No brothers

He knew that his rookie body wouldn’t be able to take much more. There was a limit to which his mortal body would take this abuse.

The other one was strong, all of them knew, but the rookie had the advantage of not knowing his limit. Perhaps this was the reason he smirked while entering the arena. The arena of the clans was one of those places that deserved respect, which it earned through generations of warriors and their clans battling each other for the ultimate glory. After all, this was the place where the two fire dragons were born.

He summoned up the strength to finally get on his feet. The smirk had faded a long time ago. The strength to fight had drained with it. All he wanted to do was go back home into her arms and just be. But there was still time for that. There was still the behemoth standing in front of him to defeat. One of them had to die in this battlefield today. One of them wasn’t going home.

Just then, he noticed something strange. A soft hand spreading his warmth on top of his head. It was a good feeling. The hand crept closer to his forehead. But then, his vision turned red. It was like he saw the world through a veil of soft red. And then the pain set in. He now knew that this was the illusion of well being that the rejected had spoken of. The warm hand, the light at the end of the tunnel, these were just the virgins that accompany you to the road to the never.

But he had more carnal intentions in mind. He had purposely chosen the behemoth as his opponent. All of them said that there was no logical explanation to this. But the wise fools did not know what they missed. The behemoth was the heir of the white dragon spirit. The rookie inherited the red dragon spirit. The wise fools did not know that the behemoth and the rookie were brothers, just as the white and red dragons were. While the two dragons were clashing in the ether, these two brothers were destined to meet in the arena. As the wise fools devised, “As it is in the ether, so it should be in the arena”.

Even the behemoth knew this. Only if he had a heart could he understand that this was a battle of their inner selves than their physical selves.

The rookie summed up his chances, which came down to none, summoned his red dragons and charged. The behemoth stood un-fazed. Cold as a stone as he was inside, so was he on the outside. But he wasn’t without his fox. He had summoned up his dragon spirit while the rookie was on the ground and was waiting for him to charge.

The warm hand turned to pink mist as he charged in furiously. Intestines burning, spine shivering, body charring under the spell, he leapt up high in the air. All that the behemoth did was follow him with his eyes. To the master, he seemed like the orca playing with the seal. Satisfying his intellectual superiority and also his physical prowess.

The rookie came down on him like a spear, a hot red spear. He thought he sliced through flesh. The smirk returned. But it lasted only till he heard the sound of fire slicing flesh.

The tunnel was not too far away then.

YOU BURN, THEM BURN!!!

PEOPLE TALK. ALL TALK. YOU TALK. THEY TALK.

YOU ASK WALK. THEY SAY WALK. THEN NO WALK. YOU WONDER WHY NO WALK. YOU NOT ASK WHY NO WALK. THEY NO SAY WHY NO WALK. BOOOO

LIGHT FIRE. TAKE TORCH. LIGHT THEM. IF YOU BURN, GOOD. YOU DO SOMETHING. NOW THEY ON FIRE. IF THEY NO RUN, WALK YOU ALONE. IF THEY RUN, YOU RUN.

BURN BABY BURN!!!

BURN 'EM BABY!!!!

 

SERT – When we were high – 1

What do you do when the kid in you takes over the big boy and manages to convince you that you want to do something, something that will leave you high and dry after you are done with it, with an uncertain future, but a hell lot of satisfaction.

Something = Build an electric FS car and participate in the 2nd FSE at Germany.

In any enthralling voyage, the team is the most important bit of the puzzle. Get this wrong, and your castle of glass will crumble, this is a given. In all the years of Orion Racings being, barring the first year team, the team I had around me for electric was by far the perfect in its composition.

Kumar Saurav, Nikhil Sawant, Inder Singh Sehra, Hiren Patel, Gaurang Shetty, Shashi Maurya

Why did we have these guys in the team? I don’t know. It just happened.

