Innovating in India

 Rajiv Bajaj, the Big Boss of Bajaj Auto once remarked that innovating in India is equivalent to "MAD IN INDIA." He couldn’t have been more right. 

In the last few months of building the prototypes of our shallow water boat motors, we are stumbling against every single obstacle possible; both those envisaged and others we couldn’t even imagine. 

The 3d scans all came with skewed geometry, necessitating manual remeasurement and rectification. Every bearing housing was either too tight or loose, the same with the shafts. Most aluminium casting shops refused right away to make sample pieces and the one that finally took the job neither sieved the sand nor removed the dross, resulting in pockmarked casts with black spots, but blamed our 3d-printed patterns for their bad quality casts. 

While trying to get the gears made, one irritated Sardarji remarked that they don't have time to make one-off pieces (that's just normal spur gears), besides he couldn't guarantee the required precision.  So I asked him what kind of gears do they make to which he gruffly replied "for Lathe machines". Which partially explained why all our machined parts were slightly off. Another gear cutting workshop owner after promising to build us two samples, did a complete about-turn after I gave him a sample to replicate, claiming that he needs a minimum order of 50 units at a cost 4 times higher than if imported from China. 

Virtually everyone had to be cajoled into doing their jobs because they all claimed that they are only interested in large production orders. Thus, the clutch is yet to arrive after two months of ordering and making full payment and the same is with several other parts. And the most insulting part is being universally regarded as a rich nut-case with money to burn on a frivolous project or alternately a  poor time-waster. So much for  #atmanirbharta #india #innovations

Ode to the Ego

 

Never Surrender the "I"

 

The Corporate Alladin's Lamp

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!!
 

Bad "Servile" Blood

Last night, I finished 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 Valley 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 successfully raised hundred of million dollars from VCs. 

With the initial team of experts and technologists leaving or fired by the psychopathic duo, later the venture relied on a small army of scared, servile and sycophantic  Indian minions afraid of losing their jobs and visas. There were also a  couple of lying Chinese, and the company was backed by powerful white and Jewish old men ready to sacrifice their grandchildren to Moloch for their seat on the board in exchange for stock and by the highest echelons of the Democrat party right from the Clintons to Biden and the Obamas. 

So when the shit finally hit the ceiling, VCs learned that they invested in an elaborate scam and lost their money, almost a million people jeopardized their lives with inaccurate tests, the female Steve Jobs wannabe remained unrepentant and is trying to play the role of a victim and the only beneficiaries of this Unicorn to Dinosaur story as usual are the American lawyers.

All too familiar elements for me, fake accents,to  bogus antecedents and reports, political corruption, legal intimidation, old coots gaga for a smart confident young woman, greed, caprice,  tyranny and as an Indian the most familiar of them all : Bullying Indian business owners treating employees and  hired consultants like servants.

Considering people's propensity for listening to and believing in fables, especially those promising them heap loads of money, I have thus started reading "Bullshit & Philosophy" by Gary S. Hardcastle.

I said it FIRST !!

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 Globalist think tank, the  World Economic Forum  let the Cat out of the Bag, and now phrase "The Great Reset" is on many a person's lips. But what nobody is asking is what came first, which is the cause and which is the effect? The great reset as a consequence of a Pandemic or a Scamdemic created to bring about a great reset for a totalitarian Techno-fascist global network of regimes? 

Pity the silent majority still prefers to remain as complacent virtue signalling sheep, muzzled and mum...

Looking around for an image of a mask wearing sheep for this piece, I stumbled on this decal for sale on Amazon one of the tech giants who profited immensely for the lockdown. Guess for Bezos, business is business, and he didn't jump upon the censorship bandwagon like google, the mass media  and the social media behemoths.

On Solitude and Sanity

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 human stupidity that is... Contrary to what Hollywood and the popular culture has been indoctrinating, the real Zombie apocalypses doesn't involve  living corpses thronging the streets, but living people who choose to remain brain-dead, watch TV and  hide in the confines of their homes.

On the collapse of life and civilization by Dmitry Orlov in his book 5 stages of Collapse