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.

2011 the year that was

Its that time of the year when one looks back to see how good or bad this one's been. So how was 2011 the year thats just gone by, for you? For us I have to say it was all of good, bad and indifferent! The year began with some promise but the global financial crisis did not seem like it was in a mood to let up and it was beginning to draw Europe into its grip too. Until then our markets in Europe seemed fine and business was not too bad but as soon as Europe seemed to catch that cold we could see we were in for the shivers and as the year drew on we were not just shivering from the effect we were going malarial!

Some travel in March-April to Oz was great because it allowed me to switch off from my business woes in Europe and focus on some good times I had with OGs down under and with biofuels experts across Oz! Its always great to spend time down under because there are so many folks one manages to hook up with that even a few weeks down under would seem like its not enough. Catching up with the Begum, Garry, Noel, Jan, Debbie, Bruce, Jenny Lazaro, Kevin Lewis, Annalie and David and so many others in Sydney was just fantastic. Moving on to Melbourne and I got to meet up with John C-Gita, Trevor-Wendy, Nigel-Di, Peter-Olivia Steers, Rod-Glo and some others. In Adelaide it was great hooking up with the oldest known Old Georgian alive - William Pembshaw and his wife and then in Perth it was the icing on the cake - caught up with Glenn, Cherie, Paul Sargon, Peter Duncan, Dave-Sheela Alley, Howie-Pat Markham, the Cumine girls and so many others.

We had this Himalayan expedition plan in the works for some time and come July things were falling into place for us on that front - our trip to Ladakh and Leh was upon us and boy was it full of excitement. For me that must rate as one of the best trips I have done because those mountains are just so awesome. Most importantly the trip was done with friends from school and thanx to the good offices of the Army we got about to some awesome places.

Bindu, Sudha, Doc Jimmy, Mary and Sheila at Khardungla - 18.380 feet above MSL

The second half of the year 2011 saw Sudha and me doing a fair bit of travel in the country - I finally got around to spending time with my daughter and son-in-law in Mumbai after almost a year of their marriage! It was exciting because I was going to be spending time with their cocker spaniel puppy named Mousse Nair!

Momma and Mousse Nair

As the year drew to a close the marriage season beckoned - We are at that age when our buddies have children of marriageable age and there is no way we can wriggle out of being at those weddings!

I'm not mentioning the two reunions in the year - both of which were a lot of fun and fellowship - you all know about them so I will not labour the point!

Georgians outside Baba Pujara's home in Coonoor - getting set to leave for the old valley

The children have been good - Ashwin has moved to the Indian Naval Academy as Divisional Officer where he mentors fresh cadets joining the Navy in a spanking new Academy. Am looking forward to going there and checking out the place - Sudha has already done her round of the Academy! Ammu and Arun are good too - they have been getting ready to move base from Mumbai to Bangalore because IBM has decided to move Arun that way. Their lives have been consumed by their little Mousse - its wonderful to see how they are enjoying their first begotten son!

Sudha poses at the waterfront at the Indian Naval Academy, Ezhimalai

There are just another 3 days to go before the world turns another year older - allow me to wish you all, wherever you are, a fantastic new year and may there be lots of happiness, health and prosperity in store for all of you.

Read only mode

Some nine years ago I set out to connect some of my university buddies with each other and all of us by setting up an e-group for them. The concept was new and exciting then - it was easy get my University friends, located all over the world, to  subscribe and enjoy the networking. It was amazing how some 72 of us could positively use the network which was abuzz with an average of some 300 mails a month. Ofcourse, for a university that had an annual intake of over 3000 people that was really a small number of us who were in touch with each other! But it was great because we shared so much through the e-group - then, one of our group, a revered and most admired member of the group passed away and left us all suddenly all too aware of our mortality! Thanx to the e-group we re-grouped and actually started a campaign to set up a scholarship in the old university in the name of our dear, departed friend. It did not take us too long to collect a corpus of funds from all over the world and put it in fixed deposit in the university so as to allow the interest to be used to pay out the scholarship. It paid for one student every year and covered his/her entire cost of studying (three years) at the university - at the time it was the highest paying scholarship in the university. 

                                                                                   An aerial view of the 12,000 hectare university campus in the foothills of the Himalayas 

Soon I began wondering why my boarding school buddies did not network in this manner - suggestions to start an e-group similar to what I had set up among my University friends did not elicit an excited response. But start it I did and in a month we had just some 50 people signed on. It was fun because there were so many shared experiences to talk about online. One thing led to another and we had dozens of folks registering for membership in the e-group - all people who passed through the portals of the nearly 90+ year old school, people who lived in far flung places on every continent!  In a years time we had clocked up a membership of over 1000 ex-students which was amazing given that only 4000 students had ever studied in the old school! The e-group became the main communication tool for alumni of the school to arrange reunions worldwide and the annual reunion in the old school nestled in a beautiful valley in the hills of south India.

