in the middle of the night on a single-lane rural highway somewhere in Rayalaseema, I can’t remember the town now, peak summer, this was before mobile phones, not even an STD booth around to make a call, and nothing on the road except trucks. I had to hang around in the car because of all my camera gear, the driver took a truck ride, and thankfully he was back after two hours with a mechanic and a bag of tools, and within no time we were back on the road. I don’t think you could do that today with any car. Another time I was working with an NGO on a rural health programme in very remote villages of southern Bihar, what is Jharkhand now, and we reached a police barrier near the Latehar forests after dark. Nobody was allowed through at night because of the insurgency and the risk of kidnapping, so the driver slept in the front seat and I slept in the back till five in the morning, windows rolled down and my feet sticking out, mosquitoes buzzing all around. People forget how comfortable that back seat was, big old springs and jute stuffing, and on roads full of potholes it just rolled over them. Later came the Isuzu engine, bucket seats, the gear on the floor, air conditioning, and for me it became a different car.A white No Refusal taxi with Road King on the doors, bonnet open, two men bent over the engine. Photo: Ananth Padmanabhan.And then there is what Calcutta painted on its doors. When the West Bengal government brought in new blue and white taxis in 2013, the drivers had to sign an undertaking on stamp paper to get a permit, promising they would never refuse a passenger, even during a rally or a bandh, and ‘No Refusal’ went onto the cars in bold. If you have tried to get an auto in Delhi late in the evening you know why that matters, refusal is almost the first thing you hear.I think about this as someone who works with design. Look at the colour on these cars, the yellow with the blue stripe, the lettering painted by somebody’s hand with a brush. Then look at the road outside. Axalta, one of the big companies that make paint for car manufacturers, reports on car colours every year, and its 2025 report found that about four out of every five new cars made in the world were white, black, grey or silver. The shapes have come closer together too, everyone designing for the same wind tunnel numbers and the same safety rules. We used to look at Scandinavia for that kind of minimal design and flat colour, and it suited them. India was never about that. Today it is everywhere here as well, the malls, the interiors, the fashion, the cafés, what the American writer Kyle Chayka called AirSpace, a look that is the same in Delhi as in Berlin or Singapore. Drive through Lower Parel in Mumbai or Cyber City in Gurgaon and it is glass tower after glass tower, and very little tells you which city you are in.A woman in an orange sari with a blue umbrella walking past a yellow taxi parked in front of a red Kali temple. Photo: Ananth Padmanabhan.That is why I agree with Ananth that this is about identity and not nostalgia, which is very easy to fall into with a car like this. Twenty-eight years on one subject is a real commitment. A lot of his cars are shot side-on, in profile, which makes sense, because that is how you knew an Ambassador as it passed you on the road, by that shape. The colour is strong, the yellow really saturated. His pictures keep what we are losing, a woman in an orange sari with a blue umbrella walking past a yellow taxi parked in front of a red Kali temple, a white taxi with Road King on the doors and two men bent into the engine, a painted door panel, WB-04F-8178, hung on the wall as it is, one tail-light in an ornate gold frame on a red wall like a family portrait. Out on the streets, a 2008 Calcutta high court order took commercial vehicles older than 15 years off the city’s roads, the factory stopped in 2014, Peugeot bought the name in 2017, and the yellow taxis that are left are coming to the end of their time. I’m told even private owners struggle to get a fitness certificate.A retired Ambassador with a Government of India plate in the basement car park of the India Habitat Centre, NewDelhi, on the night of the No Refusal opening, 3 November 2026. Photo: Samar JodhaAfter the show I went down to the basement for my car pickup, and there between the pillars, under a ‘ONE WAY’ sign, was a white Ambassador with a ‘Government of India’ plate, a chrome crash guard, two flat tyres and someone’s name written with a finger in the dust on the windows. One floor below a gallery full of its relatives.‘No Refusal’, photographs by Ananth Padmanabhan, is on view at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, until 10 November 2026.Samar Jodha is a transdisciplinary artist and TED speaker whose practice spans South Asia, West Asia and East Africa.