Impressions of Calcutta

Fifty Years Ago

It’s 1962. I arrive at Howrah from small-town Punjab at the ripe old age of fifteen. As a student-select headed to the Indian Statistical Institute, having side-stepped the IIT system which refuses to let me in till I reach sixteen, I feel a foot taller than my five feet few.

Emerging from the railway terminus, the first thing one sees is the Howrah Bridge. One word: majestic. The sprawling and muddy Hooghly underneath is a sharp contrast to the slim, gushing rivers of the Punjab.

The next thing one notices are the clichéd teeming crowds. Most of the men are dhoti-kurta clad: a sartorial effect I have seldom seen in Delhi or Bombay. The kurta is called punjabi; I never find out why. Women, and even teenage girls, are mostly clad in saris. No salwaar-kameez.

Beggars - rarely seen in the Punjab, occasionally in Delhi, and often in Bombay - abound here. Then comes the shock of the inhumane hand-pulled rickshaw; long banished from other states. One is familiar with the concept but the reality is something else. From time to time, the government avows piously to ban the rickshaw and rehabilitate the pullers. No progress so far.

Dr. B C Roy who was the chief minister for 14 years has just died. A towering figure in Bengal politics, his demise paves the way for the decline of the Congress, and the rise of the Communist party.

Though it will be 15 years before the CP(M) gets to power, Jyoti Basu, a relatively young lawyer, is getting noticed in trade union and industry circles. He will eventually become the chief minister, but be denied the opportunity to become the prime minister by his party.

Film is the cheapest and most accessible form of entertainment. In three languages. Hindi films, made in Bombay and Madras rule the roost. A unique-in-India feature of the old style movie theatres, mostly showing English films, is the in-house bar where one can enjoy a glass of beer (or something stronger) before, during or after the show.

Satyajit Ray has already made his mark in Bengal and internationally. His work though is little known elsewhere in India, except to art film clubs. In 1962 Ray makes his first film with Waheeda Rehman. Suddenly people outside Bengal take notice. Later, Bombay will happily absorb some Ray girls like Sharmila Tagore, Jaya Bhaduri and, less successfully,  Aparna Dasgupta.

Many film makers are, or claim to be, influenced by Ray. Others, like Ritwick Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, make excellent films but no one receives the adulation that Ray commands. Many Bengali scientists, academicians and artists have phenomenal accomplishments to their credit and have acquired considerable fame but in bong consciousness Ray is the sole eminence of recent vintage who deserves to be right up there with Kobi Guru and Netaji. To this day. Fifty years on.

Kobi Guru is, was and will forever, be the colossus everyone pays cultural obeisance to. Be it poetry, music, theatre, stories or painting he has left a phenomenal legacy. Your average bong, I discover, is much more into music, poetry and theatre than the denizens of northern and western states. Each household harbours a budding poet, actor, musician or singer or all four.

Music shows and events are aplenty. A harmonium is a standard and low-cost piece of household furniture. Music teachers, poorly paid but highly regarded professionals, are as thick on the ground as tuition teachers elsewhere. Often an avenue of ready romance for their pupils.

There is a wide-spread theatre scene which can only be described as passionate and vibrant. Theatre, however, is an expensive pursuit and is in a state of perennial decline for want of patronage, for production and at the box office.

The sport of choice, and indeed passion, is football. Gully football is all pervasive rather than gully cricket. Almost everyone has a favourite club team. Often a personal preference clashes with that of a sibling or spouse; leading to unending, loud, sometimes ferocious and often hilarious arguments. Chuni Goswami becomes my hero and by transference Mohun Bagan is my team. Chuni leads India to her first and last Asia Cup football title. He plays in the Bengal Ranji Trophy team. He captains the Mohun Bagan hockey team. He will go on to act as the hero in a movie, Prothom Prem. India has never seen a sports person like this.

Durga Puja is a phenomenal festival. The whole city is transformed as its entire cultural ethos comes into play. Puja pandaals come up everywhere in public spaces; throwing an already chaotic traffic into a deeper mess. The goddess emerges gradually taking shape from clay. Many artists work day and night to mould, paint, be-robe and be-jewel her. Loads of food and sweets are made, bought, distributed and consumed. Much shopping for new clothes happens. Gifts are exchanged. Teenagers go a-hunting all over town looking for adventure and meetings with the opposite sex, both planned and per happenstance. Neighbourhood gangs of boys spring up to protect the local girls - nobody asks the girls if they want it. . and everyone has a good time.

Click here to go to Part 2

Revisiting the Electric Car

I started this post six months ago but did not know how to conclude it. 
Then today the Economic Times published an interview with the iconic venture capitalist and famed green tech guru Vinod Khosla. He has invested billions of dollars in alternative energy companies. More personal wealth committed thus than any other individual in the world.

He expects to be wrong  most of the time in his choice of companies or technologies to back. He also hopes to make up for it by succeeding wildly with one or two blockbusters. So right or wrong in his choices, he has to keep track of the alternative technology train.
But we will get to Vinod Khosla and his link to this post in a moment. 
I posted The Electric Car Humbug in May 2009. Since then the two companies I wrote about have changed a bit:

• TESLA is in talks to tie up with Toyota, which has faced a public relations disaster in recent years involving recall of many models including the hybrid Prius. Meanwhile, Tesla has stopped booking orders for its only production model, the $100,000, Li-Ion battery powered Roadster.

• REVA was sold to Mahindra & Mahindra the Indian tractor, commercial vehicle and low-end SUV maker. Reva became a low cost image upgrade exercise for them. Soon after the take over, with big industrial house clout, Reva got a government subsidy  of 25%. Since then no new products have been launched to augment the $6,000, Lead-acid powered REVA-i.

