2013 - another year gone by!

It never ceases to amaze me how fast the year 2013 went by - it seems like just the other day that we were ushering in the year 2013 and here I am writing about the year in retrospect!

All through 2013 the work-life balance has been fantastic and professionally much of has gone to plan. We have been successful in growing our algae in huge open ponds, been able to harvest them without spending too much money or energy and then the harvested wet algal biomass has been successfully processed into bio-crude - pretty much just as petroleum crude was made naturally below the earth's surface over millions of years, only we do it a lot faster and sustainably! We've even managed to take the renewable algal bio-crude and fractionate it into 12 different fractions of petro-products that include petrol, diesel, jet fuel, kerosene and naphtha. For us this was a vindication of our stand that we need only to find ways to maximise production of biomass in an energetically and economically sustainable way to be able to produce crude oil cost-competitively vis-a-vis petro-crude. Here in Chennai, India we have been working on ways to turn lowly algae into crude oil and much of our research work here has found application in our demonstration plant being built down under in Whyalla, South Australia. We are more than half way through building this demonstration facility that will go on-stream in January 2014. It will be the first facility in the world where it will be possible to go from algae grown in test-tubes to barrels of bio-crude and all this using sea-water and barren land by the sea thus avoiding any food vs. fuel competition.

 

Pictured above is our Demonstration Plant under-construction in Whyalla, South Australia

Hopefully it will all happen at a cost that is acceptable to the world. Fingers crossed!

 Fractionally distilled algal bio-crude converted to a range of petro-products

I have traveled a fair bit this year, starting with a trip in February to France where I caught up with Kenneth Birbeck and his family in Normandy. Ken's aunt was one of the first English-women to volunteer to travel to India to join the teaching staff of our fledgling school in the hills of Kodaikanal back in the early twenties. Thanks to Ken and his aunt's meticulously kept diaries we have a great idea of what it was like in the early years of our school which turns 100 years old in 2014.

With Ken and Claudie in Normandy, France

Sudha and I then traveled to Australia to join a few school buddies at their Australian Old Georgian Reunion in Inverloch in the State of Victoria where we had ourselves a great time catching up with friends from across Australia and a few from the UK.

                                                         With friends from school in Melbourne enroute to Australian Old Georgian Reunion

There were of course numerous trips up into the Blue Mountains of South India for planning our school's centenary activities and of course for the annual school reunion in July on the beautiful campus of our alma mater. We also had ourselves a terrific time in Bangalore at the offsite reunion of school friends organised by the Bangalore Old Georgians who did a terrific job of organising a fun time for so many of us.

On the family front it was the wedding of our Naval Officer son Ashwin that took up all our time and energy - yes, it all finally came together in a most enjoyable two- day celebration in early November and we had the honour of having some of our closest friends from school, my University and Sudha's childhood in attendance. Hats off to so many of our friends who travelled from the US, Europe, Australia, the UAE and Malaysia just to be there with us at the wedding.

                                                                                         We're six of us now that make up our family

We have been lucky to have a healthy year with nobody really having to undergo any significant health related issues. Our daughter, Ammu and husband Arun have been busy in Bangalore with work, their adorable Cocker Spaniel Mousse and also with a full house at home! 

                                                                             That's Mousse

The newlyweds, Ashwin and Devika are now back in Bombay where Ashwin is based aboard an Indian Navy submarine for now. Come January he will move to the School of Advanced Undersea Warfare (SAUW) at Vizag to undergo a one year conversion course that qualifies him to join the handful of Indian Naval officers who operate India’s only operational nuclear submarine.

For Sudha and me has suddenly dawned on us that with the marriage of the children out of the way there is a fair bit of time hanging on our hands especially when I get back from work in the evenings! We need to find ways to gainfully use the spare time. But then again there's the school centenary coming up and there's plenty to do on that front so that should keep me on my toes at least until July 2014!

Sudha and I would like to thank each and every one of you for the good times, friendship and fellowship you have shared with us over the year 2013. Here's wishing all of you, friends and family, a merry Christmas and a very happy 2014. We hope there will be at least a few occasions in 2014 when our paths will cross and we get to sit down somewhere in the world and catch up with all that's happening in your lives.

Warmest regards                                           

Sudha & Tusky

Down south in rural Tamilnadu

An old friend Oby (from my St Joseph's College, Trichy days) had a wedding reception for his daughter in a place called Ambilikkai in South Western Tamilnadu. Oby comes from an amazing family of Kerala Christian doctors who have settled in these parts for two generations and are doing yeoman service to the community there. They run the Christian Fellowship Community Hospital where thousands of people from a radius of over 50kms, go to get treated for Cancer, Gastro-intestinal disorders, Leprosy, Urological complaints and many more illnesses.

