Fueling Thoughts

A couple of weeks back I had the opportunity to visit a pretty large plant, an old one, a sort of local Industrial landmark, but well past its prime where even the signs of decay were showing signs of age. The white wash was peeling off most buildings and most of the metallic structures were either rusty or thickened by innumerable coats of paint. Their staff too, either seemed  approaching retirement age or were youngsters who looked as if they had grown up in one of the employee's colonies and filled up the posts vacated by the previous generation. Fuel Paradise Walking the plant's internal roadways below smoking stacks and trying not to gag in air, breathable only if one is used to the smell of ammonia and rotten eggs, we made our way to see a senior engineer whose age made one think that he had  not only witnessed the commissioning, but even the laying of the foundation stone of the factory. For a change, he was quite amiable, offered us water, spoke about...

"I am not running Greenpeace here," proclaimed a CEO of a large company to whom I was extolling the virtues and eco-friendliness of our Emulsified Fuels. My two hour session where  my every point  was cross questioned, countered or simply ignored, all stemmed down to one thing;  by how much would our fuel be cheaper than their current stock.  Though we have already got used to this characteristic routine and now expect it from every potential client, I still can't help getting peeved when industry people,  especially the technical bosses just ignore the ecological impact and the long time maintenance related benefits derived from using a superior grade of Fuel. Car Fuel Once while facing a similar scenario, I suddenly asked my prospective as whether he uses the same criteria of buying only the cheapest fuel for his luxury car and whether he used the cheapest lubricants in it as well. Lets say he was startled for a moment, not used to having v...

IF ONLY Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!! Alcohol doesn’t kill; people just die from liver cirrhosis, Tobacco trees never choked anyone; people just die from lung cancer & Helmets definitely don’t safe lives as a person dies from old age anyway..  Judging life’s progress by reminiscing the various sweet first times and “would be happy to forget” last ones, there are also the memories of different individuals with whom, whether willingly or otherwise, we spent any length of time. And surprisingly, while the nice, pleasant and good, are thought of only once in a while, it is usually the memory of the unsavoury ones that come cropping up every now and then. For me one such living example of God’s follies was of all things, an editor. I am not taking about Rajan here, but a certain individual who once headed an Auto journal for a short duration before he successfully drove it into the graveyard of dead publications. My association with him stemmed...

The following article had been carried in the U.S. publication  Whole Life Times  and had been reproduced from its website. The article is also mentioned in the database of  the Australian National Library.   When I boarded the last bus from Tezpur to Rangapara, in the heart of India's north-eastern  state of Assam, the orb of the rising moon already dominated the winter evening. I knew a  Purnima (full moon) was approaching, more so because I was on my way to attend an  obscure Buddhist festival. And these are inevitably held on full-moon nights.  When the bus finally moved, the tiredness and irritation of the day's travel gave way to the  intent of studying the moonlit countryside. This lasted until the vehicle turned off the  highway to the side roads, which in daylight resembled nothing so much as a bombed airfield,  were even worse in darkness. The moon I had so enthusiastically planned to observe kept...

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...