Oh, an IT Complex in Nilgiris?

 

Nilgiris has still a magical air to it.  Anyone who visits the landscape can't escape the moments of elation just visiting NIlgiris.  One has to ride through lush forests from whichever direction we chose to come from.  The valleys, the lakes, the farms, the tea estates, the plantations paint a magical tapestry.  While those who know Ooty and Coonoor from decades back talk about the charm that is lost, for the hundreds who come every day Nilgiris can still be magical.  Nilgiris is the watershed for forests in the plains - Mudumalai and Bandipur, Sathyamangalam to to the south east, Silent valley to the west.  The streams and rivers from Nilgiris eventually pass through the Delta, ushering in a harvest of plenty.  The zing in the N in Pongal comes from Nilgilris for sure.  

More than 700,000 people live in Nilgiris, more than 400,000 of them in urban areas scattered between Ooty, Coonoor, Kotagiri and Gudalur and the remaining in small and large villages within Nilgiris.    The tea and horticultural (vegetables and fruits) sectors contribute to at least 70% of the local economy, providing livelihoods to small and large farmers as well employment through corporate plantations.  Nilgiris has a prosperous air to it.  Villages like Kattabettu or Yellanalli have brightly painted homes, with cars parked along the road side, with the markets carrying every good and services one requires.  This transformation has taken place within less than a generation.  People want more out of life than just incomes from tea estates and horticulture.  Children have been educated, have gone through college and they need jobs.  It is surely difficult for parents to send them off to distant cities such as Coimbatore or Bangalore or Chennai.  Manufacturing industries are a non-starter in Nilgiris.  With many already working for the IT industry, would not a technology park in Nilgiris make sense.  On the face of it, it may seen like a compelling idea,  After all we need a building full of cubicles connected to the outside world through a fiber optic cable.

The problems start with location.  Yeddappalli village as the crow flies is 350 meters away from the forests that extend into Forest Dale - a beautiful blend of exotic plantations  and natural sholas that are part of the watershed for Wellington township.  Yeddapalli is about 500 meters northwest of Bandisholai another beautiful stretch of forests near Sims park feeding the Coonoor-Wellington watershed.  Yeddapalli lies upstream at an elevation if 2065 meters, while the 

forests slope across hillocks towards Wellington township at an elevation of 1865 metes   

Over a thousand people are expected to work in this IT complex, bringing in at least 500 vehicles into the already crowded Coonoor - Kotagiti road ,   At least 40000 litres of water would be needed per day at work, and another 100,000 liters per day at home.  For an IT complex to work, at this scale one needs at least a six to ten floor building.  Given the soft soils in Nilgiris and torrential downpours during the north-east monsoon an office complex in this location seems loaded with risks,  Clearly if eompleyment generation is such an imperative, and that too in a district which is 60% more affluent than the delta , any construction has to be in relatively flat terrain, within the municipal limits of existing townships where no further displacement of nature capital can take place.  An IT complex carved out of relatively levelled areas near the Ooty market could be considered.  Given the bus connectivity this would be  better than keeping a complex right where nature capital needs to be thriving.

Bangalore is the IT Capital of India.  It is not uncommon to see employees spend two hours to commute each way .  It is often the norm.  For the IT sector to thrive it requires people to people contact.  New talent needs to come and go.  In such a flux organizations adapt and grow, which brings us to should the complex exist in Nilgiris at all.  Why not Mettupalayam, the airport is less than an hour away.  There are trains connecting it to Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.  Working three days a week at the office and the remaining at home is the norm.  Just an imagine, a commute to Mettupalayam, downhill at 7 AM, in time for work on a Tuesday and back on Thursday night, with calls and a workstation at home overlooking the mists and the clouds and greenery, and cups of tea.

It is really time to wear the Nilgiri hat and question the need for a TIDEL park by the woods in Yeddapalli, and plead with officials to find a better location , which generates jobs and opportunties for the youth in Nilgiris, while preserving the nature capital that still remains in Nilgiris.