The reception was in the evening and I got there in the morning so I got around to doing a walkabout in the area. This is technically a very dry area and the dominant color is usually brown but this is the rainy season so the area goes very green, albeit for a very short time. Went around to a few of the farms there and learned a few things besides taking in the farming lifestyle of these simple rural folks. Here are some pictures some of you may enjoy:

A perfect heart-shaped abode of ants who stick the leaves of the sapota tree together with their saliva to build their home!

Clitoria ternatea - no money for guessing why that flower gets such an interesting name! It may soon turn out to be the source for unique cliotides that can cure some cancers!

I've seen the tamarind tree since I can remember but never noticed its flowers!

Maize fields in the foreground and the Pulney Hills in the background - typical rural scene in this part of Tamilnadu

 

Wild solanaceous flower - those golden yellow spots are to entice insects into the flower to pollinate the flower!

Yet another beautiful wild flower - not sure what its technical name is!

This is a first for me! Have seen this plant (Gloriosa superba - known in Tamil as Kannvalli) back home in Kerala and have admired its beauty but this is the first time I have seen it cultivated - it is grown for its seed and tuber. The seed has a high content of cholchicine and gloriosine both alkaloids are used to treat gout and rheumatism. Seeds sell for Rs 2000 a kilo.

Close up of the Gloriosa flower!

Those are the fruit of the plant that bear the seeds which are of commercial value.

Thats the farmer who grows those unique crops!

He also grows tobacco! With one crop he cures and with the other he kills!

A Suitable Girl

Its been over a year since we began looking out for a bride for our Naval Officer son. Like most folks these days we set out to put Ashwin's details on a popular matrimonial website in order to get us access to details of potential daughters-in-law. We did pretty much the same thing when it came to Ammu, our daughter, some four years earlier, but in her case we hit upon our potential son-in-law in as little as one week of posting her details on the site! And what was amazing was that we did not have her permission to put up her picture on the matrimonial website so only some textual detail was put up! We tried doing the same for our son but the fish were not biting! Which  meant we had to put up his pictures on the website along with a whole lot more details about him! 

Weeks went by with Sudha and I poring over hundreds of profiles and pictures of young things from all over the country and overseas but nothing was really clicking because even when we expressed interest the girls' folks seemed uninterested! With the few that did reciprocate interest there would be issues with the girl's looks, or the girl's family or the girl's educational background! But mostly the problem stemmed from the fact that most girls did not fancy marrying a Naval officer because they would be subject to frequent transfers (postings) which meant that they would not be able to keep their jobs. Then ofourse, there were those who felt that Ashwin's specialisation as a submariner meant he risked his life too often by spending too much of his working life at the bottom of some ocean somewhere! On occasion we would get to talk to potential brides' parents and try to set up initial contacts between Ashwin and the girl concerned but then something would give and the call between him and the girl would not materialise. Then it would back to the drawing board and poring over profiles and sending off details of more girls to Ashwin and getting him to shortlist a few who's parents Sudha and I would try and make contact with. Then one day we stumble across the details of a PYT who is based in Chennai but her parents were in Kerala - I manage to speak to the father of the PYT and was asked to send along Ashwin's horoscope and other details. Weeks go by and there is no come back from Kerala and then one day Sudha gets this call from a nephew's wife saying that they had a call from people they know, enquiring about the suitability of Ashwin as a bridegroom for their daughter. This nephew is also in the Navy and hence the referral by the PYT's parents to enquire about Ashwin. Ofcourse, Sudha's nephew assured the parents of the PYT that Ashwin was all of what his CV and matrimonial profile depicted him to be. 

I then get on to FaceBook to check out the girl and sure enough there she is - plenty of pictures of her there. Ashwin was asked to check the PYT out on FB and he comes back to his mother and wants to  know if we actually find the girl ok! He asks the question not once or twice but several times and wants to be assured that we were ok with the pictures of the girl! Its only then that we realise that he was asking because the PYT wore pretty modern outfits in the pictures, so the son was wondering why his parents were not scandalised by the pictures! Soon the parents of the girl and the girl herself paid us a visit at home and spent a little while with us over lunch and before long Ashwin and the PYT were on phone with each other. A week later we got the green signal from the son and then the marriage machinery begins to crank up. An engagement was in order, Ashwin and Devika (thats the name of the PYT!) were soon engaged and then they began their count down to November 3rd - the day they are to be married. 