          The beautiful valley of Ketti with the 260 acre boarding school campus spread on either side of the school steeple

On the school e-group we were soon averaging something like 2000 mails a month by the year 2008 and the community was humming along until somebody got intemperate with somebody online and there are sides being taken and we soon have a situation not very different from what would happen in a living, breathing neighbourhood! Thats when one realises that virtual communities have all the attributes of real communities and it becomes necessary to moderate (thus was born the concept of policing!) people's activities online! As the Moderator of the school e-group it was tough deciding whether a particular line of communication will split the e-group down the middle or if some dissent and open talk should be allowed to occur! 

Soon we had the Orkuts, Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world making their appearances online and those social networking tools suddenly seemed so much more 'in' and e-groups were passe! The activity on the e-groups shifted to FB and before we knew it most communication was happening in one line form on these new-fangled social networking forums. I chose to stick with the e-group and tried very hard to keep communication alive on the e-group and just about managed to keep the mailings to about 1000+ every month in the school e-group - but on the university e-group it had dropped drastically to almost 30 mailings a month! By now membership on the School alumni's FB page had hit 1700 while we in the e-group were still at around 1200+ but like most of these networking tools the initial hype and hoopla wear off and the FB page too starts to show a massive dip in communication. Interestingly, I've learnt that its not that people are not viewing the FB page or checking mails on the e-group. Its just that they have all switched to read-only mode (ROM)! They have all kind of begun to expect that a small group of folks will keep writing in and keep people posted of whats happening in the world of their alumnae! Kind of unfair it would seem but thats the way the cookie crumbles. If those few who do keep the system humming do not write in I imagine it will soon be curtains for these e-groups and social networking sites.

   

Back from God's own Country

Its been a hectic long-weekend - there were two marriages in the family to attend - the first in Thiruvanathapuram (TVM) and the next in Kottayam. The children were going to be attending the two weddings so that was incentive enough for me to be around at these weddings. These days its a big deal if I get to spend a whole day with one or both the brats because they are the busy bodies and so it should be! Our daughter Ammu and her husband Arun headed to TVM via Chennai earlier so I had gotten to see them for two days in Chennai. Two days after they left for Kerala our son Ashwin showed up in Chennai after his leave from the Navy was approved just at the nick of time for him to catch that flight to Chennai. Haven't seen him in a long time so it was good catching up with him. He spends most of his time prowling the depths of the Bay of Bengal manning an Indian Navy submarine so it is kind of difficult to catch a peek of him even when he surfaces!

Arun, Ammu, yours truly, the bridegroom (Timki), Sudha and Ashwin

Marriages, like all marriages in God's own Country, are a raucous occasion for family and friends to meet and share experiences after sometimes 20 or 30 year hiatus! The colour and confusion of these occasions are actually quite enjoyable if you are not part of the organising. The girls look very pretty in their wedding clothes and can keep most men quite busy simply gawking at the PYTs! But every once in a while one has to be careful to look away so that those PYTs do not ask their friends 'what was wrong with that dirty old letch sitting in that chair over there?' In actual fact I was also casting my eyes about for a 'suitable girl' for that Navy brat of a son I have but those PYTs don't know that so I would qualify for a dirty old letch in their minds! Once in a while if I did spot a potential daughter-in-law candidate I'd sidle up to my son and ask him 'how that girl in white' was and I'd get a dirty look from my son as if to say 'give me a break Acha'!

 All decked up - cousins from all corners of the country and overseas

When one sees the assemblage of some 500-600 people at these weddings, folks who have traveled from far and wide both from within and outside the country one can get a feel of the kind of money that gets spent on these weddings - not just by the bride's folks but also by those coming to attend the wedding. On a typical day when the stars are all aligned well there must be a few hundred such weddings taking place across the state I would estimate the total money churn to be of the order of about Indian Rupees 2 billion on just that day - in dollars that would be a cool 45 million dollars! And they say ours is a poor country! Maybe its a poor country with a lot of rich people! 

The wedding stage all decorated and ready to receive the bride and bridegroom

Is corruption built into us by our culture and philosophy?

There's so much of hoo-ha all over this country because a quixotic campaigner has built a brand out of standing up against corruption and trying to get the government to legislate against corruption. I think it behoves us to try and understand the issue of corruption in the Indian milieu first before we really try to obliterate it!