Other car makers, notably Nissan with Leaf and Mitsubishi with i-MiEV, have made some progress. World-wide sales are, however, still in five figures and there  is no game-changer in sight.
The big change is that all electric car development is now in the hands of major car makers. These guys have the most invested in internal combustion technology. And the most to lose if electric cars succeed. 
I keep track of developments in green tech space but obviously do not have the resources to track everything.

Along comes Mr Khosla and in his interview, already widely quoted elsewhere, he has this to say:

Quote
Electric cars are toys. They're for rich San Franciscans and rich Germans. They don't make sense for normal people. They're too expensive. What is important is cheap cars. If you add $10,000 worth of batteries to a car, it's silly. But that's what every electric car does, and environmentalists keep pushing it. 
One of the fundamental problems is environmentalists keep pushing solutions to the press, such as solar cells and electric cars that make no economic sense. They defy the laws of economic gravity. 
I keep saying we need to produce products at the 'Chindia' price--the price at which people in India and China will buy it--without subsidies. You can't subsidise energy on a large scale. It would bankrupt any government. Every government that did that would end up like Greece. 
Unquote 

Reading this interview I realised that I have a draft sitting in the blogger and decided to post it.
 
Update December 2020: Worldwide, there's still no decent electric option under $ 25,000. That would be roughly Rs. 20 lakhs before import duties in India. Even in richer countries the adoption pace is glacial. In fact, thanks to climate change, glaciers are moving faster.

Reva sales in the meantime tapered off to zero after years of three digit stagnation.

TESLA talks with Toyota broke off because TOYOTA wasn’t convinced that all-electric was the way forward. They declared increased commitment to hybrid cars!

Update February 2023 TESLA is going strong, but there’s still no under $25,000 option to IC cars with comparable lifetime costs and equal range! 

TOYOTA continues to plough a lonely furrow for hybrid cars. The Chinese EV car makers have emerged major players but I don’t know enough about their products and their game plan, other than the fact that they now control some 80% of battery production.

Issues with battery raw materials, battery manufacturing as also with used battery disposal remain basically unchanged.

Issues with electricity needed to charge the EVs remain generally unchanged!

Nuclear Business Opportunity

Yesterday was the 25th Anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

Russia, which owned the plant, marked the event by calling for "Stricter Nuclear Safety Rules".

Ukraine, which actually ended up holding the Chernobyl baby, said it still needs to mobilise $300 million to bury the mess.

Belarus, Russia & Ukraine, which together hosted most of the 600,000 people exposed to high levels of radiation, have, in recent years, significantly reduced the benefits they were paying the sufferers. Belarus banned a traditional annual protest march in Minsk and relegated a planned evening rally to the outskirts.

The European Union, announced a relief package of $156 million.

The United States, till yesterday stuck between Obama's birth and Osama's life, did not make a big ado about the anniversary.

Japan, as always, politely asked to be excused. 

The United Nations: Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, after a recent visit to to Chernobyl, came out with recommendations for the future. These mainly revolve around the flexi-words: review, study, tighten, analyse and the like. He also informs us that, 25 years on, a fresh safety shield is in the process of being installed around the blown reactor. Better late than never.

India, which was a Gandhian bystander and saw nothing, heard nothing and said nothing when it happened, marked the silver anniversary by declaring its commitment to accelerated development of new nuclear power capacity.

At a high level meeting the Prime Minister gave the go ahead for the Jaitapur nuclear power project in the western state of Maharashtra. (Not very far from Koyna Nagar, the site of a major earthquake in 1967). When ready, it will be the largest nuclear power complex anywhere in the world.

Per the official fact sheet, it is the best thing that ever happened.

India Takes Precautions

The high level committee which gave the go-ahead to the Jaitapur plant, was briefed by The Secretary, Department of Atomic Energy, a leading bureaucrat, whose minions planned the project; and by the CEO of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India, a leading technocrat of the Government of India, who will implement the project.

The Prime Minister announced that

1. a super regulatory authority will be formed to regulate nuclear disasters,
2. the protesting residents of Jaitapur have been told that they are totally safe, and
3. in any case, a generous compensation package is being formulated. Just in case.

Left unstated was the obvious fact that there was no need to hear any dissenting voices or anyone who might actually know something about nuclear safety.

Classified Information

While it is well known that India is quickly tying up massive uranium supplies dirt cheap from Ukraine to feed its rising nuclear appetite, it is also learnt from highly reliable sources that:

1. India is setting up a Nuclear Safety Consulting Corporation and a Nuclear Disaster Management Corporation, both to be chaired by Suresh Kalmadi,  who has been whisked off to Tihar jail in Delhi. Ensconced in the famous jail, away from prying media, Mr. Kalmadi, along with his co-chair, A Raja, the former Telecom Minister, assisted by top managers of various Indian companies already lodged there, will work out business plans for the two new ventures.
2. The Human Resources ministry is working with various countries across the globe to determine their requirements of radio-active human beings. The radio-active body shopping business alone is expected to take India to the ranks of G5. Far out-shining the software body-shops we have set up over the last three decades.

For the first time this ancient civilisation has managed to get into a win-win situation.

• If our plants are indeed safer than safe, the Safety Consulting Corporation will rake it in.

• If, on the other hand,  they are not, we will have a head start on Disaster Management. Apart from expert advice, every country will need people willing to go in to disaster sites for damage control. What better than ready-made radio-active people? Of which we will have millions!

Next The Kundakulam Saga 
First The Nuclear Mess