I was at that time working at Solar Magic in Samirwadi. Orion had had a not so satisfying performance in Germany that year. The year was 2010. The month was September. Some one from the team called me up(I think it was Hiren) and said we are pissed at not performing in Germany. We want to go out with a bang. The “bang” was making a prototype of an electric vehicle. I understood the urge. The urge that’ll leave you unsatisfied if you don’t follow it and it’ll make you insane if you do. I had taken a 8 month hiatus to do Orion one last time after my BE. So I understood well what they were talking about without saying much. As they say, pirates on the same boat get the same disease. The other guys at that time were infected with the same virus I had a year back. All of us were pissed, frustrated, charged, not giving a shit about what anyone said, thick headed, stingingly un-diplomatic, in your face, brains hyperclocking. In short, we wanted to do a Christopher Columbus. We wanted to set sail in a direction that no one we knew had taken.

So what do you want from me, I asked? Money! came the reply. Post Germany, very few people had the muscle to ask for money from their parents. So I gladly gave out 5K for the prototype. The prototype was made entirely by the 5 of them without me. I was still in Samirwadi.

We knew that going ahead with this would be something without precedent. We were planning on an electric FS spec car for FSE 2011. That was certain. But then was the question, where would all that money come from. Our estimated cost of the car was nearly 17 lakhs. And since all of us were without a job, we needed atleast 25000Rs. per month to survive. The total came out to nearly 28 lakhs. Big ask. There was no one with any marketing experience. All of us were technical and  all of us detested the idea of going around asking for money. We wanted to build a car. We wanted to win. So then came the funda of R.O.I. Return on investment. How do we make our proposition more attractive so that someone would be willing to invest in us. Then the thought of adding in more features to the car.

Born was the Autonomous Electric Vehicle. This is the mother technology from which the future will flow in all directions they say. Google and Stanford had done it before. There was no reason why we couldn’t.

The month that unfolded after that decision made us all learn what the real world was about. That engineering by itself meant shit. It has to translate to value. Without value, engineering is sex with yourself. I learnt more than what my unclaimed engineering degree taught me. What happened next shaped us in a way we will never forget.

What I can relate between carrom and innovation and startups

What did I do when I got to college everyday? No, no lectures, but the Boys Common Room for an early game of carom. Spending a good 5 hours in the Boys Common Room and the Badminton Court was the norm during the engineering days. What that entailed was endless board of carom, rounds of claims to the board, lots of boric powder, lots of cheating just because we were BE Mech and we were the best with or without cheating. Cheating just added spice to the games in the terribly hot rooms. But looking back now, there are definitely a few things that I can connect to carom and what I am doing now in the space of innovation and startups.

