India's Jinxed Energy (Generating) Field

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 just sent a few links of article from the recent years from the Indian pertaining to the current scenario in the power sector to help them make up their mind. Never heard from them again...talk about shooting your own foot...

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When a Blind Man Cries - An Ode to Nivedita

Deep Purple’s “When a Blind Man Cries” is arguably one of the saddest rock ballads ever sung. But honestly, I was never a great fan of Purple and only started paying serious attention to the song after hearing a cover version by the German never-grew-old rockers Axel Rudi Pell. They did justice to the song in a way Ian Gillan and the rest of Purple could never dream— powerful, yet plaintive heavy metal vocals, with canyon-deep guitar riffs emerging from the core of the heart only to rip it apart, while tears stream down from empty eye sockets. Listening to this song invariably reminds me of a college senior and good friend, “Raja,” an ethnic Nepali who lived in a small room behind a pharmacy owned by his uncle, not far from my home. Short, stocky, thuggish but effulgent, we shared a love for books and rock music—though he leaned more towards metal. I started appreciating Iron Maiden thanks to him, while he tripped on Floyd...

SHAME

I first tasted deep shame in 10th standard, delivered personally by a girl’s mother, who kicked me out of their house like some neighbourhood pervert. The irony - I had never touched the girl. We were just friends. Soon afterwards, my friends in her school, some gleefully to cause hurt, others as a word of caution, filled my ears about she was caught with some boy in the school toilet. They faced disciplinary action. While, I inherited the silent disgrace. The second blow came when I confessed to a friend’s girlfriend, who thought I was a Casanova, that I never had a girlfriend, or touched a girl, and that I was completely inexperienced. In contrast, she had been sleeping with her coach since school, followed by a relay race of men, eventually devirginized my friend, then when he left for higher studies, helped his best friend become a man. A few more years and bodies later, she married a gold digger from the back end of nowhere - that's decades before Soci...

Enlightenment

The voice on the phone delivered a phrase most men dread hearing from a woman, “Ravi, I have something important to tell you!” In this case though, despite being completely smitten with her during that period and even entertaining the rose-tinted fantasy that she was the one who got away, I had nothing to worry about. My strict code of not getting involved with married women kept me safe. I was, however, totally unprepared for what followed and even less how to visualise it. “My third eye has opened,” she announced with absolute seriousness, then launched into a ramble about Shiva Lingams, visions, stream of consciousness and pre-Columbian Hinduism as evidenced by how a US state, made famous by fried chicken, was actually named after the Sanskrit word for thorns "Kanthaka". It is usually not very easy to unsettle or surprise me with things spiritual, bottled or otherwise, and her cosmic revelations too barely moved the needle. Well, except f...

Holy Diver

At an age when most rockers had burned out, overdosed, or taken permanent residency in rehab, the undisputed King of Heavy Metal burst in with his first solo mega-hit, “Holy Diver,” well into his mid-40s. I had been yelling along, with the starting demonic howl and all, since my teens without the faintest idea what Ronnie James Dio was singing about. Recently, I looked it up. Apparently, it’s about some transdimensional, chain swinging Batmanesque masked messianic figure taking a dive to save an ungrateful humanity. Sounds familiar. Now on a personal level, “Holy Diver” has lately come to mean something else. One, call her the manifestation of my Jungian Anima , the female archetype lurking in a man’s psyche, or simply the temptress, a Sky Dakini in the flesh luring me to take the plunge. This Diver, a Skydiver actually, is no fantasy. She is the latest YouTube demigoddess I stumbled upon. A striking, brown-haired, yet a decidedly unglamorous young woman who sits on a chai...

Happy Endings…

After more than a decade around boats, and for earlier living in Goa, whose only relevance here is that it happens to have a seashore, I am routinely treated as a know-all repository for anything remotely connected to ships and vessels. Of all the questions I get, the one I detest most, and about which I know virtually nothing except having seen a few lined up for scrapping at Alang, concern cruise liners. To be fair, I did predict the commercial failure of India’s first homegrown cruise ship even before its maiden voyage. Like most of my negative prognoses, that too came true. But my dislike for cruise liners has nothing to do with ships. It has everything to do with the people asking the questions. The questions are never about ships, routes, costs or even seasickness. The most common one is - whether it is true that one can avail of intimate services on board, in massage parlours and saunas, the “happy ending” kind, while their families lounge on deck and pose for photos. Why g...

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