Fueling Thoughts

From a hardcore caffeine junkie to milk-tea (Chai) drinker, the transition has been as much due to developing gastric symptoms due to half a dozen espressos daily as much as due to the innumerable Corporate Panhandling and Freeloading attempts I had to endure at their expense of 1 cup of coffee(usually a lousy machine made one with the cheapest beans), their wish list encompassing all that is mentioned below for everything from Tyres to Batteries, Industrial Chemicals, Refinery Equipment, Military Grade tech, Amphibious vessels and what not… So the resolutions for 2021 are: No personal meetings (only Zoom or Skype calls for the preliminary interaction where I first specify my charges and terms or work before starting the conversation) and yes... No Coffee!!  

Last night, I f inished reading the not so incredulous story of the Biomedical startup and biggest corporate scam of this century the - Theranos saga in "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Va lley Startup" by John Carreyrou.  Though quite engaging, I can’t  say I am very impressed by his style of delivery which at times is more suitable for House and Garden magazine or a woman centric publication with a penchant for describing dresses and mascara. But, on the whole it was a tenacious labour of uncovering the truth behind a corporate scam shielded by powerful men,  weaponized legal intimidation and absolutely unscrupulous promoters.  A story of how a young blond blue-eyed woman from a privileged background, a Stanford dropout with a fake voice having all the hallmarks of a psychopath and her unlikely partner, a Bombay born, bullying, boastful, uncouth and unscrupulous Sindhi rouge who earlier made it big in the US by a fluke, peddled a non-existing technology and success

It was way back in February while talking with a respected friend, an ex-senior journalist on the phone, I expressed my views on the emerging so-called pandemic. My exact words were "It doesn't add up, the body count doesn't add up, the facts don't add up, the 24x7 fearmongering by the media doesn't add up, it's all to choreographed not to be preplanned, and all the countries are falling in line with the narrative as if ordered to do so. I think the global economy is being reset using the excuse of a cooked up scamdemic. First they will crash the stock-markets, next the economies. Can't say if it's good or bad, because either way the current consumerist standards of living are unsustainable." Later, when I shared the same views with a friend who is a banker, he asked me what I was snorting, but a month later he told me that all his investments in the shares market had been wiped away.   So how did I guess?  I told him that I snorted facts! Then the

While I can't claim to be a brilliant eccentric, but being a loner, living alone, I know first-hand how it helps preserves sanity in taxing times. Hence, in the early days of the ScamDemic,  I used to roam around the neighbourhood with a "what me worry" attitude, sans a mask of course, oblivious to being the target of the collective evil eyes. Meanwhile, my neighbours downstairs were lowering down a bag on a rope from their balcony for groceries ordered on Amazon. And my landlord and friend decided to utilize the time to create a walking regime by prancing to and fro on the terrace which alternately made me think of a poor caged feline in the zoo or just gave me vertigo watching him going round and round. That with a park next-door... So, when concerned friends asked me how I was dealing with isolation and the quarantine, I always replied "Marvellously!!" The thing is I had already self- isolated myself for almost a decade...from needless social interaction and

 I cancelled my streaming services because I realised binge-watching was even more wasteful and addictive than social media, but except for saving me a bit of money on subscription charges and making binge material a bit less accessible, it has not really eliminated the pastime. I ended up wasting two nights watching a so-called supernatural drama in semi-sepia tones, with 30s era cars and people in period costumes  in a contemporary western liberal (read as US Democrat propaganda) indoctrination series masquerading as a TV serial, only because of a brief flash of flesh in an altogether different film.  Honestly, I started watching it only because earlier Natalie Dormer gave a peep of her stockinged thigh in the "Counsellor," which I consider as one of the most sexually charged scenes in cinema, paradoxically in a film with the most morbid ending I had ever seen.  I had neither watched the Game of Thrones, except for a compilation of all the nude scenes in the series, nor the

With age, a man sheds two things; the hair on his head and so-called friends! The ongoing ScamDemic has had me blocking a few Covidiots who were daily sending me a barrage of scaremongering messages. Likewise, I had to tell a couple of "Maskista" Karens to Fuck-off, also reminding them that I am not their hen-pecked husband to listen to that chiding tone. Which reminds me how fed up with their sermons and pretensions, I used to get rid of my female college mates exactly the same way, and they always angrily retorted back" No wonder you don't have a Girlfriend" as if my single hood and inability to take their Bullshit was interconnected. But, they probably had a valid point! Without going deeply into the topic of masks, government flip-flops on the subject and over 50 medical (peer-reviewed) papers, which I collected that say that they mostly don't -  the main factor causing this current divisive rift is really about not their effectiveness but the subject of