1. Slog – Yes, I enjoyed this a lot. Partly because I was pretty good at it and partly because I enjoyed the company I had. But this was not always the case. When I was in SE and TE, I sucked miserably at the game. And to add to that, there were all these harami seniors all around the place. I was never bullied by them though, but there were times when I was laughed at for screwing up simple shots. But sticking to it made me better by the day. Coming back to the present, I meet people who have good ideas and some of them are very much feasible in the marketplace. But very few have the determination to slog it out to execute the project. Those who do have the zest to hang on can usually be found in the Orion Racing workshop, the Aero guys who are currently working in our office and have consumed our office desktops and the Baja guys near the canteen. You have an idea, you need to slog, you need to sweat, you need to burn some serious oil, you need to disturb people, you need to mock “experts” and in true BE Mech fashion, “Dekh lenge jo hoga”. But this is easier said than done for most.
2. Collaboration – Carom is as much an aiming game as is a strategy game. When and which opposition coin to block, which hole to block, which opposition coin to pocket and what to do to distract the opponent. But this is done best with a partner in crime. With a partner, you can move things to your advantage while focusing on the other things. Likewise, getting a startup off the ground alone is a mammoth task. You need mentors, you need connections, you need people to plug the gaps which you cannot fill. At the end, the objective is making a water tight unit that can brave the rough seas of market uncertainties and the fact that a plan will never go according to plan.
3. Taking a risk – Not every shot is a straight line put. Some are rebounds, some are frames, some are faint nicks, some are shots that no one would’ve seen before and somewhat ridiculously, some are ones that no one knows how it worked, but it worked. But what is most important, is the intention to pocket a coin. I was not always sure whether I would pocket a coin, hell, I was many a times not sure even if would touch the coin. Mostly, I said what the heck. I’ll try. Not everything you try will be successful. But the important thing is don’t be scared of taking the mustang by the hooves.
4. Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention – Risk is not action based on wild guesses, but an action based on assessment. During official tournament matches, where you are not allowed talking to your opponent or intimidate him / her to make mistakes, paying close attention to the opponent gives a lot of clues on the planning he / she is doing, whether he is content with the setup or simply, if he has a trick up his sleeve. Similarly, while startups should focus on a few things that matter and learn to say no to other things, it is important that they go out into the market and know what is happening in their field. This includes keeping tab on what other startups as well as tech giants are doing and how you can beat them to the market. I wish there were a detective agency for startups who’d covertly get all information regarding a startup / established player.
5. Have a back up plan – Risk is not only about making wild guesses and acting on them, but also about paying attention to other options and moving forward using another plan if the risk fails. Using the striker follow up to disturb an appointment coin, blocking coins and pockets, displacing the opponent coin from near the pocket  to avoid the opponent pocketing, also called negative play are just some of the options carom players use to make sure the risk they take in the next step is safe enough to save the game. Stay safe, play adventurously.
6. Flex your muscles – Vocal, cranial and physical. There were times when you could just harass people into giving up their seats, sometimes I had to use force. But that was all for a good cause. That was for letting me play! Leverage your network, go to events/workshops/conferences/exhibitions. Not just for the sake of gaining more knowledge, but also, getting perspectives and a general sense of where your field is heading. Flex your vocal muscles here, talk to people, ask them questions that you haven’t been able to answer yet. Sometimes, you end up asking questions that they themselves might not know the answer to. They will will thankful to you. On the face of it, they may blabber, but you’ve just made them realize that they don’t know everything and you probably saved their venture. When you are into your own venture, write blogs, write to TC, Mashable, VC Circle, ask your alma mater to put up an article about your venture on your website, make friends with the media, talk to people who have been there done that, make your presence felt all around.
7. Not worth your time?, don’t do it – Carom is an interesting game. Out of the 25 odd pieces on the board, you have control over just 1 striker. This makes sure that no 2 games are the same. That is what makes it totally worth the time. Because you don’t do anything twice. And the better the opponent, the more interesting the game. I’ve been part of games that have wrapped up in 2 rounds. That is what makes this game at the pro level so intense. Even the best of players make the simplest of mistake, the pressure makes you do so. Hands start trembling, palms sweat, heart beat goes up, you start hyper thinking. All this stress and adrenaline for a short time is like taking a car past 100 kmph for the first time. That is what makes it totally worth it. If you feel what you are doing is not what makes you happy, get out, get out of the building like your ass is on fire. Because the juice is not worth the squeeze. Do what you like doing or just get a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Mumbai, work for Accenture for 2 years, earn some money, make mummy pappa happy, earn your MBA, go work for a bank and go home. And close this window. This juice is not worth the squeeze for you mate.
8. You will not always win – Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But you will get better with time if you stick to it. Stick to it like Araldite.
9. Stop making excuses – If you goof up a shot. People will appreciate your guts to try that shot, but if you miss and you lose, there is no consolation just because you played a daring shot. You lose, you leave the seat/ No body gives a damn about your shots. You are responsible for success, you are responsible for failure. Period.

Do I follow all of this. Only sometimes. This is also a reminder to me to follow these dots. If it helps you in any way, good for you. If not, boo!

