Fueling Thoughts

The first day of the year brings symbolic "new beginnings," but in reality, it's just another date on the calendar. Unlike the winter solstice, January 1st lacks any astronomical or religious significance. Across major cultures, there are at least five different New Year dates. This one owes its existence to a Roman-era calendar, later corrected in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII after the Julian calendar had accumulated ten extra days. Interestingly, the Orthodox New Year, celebrated by believers of the Orthodox Church in Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Balkans, and Ethiopia, is also known as the Old New Year. According to the Julian calendar, it falls on January 14 in the Gregorian calendar. This festival coincides with the Hindu Makar Sankranti festival in North India, Pongal in the South, and Bihu in Assam, in India's northeast. Astrologically and astronomically, this is the day the Sun moves from Sagittarius to Capricorn, heralding midwinter and the approach of ...

  Like many in my generation, I grew up under the stern, steely, daring, all-seeing eyes of Bruce Lee! He was everywhere—staring down from the walls of friends' bedrooms, roadside eateries, garages, and barbershops. In the late '70s and early '80s, he was the omnipresent aspirational icon in northeast India. Regular fights in the serpentine queues outside theatres screening his movies rivaled those in his films. With a large section of the population having Mongoloid features, teenagers and young men imitated his look—sporting haircuts that resembled bristles on a wild boar’s back, maintaining perennially scowling expressions, and joining martial arts classes. Even those who didn’t join such classes still acted like Kung Fu or Karate experts. Meanwhile, traders made a killing selling Jalandhar-made fake Chinese nunchaku, pirated or original copies of Kung Fu Weekly (complete with the inevitable Bruce Lee poster), and Tao of Jeet Kune Do or Official Karate magazines, whic...

In a convoluted scene straight out of a raunchy early 70s Ted Mark novel, like the one where the US President (a parody of Richard Nixon), undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, was asked by a doctor whether he was attracted to his mother, before another inquired if he had ever acted on it—I too was facing a similar situation, but in a woke mid-2020s fashion. First, I was asked whether I identified as male, and next if I had the necessary hardware provided by Mother Nature. And no, this wasn’t some gender rights imbroglio I unwittingly got into, but a questionnaire from a US-based Impact Startup Fund for their fellowship program, one whose DEI agenda far overshadowed their green credentials. The rest of the questions were pretty staid: what you’re doing, why, who benefits, and so on. Until my non-bionic Terminator brain’s non-electric eye stumbled upon one for which I had no ready answer. It was like being back in college, sitting for a Corporate Finance paper—a subject I utterly deteste...

  It was during a visit to an industrial area near Delhi where by chance I came across a familiar steel rebar factory. Now abandoned, its gates locked and bent, with not even a guard in sight. When I asked around, I was told, "Oh, that plant? It’s been closed for years, the owner’s in hiding." Further digging revealed that he and his sons were wanted by banks, private creditors, and government agencies. Their investments in an African plant had also gone belly up. How the mighty had fallen, I thought. These were the same people who caused me immense distress and months of sleepless nights, using legal intimidation and a sham arbitration case, appointing their own foreman as arbitrator. All because I refused to get arm twisted to reveal one of my professional secrets - the formula of a surfactant used in fuel emulsification. Finally, it was only my well-wishers in the government that got them off my back. A clan of arrogant, greedy, egoistic and unscrupulous sc...

  Last year Channel 4 made a major exposé on the Biomass Stove Carbon Credit scam specifically naming US based C-Quest Capital and detailing how most of their distributed stoves in Malawi were out of commission, but still accruing phantom Carbon credits. As someone who's been deeply involved in developing high-efficiency, low-smoke Biomass Stoves with a patent-pending design, I am not surprised. Having seen many of the stoves distributed by these so-called Carbon Credit companies, I can tell you first-hand that the claimed efficiency figures are laughable. Most of these stoves are poorly made, flimsy, and to put it bluntly, absolute garbage! Worse still, their methods for calculating carbon credits? Accountant meets the Phantom Menace, in other words a spreadsheet fantasy. Last year, C-Quest Capital's Indian subsidiary approached me for my patent pending biomass stove design. Long story short, they wanted a few units for testing, made me jump through endless hoop...

  When I first dipped my toes into inland navigation, I once embarked on a few zig-zagging trips aboard the local country boat ferries, known as “Bhutbhuti,” on the Brahmaputra in Guwahati. After my earlier failed attempts to engage with country boat operators and nearly getting tossed out by hostile crews, I took a different approach. I played the role of a clueless NRI( Indian residing abroad), out on a nostalgia trip in my hometown. With a big, stupid grin, obsessively clicking everything with my mobile, I asked the most naive questions, looking every bit like a harmless tourist.     A new government subsidized marine engine in a Country Boat Ferry , but it still doesn't plug the leaks      What I saw on those trips wasn't eye-opening as I had seen it all before. The boats were all flooded up to the floorboards. Their propeller shafts, connected to old lorry engines serving as power plants, were so poorly sealed, that they practically poured ...