Fueling Thoughts

I was still too groggy in the morning to notice that his breath reeked of stale booze when he stopped me outside a store where I just purchase milk and showing me his calloused dirty hands said that he was an out of job mechanic and if could I help him buy some rations as he has two small daughters to feed. Frankly,  I didn't like him at all, but his plea about having kids to feed struck a cord.  The dislike only deepened when sensing my positive disposition he quickly added a list of stuff: flour, tea, sugar and rice.  "Whoa, I am not getting you your  shopping list" I told him and just asked told the store clerk to give him a kilo of flour on my account. "What, you can't even buy me 5 kilos" he retorted angrily and bitterly, to which he received a string of expletives(my first in the day) and was left standing empty-handed. It was obvious that in his eyes I was a fat selfish   Bourgeoisie  unwilling to help a desperate man, whereas  I saw an ent...

 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 r...

 

 

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 an...

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...