About 24 years back, after motorcycling across India for 6 months as a voluntary mechanic with an international group (I will skip over the part covering loud rampant sex or riding dead stoned);  I was unable to sit in an office cubicle again.  So I took up on my ambition of becoming a journalist except that sans an MA degree in English or a Mass Communication diploma, I wasn't going to land a  gig in any local publication even if I had the writing skills of Harold Robbins.  So I started freelancing to build up a portfolio, which was writing 2000 words for  250 rupees and trying to cram it with at least 3 photographs as I was paid 100 per image. In a few months, my articles became a regular front-page feature on the supplements of the largest local English daily of the region.  One of my ardent fans was a  professor of Linguistics or was it Folklore, from Gauhati University who always complimented my pieces whenever he met me. One day he asked me from where I got my Mass Comm degre

The Russians love to use the French phrase "Cherchez Le Femme" made popular by Hugo, which implies that most trouble directly or indirectly is caused by women. Their ladies too use it with equal fervour, because beyond the facade of female solidarity they actually all hate each other.  In my case, these words should  be embossed on the walls, mirrors and my coffee mugs.  As  most of the women I had met as an adult in my last 28 years, collectively inspire me to write a Punk Rock version of the Rod Stewart classic - "Some Guys have all the Luck."  Only my punk anthem would start with "Some Dudes get Blow jobs, others get to deal with whack jobs, no prizes for guessing where I belong..." Misogynism, a case of sour grapes? Trapped by unwanted pregnancy and bamboozled by child support payments? Did ex-wife grab it all? False rape accusations… Nooo... Sirs!! it's far more insidious!! I could of course go on for hours ranting about a recurring theme with wom

  I recently read a story about lenders adopting intimidating techniques on loan defaulters, no thanks to the precarious economic condition in India for the last few years,  now conveniently explained away by the government as the fallout of the COVID-19 ScamDemic.  Well, despite not being a loan-taker, my car instalments being paid 10 years back, I still found myself on the receiving end of such harassment several times.  The first started when I added a friend's wife on Facebook, who had apparently defaulted on a car loan more than a decade back and fled town. The recovery agent followed her FB account as it had no privacy settings, next found my phone number from a job site where they were registered as an employment agency and unleashed 24-hour harassment via intimidating calls demanding her number and address. He even cited my home address, threatening to come over physically. It took me a day to discover that they got my contact details from the  India job site www.Naukri.com

India has some of the filthiest cities in the world,  no thanks to a dysfunctional socialistic and corruption ridden municipal service, lack of civic amenities and an almost universal lack of civic sense among her citizens. Indian cities occupy  22 positions among the top 30 dirties cities in terms of air pollution in the world with Delhi being the most polluted capital. Yet, what surpasses both our filthy air and toxic waterways in the amount of venom my fellow Indians are capable of spreading online the moment they feel the country's image or prestige is undermined.  Well, to be honest no one really gives a flying-F about the country, otherwise she wouldn't have been in the state she is in, but for most of my fellow Indians whether the domicile variety of the economic migrants (sorry ex-pat is strictly a white-privilege term) the equation for nationalism and self-respect is per the following formula: My ancestors were great = My Country is great = So I should be respected! Po

Okay, I know it looks and sounds FaceBookish, but it's been my guiding principle all my adult life, the same applies for professional relationships as well.  Nobody is perfect, and we all have to deal with difficult and demanding people or clients. Nonetheless, it takes a more than a certain amount of unreasonableness, malice or entitlement to make it toxic. I have seen time and time again that a 2nd chance never works out, in fact it fizzles out even faster than the first...  So to the rubbish bin of relations it is... And some people are sent there right after the first meeting...to hell with the potential business opportunity lost!!