When we as a people visit one of the holiest of shrines in this country, the Tirupati temple, many think nothing of paying a buck or two extra to ensure that they can get to the head of the darshan queue or to spend an extra few seconds in front of the deity. Is this not tantamount to bribing the powers that be right under the nose of your god? The fact that priests and temple-workers think nothing of accepting that bribe indicates that its ok to bribe to get an undue advantage! Why, there are actually different queues which officially cost different amounts to get to have a darshan - that must indicate that even the Gods think the rich are entitled to a quicker and longer darshan! Tough luck if you cannot afford the higher official fee. We have thus institutionalised a form of corruption right in the abode of the gods! There is thus no place in the country where all men will be equal, not even in a temple!

Then there is the system of paying humongous amounts of money to get your child into a suitable engineering or medical college - true, seats are limited but we think nothing of the need to make merit count and officially allow colleges to accept capitation money so even below-par students make it to professional college. This in turn creates a mediocracy where we should be building a meritocracy and then these mediocre students believe money can buy them anything and everything is purchasable. To me this is corruption too, corruption of young minds, who will go on to become the movers and shakers in the country, who believe that money talks, money opens doors, money gets you to the top of a queue - how then do we expect that people will shun corruption and follow a laid down law? Is it not quixotic to think so?

I read somewhere that almost every single war waged through our history from Alexander onward to the East India Company to the Moghuls and the Marathas it was money that was taken by some commander of the vanquished side that turned the tide and allowed the victor to win! To me this smacks of a pathological lack of pride in one's own kind which allows these crass leaders to sell out for a fistful of cash. This lack of pride runs right through us as a people - there seems so little for the people of this country to be genuinely proud of, no leaders worth following, no real heroes to emulate and nobody who genuinely cares for the country and its people it would seem. Maybe, thats what makes the Anna Hazare brand - here is somebody who atleast appears to genuinely care for the country and its people, never mind if he has quixotic ideas about quelling corruption, atleast he is not looking to line his pockets or atleast it seems so! 

A surprise visitor

It was Friday evening - I had gotten home early to be able to pack and catch a flight to Mumbai with the wife. We were to leave home at 1800hrs, the taxi was waiting, I was almost through with my packing in the bedroom upstairs, the door to the bedroom was shut and I was on the phone with a HDFC Customer relations guy. I was yelling at the guy for some deficiency in service and could not hear the commotion downstairs - then I heard the desperate screams for help from the wife downstairs! I rush down and see a huge owl looking at me from on top of my CD player! The wife was hysterical - 'get that thing out of the house' she yells! I move towards the avian visitor and the bird takes off for the kitchen exhaust fan - hangs on to the grill of the fan and looks at me with those haunting eyes. The wife scampers off upstairs - the doors to the front and back balconies are open so it beats me why the bird would not just fly out of the house! When I moved with a broom in hand to the exhaust fan the darn thing would fly to the drawing room and perch precariously on the tube light! I tried to dislodge it from its perch and it flies again into the kitchen! This time I grabbed my camera and took this picture - of the owl in our kitchen!


I finally managed to shoo the visitor out of the drawing room balcony door and before it could get out about 10 crows swooped on it and amidst a lot of screeching and crowing I could see owl feathers aflutter! I think the poor owl managed to get away because last night I saw an owl sitting on the parapet of the house opposite our drawing room balcony! I sure hope it was the same majestic bird that came visiting!

Legislating against corruption - what a joke!

The last two days have been crazy - Anna Hazare decides he must get his Lokpal bill against corruption and it has to be 'worded his way or its the highway'! If getting rid of corruption is only about legislation one could wish away corruption by a swish of that pen! I'm afraid I have a completely different take on the issue - tackling corruption is about people not bribing when they are asked to shell out undue monies. Its about showing the middle finger to the bribe-taker, not about legislating against bribes! To me its a no brainer that if people refuse to bribe there will be no corruption!

Somehow, we as a people think its ok that we pay a hundred bucks as bribe to a cop to let us off a traffic violation but its not ok for a politician or bureaucrat to make a couple of crores!! This is hypocrisy and somehow we are ok with being hypocrites as long as it suits us. It is this hypocritical attitude about almost everything in urban India that breeds corruption and I say again that legislation cannot change the corruption scene in this or any country where a hypocritical people think only about themselves and not for the collective good of the nation or a people.

Can we teach children in schools to change their attitude towards bribery - I guess we can but it again requires that those who teach have their own attitudes corrected, therein lies a himalayan problem! Seems like we need a new breed of teachers to start the anti-corruption movement going. Until that new breed of teacher comes along it will seem like I was a fool to teach my kids that 'honesty is the best policy' and 'thou shalt not bribe' because all around them they see dis-honesty and bribery and then wonder why their old man was such a weirdo, so completely out of kilt with the India around him!