 

Its amazing how fast time went by - before we knew it the wedding was upon us - Ashwin had in the meantime been posted out to Mumbai on INS Sindhu Vijay. Now it was about making sure the Navy gave him his leave to get married! He shows up on 2nd Nov morning to get married on 3rd Nov giving the bride and her folks plenty of kittens in their tummies wondering if he would be there for the marriage!

Suffice it to say that the pre-wedding party and the wedding went very well and Ashwin and Devika are finally man and wife thus ending one whole year of searching for a suitable girl! 

2012 - the year in retrospect

Like most years in my fifty five years of existence 2012 too was good, bad and indifferent but what matters most is that the good was a whole lot more than the bad and the indifferent put together!

The year started with some interesting developments on the professional front because our company decided to put its money where its mouth is and invested heavily in a biotechnology led algal biofuels initiative in Australia. Parallely, we set up an Algal Research Facility in Chennai, India to validate some of the algal research results we have shown in Australia as well as to develop solutions for some seemingly intractable problems in the algal biofuels domain. Happily for me and for the company much of what we had set out to do we have been able to demonstrate ‘proof of concept’ and show that we could well be on the way to producing bio-crude from algae – stuff that can actually go into a regular oil refinery whence it can be turned into petrol, diesel, kerosene and other fuels as well as organic chemicals.

 

Open Algal ponds (left) from which algae are harvested and processed into algal bio-crude (right)

Our Indian Algal Research Facility has recently been accorded recognition by the Government of India’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) – the only algal lab in India to be so recognized.

Algal research ponds in India

And in Australia the Federal Government recognized us by conferring upon us a major $ 4.4 million dollar grant from the Australian Biofuel Investment Readiness (ABIR) fund. It’s another thing that the money hasn’t yet begun to flow from the Aussie government but we are hopeful that it will start soon and we will be able to show the world that it is possible to produce bio-crude sustainably from seawater fed ponds built on un-arable lands, at costs lower than current petro-crude cost.Enough of blowing my trumpet I would imagine!

On the personal front life has been good – Sudha and I have been around a fair bit this year, both in India and overseas. Most of our travel being to Kerala, Ketti, Bengaluru and a bit of it overseas. My school reunions are still the best – we had an awesome reunion in school in July and then again in Kodaikanal not so long ago. These school reunions and get-togethers have been happening so often that a lot of folks (including our kids!) wonder how Sudha and I manage to find the time to get around to all of those reunions, meetings and get-togethers! Sometimes, I wonder too!! The reunions in Bali and Kuala Lumpur in Oct-Nov this year were fantastic and it was wonderful catching up with so many Georgians who showed up from all over Australia, Malaysia and India.

Sudha and yours truly aboard the Bali Hai II (left) some of the school alumni who made it to Bali, Indonesia

Health has been fine for me and mine but some of my friends have had to deal with reverses, a good friend in Berlin, Germany was diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease which is progressively getting worse – he now needs 24x7 nursing care – he’s on a ventilator, has no control of his bowels and cannot find the strength to stand up and move about, ironically his mind remains as sharp as ever. Another friend from university lost a 25 year old daughter in a most heinous murder in Mumbai, India. And sadly two good friends in Australia lost their wives to the big ‘C’. We hope the families of these dear friends will find the strength of spirit to take them through these tough times.

Our children have been busy – Ammu and Arun moved from Mumbai to Bengaluru early in the year and that means we find ourselves heading off to Bengaluru at the drop of a hat. Their little doggy Mousse Nair is a major attractant for me to do that trip to the garden city! Ashwin also was posted out from the Indian Naval Submarine base in Vizag to the Indian Naval Academy in North Kerala where he is Divisional Officer in-charge of a Division of Naval Cadets and is mentor and tormentor to the bunch! We hope he will be able to nurture those young lads and lasses into the finest officers the Navy can possibly have.

Ammu, Ashwin & Mousse Nair

 

Ammu and Arun

We look forward to an eventful 2013 and hope that all of you, friends and family, have a healthy, happy, happening and joyful year ahead. May there be plenty of all the good things in life for all of you and very little of the niggles that life sometimes throws our way. It’s been an absolute treat to count you all among our friends  and family and we look forward  to    plenty of interactions with every one of you in the year ahead.