Fueling Thoughts

snake oil  (dictionary.com) noun 1.  any of various liquid concoctions of questionable medical value sold as an all-purpose curative,especially by traveling hucksters. 2.  Slang. deceptive talk or actions; hooey; bunkum.  From commuters puttering to work on miserly two-wheelers, to those who splurge on the latest imported four-wheeled status symbol, albeit a diesel version and the industrial sector for whom it comprises a major recurring expenditure, high prices of Fuel are a painful reality for all. However, whenever a technology that promises to save a few litres of the all-precious fluid is announced, it is instantly relegated to the category of Snake Oil Salesmen, in which none but the most gullible would believe in or actually spend any money on.  But do they work? The only question ever uttered about any of these wonder devices, additives or technologies is invariably “does it work?” Unfortunately, there is no single universal answer...

Sometimes in the autumn of 2010 I was flying from Mumbai to my hometown Guwahati, as usually on the cheapest air-ticket with a tradeoff in having a long looping route, via Kolkata and Agartala. The short stretch between Agartala and Guwahati is actually a quick aerial hop over Meghalaya, which if luck accords, would remain cloud-cover free offering the sight of marvelous verdant mountainsides, steep gorges and snaking brown rivers below. It was during this flight, when thanks to exceptionally clear weather I noticed the scattered pockets of deforestation on seemingly inaccessible hillsides, ones caused not by commercial logging but by the nearby villager’s mundane need for firewood. Deforestation; caused by indispensable human need for Firewood, an endemic problem of all the mountain areas of India.   I remembered instantly how once as a guest of the venerable T.G.Rinpoche at Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh (another mountainous State with pockmarked hillsides), my host who...

The Question of Insurance Coverage If there is a single aspect that gives me the jitters about the numerous biking jaunts I undertook in the past, is the fact that during most of them, I rode without any personal Insurance cover. It is pure luck that I rode through all of them without any mishaps and so the lack of coverage seemed almost trivial. Well, I won’t deny that the thought wasn’t there somewhere in the back of my mind and on a couple of occasions I even went to find out details about the various accident and medical cover insurance policies available. But it was way back in the early nineties when Insurance was strictly a privilege of our Socialist Comrades, the Public Sector. In the first General Insurance Company's office I visited, the person dealing with Personal Accident Insurances was missing for a couple of hours and no one knew where he was and when he would be back. After waiting for close to two hours and fed up of getting “why are you he...

When Royal Enfield motorcycle’s designers in Redditch blueprinted the Bullet, their intent was to create a workhorse and so emphasis was placed on mechanical reliability and not performance. As a result, the traditional Bullet engine packs a solid construction, one that can endure colossal mechanical fatigue and stress. Thus it doesn’t take much to garner appreciably higher power output from the motorcycle and one doesn’t have to be either Fritz Egli or have a state-of-the-art workshop to do it. For starters just knock in an additional Spark Plug and you already have something worthwhile. And no, you don’t have to go for the Royal Enfield’s new unit engine, of the Thunderbird TBTS to have the Twin Spark Plug advantage. As I have been riding one for the past eight years. A second Spark stands for cleaner and faster rate of combustion translating both into higher RPMs, better power and leaner burning. In fact far leaner and Fuel efficient then the Enfield’s AVL engine. Coming...