I grew up during the last vestiges of the Cold War in a place the least affected by it in any way.  There it was Reader's Digest readers who "knew" that the US was the land of the free, and those who purchased Soviet books on everything from Russian folk tales to Marxism and Physics textbooks, sold at a price lower than the cost of transporting them.  At times the dividing lines merged.  I always detested the feel-good Reader's Digest, viewing it as covert American propaganda, which as an adult I learned that it in-fact was, same with Nat Geo and Popular Mechanics. But the key word here is "covert."  With no television, it was a battle of government radio stations on short wave. BBC was still held to be truthful, till they exposed themselves much later during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, lying even more than the US outlets. VOA and Radio Liberty for propaganda against the Soviet Union, and Radio Moscow for laughs.  However, none of the cold-war rhetoric c

 "Ravi, do you have any relatives in Delhi? " No Sir!! "Not even friends, with whom you can stay for a few days?" No Sir!!! (More forcefully). Big Sigh !!"...well try to find an economical hotel !!"  It was 1996 and being the only person in the organization to know how to use computers and PowerPoint, I was selected to accompany the big Boss to the Auto Expo 96. My fellow young colleagues were all green in envy, especially as there was a rumour that I would be also getting a new business suit.  That was till the time the Boss's wife called me into their office and asked me to try on a decidedly worn coat which  beaming she old me that was the one her husband wore on their wedding. It did fit, albeit a bit loosely, and I was told to wear a sweater underneath as Delhi would be quite cold anyway.  So wear it I did, trudging a borrowed laptop, lodging in a common bathroom room in YMCA Delhi (which much to the relief of my Boss included complimentary breakf

The story of "Pavlik Morozov" was compulsorily taught in soviet schools and his portrait hung in every classroom. He was a communist martyr, a boy who informed on his father to the authorities for some criminal activity (hoarding grains as per another version) and so was killed by his family. The moral was two-fold: A hero always places the state above his family and that it's perfectly all right to snitch on family members if they don't follow government dictates.  The western world always expressed horror on such leftist indoctrination, but are no strangers to such behaviour either. Right from the days of the Catholic inquisition in Europe to McCarthy's anti-communist witchunt in the 50s, to standing in long ques for signing-up to spy on terrorists (neighbours) after 9/11 in the US.  Now, in the era of Corona Karens, people are self-righteously spying and snitching on others for lockdown or mask-rule violations "all for the good of the State". So stop

Covid Censorship - Google is not showing the Great Barrington Declaration page in its searches. Though its facing flake in the news because a handful of its signatories are fake, the mass media conveniently ignores the long list of medical professionals and their expertise who signed the declaration. The declaration was authored by  Sunetra Gupta  of the  University of Oxford ,  Jay Bhattacharya  of  Stanford University , and  Martin Kulldorff  of  Harvard University . Cosignatories, across disciplines ranging from  epidemiology ,  biostatistics , and public health, through  psychiatry  and  self-harm , to finance and  human geography , include  Sucharit Bhakdi ,  David Livermore ,  Angus Dalgleish ,  Mike Hulme ,  Michael Levitt ,  Jonas Ludvigsson ,  Yaz Gülnur Muradoğlu ,  David L. Katz , and  Karol Sikora . https://gbdeclaration.org

  I really miss the days when spam email comprised of various ways to enhance my manhood, slimming pills, fabulous business opportunities from Nigeria or even correspondence from Ayesha,  Gaddafi's (one time) gorgeous  daughter who once solicited my help in transferring her father's millions.  As today, it's either legit Insurance companies offering to protect me or my 3-year unused car, Medical test labs trying to test my prostrates or check me for diabetes or Covid, but most of all it's the B-Schools both Indian and from overseas  offering me their fantastic and probably utterly diplomas to enhance my career or to avert a midlife crisis, for a hefty  fee of course, a student loan option included...

It is impossible to ignore the hottest topic of the Indian Automotive world which is the not-so-sudden exit of Harley Davidson from the Indian market.  I wouldn't poke a hornet's nest discussing the bikes; if people spend their money on a 2-wheeled jackhammer or vibrator is purely their choice, but the company has had it share of gross failings in the country.  From ignoring customer's grievances which led to a slew of lawsuits, to charging exorbitant price of spares and servicing to lacklustre overpriced entry models, it had been following a potholed path where brand image and fanboys weren't enough to make their Indian foray either stable or profitable.  And yet, one undeniable fact staring us in the face is that neighbouring Thailand continues being their assembly and export hub for the entire ASEAN region. Though not privy to their internal doings and with any real contact left in the automotive sector, one thing that I can say for sure am confident it will be vouch

