Fueling Thoughts

  After a little over a year, I could finally leave my hometown and board a train, perhaps after half a decade. It was the new Vande Bharat overnight service to Kolkata - Indian Railways’ latest flagship and the country’s first high-speed sleeper train. Certainly the most modern thing on rails in India, with interiors almost at par with new Chinese trains, though not quite there yet. The travellers, however, were mostly unchanged - yelling across the wagon, playing music, or watching news and clips on mobiles at full volume. If some wore headphones, it took care of the input, not their vocal cords. The train was new and clean, inside and out. The linen was fresh and crisp. It travelled quite fast for an Indian train, and almost everything worked, except the bathroom occupancy lights. They glowed green at all times, which meant anyone inside had to bear the indignity of the doorknob being repeatedly rattled by people attempting to enter, especially while they were re...

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...

North East India has long been conflict-ridden. First came fights among tribes, then tribals versus non-tribals, then tribals and non-tribals against invaders, followed by cries for independence, protests against discrimination, and so on. It was this way before the British arrived, it remained so after they left, and it continued unchanged as part of India. The 70s and 80s saw mass  insurgency, agitations, and political unrest. And yet, if there was one man who was the undisputed and omnipresent aspirational icon across the region, it was Bruce Lee. My generation grew up under his stern, steely, daring, all-seeing eyes. He was everywhere, staring down from posters on the walls of  bedrooms, roadside eateries, garages, and barbershops. Fights in ticket queues outside theatres screening his movies put those in the films to shame. With much of the population having Mongoloid features, teenagers and young men imitated his look and strut, sporting the Lee-cut hairstyle that resemb...

 Let’s face it, people may watch a random film without relating to anyone in it, but not TV serials. Hence, the ever-suffering strong woman with a heart of gold in soaps, tailor-made for a predominantly female audience. For me, since school, it was Mr. Spock. Tall, fit, logical, cool vampire ears, a deadly shoulder grab, and zero interest in women, basically everything I wasn’t, except the last part. Most girls around me seemed to think I was just as alien anyway. With "The Next Generation", Spock became Picard, still logical, aloof, single, but more human. His interest in women? Strictly intellectual equals. My loyalty shifted accordingly. Fast-forward a decade. I was at my parents’ place when an early morning call woke me. An acquaintance, an aspiring politician from a neighbouring state, with a request. Not the kind anyone wants to hear first thing in the morning, and one most would refuse right away. By then I had already hit rock bottom in Goa, the second or third time i...

  I came across a report in a local English daily from last year stating that the riverine island of Majuli on the Brahmaputra does not have a single functioning river ambulance. One vessel is reportedly in a completely dilapidated state, while two others are considered repairable, at least for now. Around the same time, I was pitching for CSR grants to build a purpose-designed shallow-water ambulance using my bamboo composite boat-building technology, powered by a diesel-solar hybrid propulsion system. To strengthen my case, I used images from Dhubri in western Assam, where three identical fibreglass boat Ambulances fitted with large imported outboard motors were lying beached on a sandbank, slowly disintegrating. Each of these vessels had been either purchased by the government or donated by state PSUs, at a cost of at least USD 5,000 apiece. They were rarely operated due to the high running costs of their fuel-hungry petrol outboard motors, compounded by fuel pilferage by staf...

  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...

  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...

Between faded horoscopes and "Ballsbridge University" degrees: On Lady Luck, a builder, fake PhDs, and a Chief Minister who chose to sprint away.   The only thing feminine in “luck” is its fickle nature. The down-on-his-luck (so he said) builder came to me through a mutual friend, clutching his tattered horoscope. My reputation as a seer was not built on the “says what you want to hear” charm of Asterix’s soothsayer, nor on the absurd serendipity of that old Persian tale where everything a false prophet uttered came true, a story recycled across countless Asian folklore. It exists only because of yarns spread by people like the friend who brought him, who himself earlier laughed and told me that the builder had already consulted at least 5,000 astrologers and tantrics . “So what’s your bloody problem?” I growled, looking at his smudged, dog-eared, cello-tape-stitched astro roadmap. “You have more than enough money, your family is healthy, your children are doing fine, and th...

I almost stepped on a rake again the other day, driven by the urge to jump into a field that is, in theory, indispensable, yet in practice sits squarely in the paradox of "high need with zero demand". The subject: Low-energy water pumping. I have spent years obsessing over designs that use a river’s kinetic energy to pump water into fields - pontoon-mounted Darrieus or Gorlov turbines driving pumps, to more esoteric ideas like the Hydrautomat water staircase. The wake-up jolt came when my own shadow asked : fine, you build a working prototype, then what? Who, exactly, will use it or buy it? A sobering question. Experience and data both show that most community-scale alternative energy or WASH projects collapse the moment they are no longer underwritten or subsidized by governments or NGOs. While riding through the upper reaches of Arunachal Pradesh, I was initially awed, and eventually irritated, by the number of water-driven prayer wheels lining the roadsides....

I got introduced to Billy Bob Thornton’s acting prowess through Landman. Next, I binged through Goliath, then Fargo, and now am back to season two of Landman. From what I’ve read, he lived a hard, working man’s life before his screen breakthrough. And it shows. His onscreen presence, is not something any acting school can teach. He is essentially always himself, a ronin, a rogue inside the system, playing by his own rules, alone, and never hesitant about speaking his mind. Plus, in real life, he is dyslexic and struggled in his education - things I can strongly relate to. It is in episode two of Landman season two  (word of warning - if you have watched the 2nd season, don't bother. Its rank bad),  where his character tells his son about his own frustrated, physically abusive father and says: “Just know this: however you raise your son is how he’s gonna raise his son.”  That line resonated. Not that I was physically abused growing up, but a binary system of n...