On why food should greet the mood

I had the opportunity to have the most heartless meal I can ever remember. Even Gaurang Shetty‘s bland maggie noodle suspended in salt water is beaten here.

Soul food

Most saddening here is that the said meal was at a cousins place. Fish and chicken with puri, served out cold.

I’ve always been the sort of guy who’d hog on anything and everything. What dawned on me today is that even though I may eat this up, I’m not going to be satisfied. I’ve never understood why chefs all around put in effort to make their dishes look good. Today, I know.

 

What exactly are we celebrating?

With the advent of the Ganesh Chaturti, the city took on vibrant hues and colors of vibrancy. Good, I say. But that Good did not come out with the way it should be associated with a happy festival. Neither was it sarcastic. It was accompanied by a headache, a sprained back and drenched clothes. Let me explain -

I stay in the farthest part of Chembur, a suburb in the eastern part of Mumbai. My office is in Ghatkopar. Some might call me lucky, because it takes me about 20 minutes to reach home from office. But out of those 20, 15 are spent dodging potholes the size of my bike itself! And this pothole party is just near a hub of ganesh idol’s makers. This is where nearly all ganpati’s from Chembur leave. So, in strict adherence to the Indian tradition of having a band accompanying your ganpati, all hell breaks loose on the streets even if there are 10 parties ushering in the festive season. This, accompanied by the traffic jams because of the metro bridge construction, I spent a good 20 mins honking, pushing, shoving and rubbing my way through, often accompanied by sweet smiled apologies and sometime by being head rippingly pissed off at the rickshawallas. Well, there were some moments where some cute women did pass by, but that was the only good thing about the ordeal on the road. Not cribbing, just saying.

Did I also mention about the stale water spray mechanism that the BEST has invented. Stand in a front of a water puddle on the road and soon a BEST bus passes by at top speed and gives you a live demo of what their new process is about. Patent pending on that one. Patent code – Mum/AsHoLeS/420. Thus the drenched clothes. No, it was not raining then. Or else, the cute women would’ve been prettier! :p

Rajdeep Sardesai says that ID and Ganesh Chaturti fall on consecutive days. That is why he loves this country. Well, but isn’t all that decided by astronomy or something and it would’ve been celebrated all over the world during the 2 days itself? What role does our nationalistic feeling have to play in that? Or a possible explanation could be it makes for a catchy twitter feed.

If Lokmanya Balgangadhar Tilak were a mathematics student at the University of Mumbai and he were asked to extrapolate the Ganesh Chaturti over a period of 90 years after his demise, he would for sure get a KT. Not because he did not know the most correct answer, but because the question was out of syllabus. Ganesh Chaturti started for political reasons. It was started to unite people at this centre stage and spread the message of nation love and ignite the spirit of uprising. The correct answer for him to give would be :-

1. Everyone will have a ganpati at their homes and they invite other people over for the arti.

2. There will be no talk of the nation and their love for it, just display of new decorations and Anna Hazare and how futile all his exercise was.

3. The idols made of clay would be immersed into water bodies and we can have all the dead fish to eat after that. But their bones would’ve been clayed by then.

4. The tons of garland generated would lie in the dumping grounds of Deonar for a long time. But there are a few good souls who might refrain from these and use something else. The rest, won’t.

5. You can burst crackers and frighten away all animals and disturb the oldies. Its ok. We do this only sometimes. On a sidenote, seen a sparrow lately? If no, that’s probably because of the level of sound pollution around you. Got this sparrow coming to my window early morning everyday now, along with a couple of hummingbirds.

How far can we go with the way we are currently going? The future has to be thought and planned for in the present. Or else, its just going to be a present with no future. Indian dependence ended with independence, foreign investment came in with the LPG – Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization, facebook came in with zuckerberg, the question, as I stare into my Evernote icon is, where do you, Dear Ganpati, go from here? Who charts out your fate? Or are we stuck with you for good?