I was asked my opinion by a niche player in the renewable Energy sector about the viability of setting up a pilot unit with a Power Purchase Mode of operation in India.  My reply was swift :"Don't touch the power generation sector In India with a barge pole unless you want to lose your investment, irrespective of what a hustler may have pitched or a government officer promised. But you may come in as equipment vendors, that to after ensuring that costs and profits are covered in the 80 % of the quoted price."  Instead of wasting time on a long narrative describing the woes plaguing the sector from defaulting, corrupt DISCOMs( Power Distribution Companies) to how multi-million dollar investments are turning NPAs from the Mini and Micro Hydel Projects of the early 2000s to the Gas Turbine Thermal Stations from the Reliance Gas Bubble days, then the Wind Power generators who have lost their wind and now the solar industry on the threshold of folding like a house of cards: I

Been there, done that and got a T-Shirt!!  Nepal's iconic backpacker's souvenir is the "NO-T Shirt" which started off as an optimistic but ineffectual attempt at keeping tourist touts and hustlers at bay during the "Dum maro Dum" Hippie Era. There is even a rip-off Varanasi version with the same words only with Hashish replaced with Ganja and an additional line "No Boat." As to why I remembered this piece of nostalgia from my long-past wandering days of my misspent youth, is the number of times I am forced to say NO!! Only not to touts and panhandlers, but loud-mouthed freeloaders hustling free service posing as potential clients or future partners. In fact, I am seriously intending to print a similar message on the back of my Visiting Cards: NO-Free Consultancy, NO-Free Write-ups, NO-Free Concept Notes, NO-Free Market Overviews, NO-Free Service, NO-Free Visits, NO-Pun Intended!! Not that I have any illusions it will shame them into offering to pay

For over a year, I have wasted a tremendous amount of time and effort trying to get development funds from various startup programs, incubators, NGOs, Overseas agencies with almost zero results.  I got at least 15 rejections for a development grant from India and overseas in one year.   Yes, my work is niche technology, but with no local or imported analogues, quite indispensable in defence sectors and tremendous social impact potential. So why the mass rejections??   At some point, I re-read all my applications to find out what's so wrong and  after thorough introspection and revision of my presentations, write-ups, strategy and my product offering, dawned the realisation that most of these programs are a charade with the dice loaded against most applicants.  They are like Facebook, which exists and profits only due to its users who are the free content providers. For almost all Startup funds and Incubators, their raison d'etre is to collect as many applicants as possible, con

Recently, a company CEO while trying to push his niche and pricey Marine batteries, boasted that they were selected as OEM suppliers by the winners of a large Indian inland vessel tender, more specifically, the Kochin Metro's, water metro project.  Being both well-connected in this field and also keeping myself abreast with all the latest developments, I was quite surprised not hearing about this development. Thus, I called up the bid winning party to confirm whether it is true.  "Not at all, the principal rejected their technology, and so we are providing a competitor's product." was their reply. So, apart from spouting blatant lies, he also took the person in front of them for an uninformed fool: A seasoned Inland Water transportation specialist, at that.  No excuses for giving such a company a miss even if their product is good and competitively priced.  I will, and shall also make sure that everyone I work with does it as well.

  A favourite grouse of my fellow North-east Indians(many with an acute case of angry nigger syndrome) is that the rest of the countrymen know nothing about their area, confuse them with Nepalis or Chinese, think that tea grows in every backyard and so on and forth. That is, till they are reminded that they too know nothing about places like Kerala or Chhattisgarh and the people who live there. Because till about a decade or two back, the few times anyone ventured out was either to study, enrol their children in an educational institution or for health check-ups or cancer treatment in Vellore.  Besides, ignorance about other states and the geography of the country is endemic everywhere. My favourite example being an NCO from Signals Corps of the Indian Army who travelled with me on a train to Goa for some advanced training at the Army Signal Training Center in Bambolim.  An M.Sc. degree holder by his own admission, in his excitement of getting to see Goa and the sea, the first time in

Linkedin is a platform that had first morphed from a professional and cribbing HR's network into a jobseekers forum, now is just a little more refined Facebook with kitty videos and children's drawings (at least previous work's drivers and handymen don't send me friend requests, if it sounds elitist so be it, I don't GAF). We have all manners of Deshbakts(Modi cultists), Trump, Russia and China bashing self-righteous inquisitors, hysterical climatistas, weeping willows, trolls of every form, and plagiarists aplenty. Ghost-written posts by high and mighty influencers to those promoted by paid ones.  Where having 10,000 connects equal to adding 2 inches in the chest or between the legs, depending on your gender. And now we have the LinkedIn Jail, Censorship and the threat of being deplatformed without a warning. In short the writing on the wall says, time to redevelop your website and start blogging there in parallel, because you never know when LinkedIn will deem yo