Gandhiji and todays world

It was in the late 1970s, that my grandfather visited us in New Delhi.  His agenda was to spend time with us, visit a few Gandhian friends who were in the twilight of their lives nearly three decades after independence and visit Rajghat.  An otherwise authoritarian man with a stentorian voice would break down at Rajghat, showing his emotional side.  Yes, Gandhiji had visited their family home in Chennai, and that too for three weeks in April - May 1915.  My grandfather would gave just crossed 10 then; while his own father was a public figure, running a journal, bringing leaders together, publishing their writings, and maintaining a friendship with Gandhiji that spanned decades.  Among many memoirs, paintings, sculptures that dot my grandparents home, the most cherished is the framed photograph of Gandhiji and his wife with my great grandfather.

So Gandhiji was more than a distant icon, who fought for Indias freedom through non violence and won it seventy-eight years ago.  There was a familial connect that made me read about him, adulate him, defend him, critique his views and reimagine his relevance today,   There is perhaps so much written about him, elevating him to the level of sainthood, and some excoriating him and assigning the entire blame of partition on his name.  Considering the sheer weight of his achievements of questioning racism in South Africa and bringing about half a change during his times, to returning to India, joining and then leading the freedom struggle, developing new morally unimpregnable ways to fight injustice and oppression, of questioning everything within his society - of caste, untouchability, gender roles, class, treatment of animals, he has left an imprint which is hard to erase and hard to match.  

So what is his relevance in this world today?  I think the dismantlement of colonialism started with India in 1947.   Colonialism was morally wrong, politically indefensible, and economically difficult to sustain,  It took time for much of Europe to let go of their colonized states, but within 15 years much of the colonized world became free.  

However, even in countries that were ostensibly free, problems remained.  Reform was either painfully slow or non existent.  It took eighty five years for US to abolish slavery post independence , but post that African Americans in many parts of US endured humiliating segregation, without a right to vote till 1965.  These changes were brought about by Martin Luther King, who followed Gandhijis non violent methods, that of fighting oppression without giving in, and showing the morally correct path to American leaders.  Nelson Mandela was another stellar example of how decades of oppression could be reversed.  The fight against apartheid, and the violent incidents that surely underscored the struggle was conflated with the spread of communism.  Mandela rose through the clutter, embracing Gandhi's non violent ways to press for the dismantlement of apartheid.  And while doing so showed extraordinary generosity by starting a Truth and Reconciliation process so that the true freedom that South Africans enjoyed does not transform into a witch hunt against all whites.  Nelson Mandela's ANC was initially a violent movement.  And as long as there was violence, the government could resort to force to quell the movement, and paint at as anarchy spread from elsewhere.  During the polarized cold war era it was convenient to blame the Soviet block and overlook the moral horrors of an apartheid state.  It took Nelson Mandela, then inspired by Gandhiji to break the deadlock, just like Martin Luther Kind who accomplished this almost three decades earlier.

When one questions the relevance of Gandhiji today the answers are clear  When one examines the most persistent and violent of conflicts, where the morally correct answer is clear, it is the violence that obfuscates the path.  The genesis of Israel during modern times was clearly the decades of antisemitism in Europe culminating in the unimaginably evil Holocaust, forcing Jewish Europeans to flee to their roots and promised land under the most extenuating circumstances.  They occupied a land that was colonized by the Ottomans and then the British.  An Israel was created out of Palestine.  The Palestenians who saw this as their own land getting usurped fought back.  Several bloody wars followed.  Each aimed eliminating Israel, till the maps were redrawn in 1973, with Israel occupying Gaza Strip and West Bank, as semi-autonomous regions..  However, what is justice is known to all.  It took another two decades for Israel and Palestine to come to the negotiating table and come close to articulating a two state solution in the early 1990s.  But violent forces from the fringe took over, and Israel and Palestine got pulled back from the summit of peace to the precipice of perpetual war.  It takes extraordinary resilience and courage to defend a small country against countless barrage of missiles from Gaza or Lebanon or Syria.  But it also speaks of unfathomable retaliation against opponents every time this happens.  The current events in Gaza are an unfortunate culmination of the waves of violence and retaliation that have marked this conflict.   Could there have been a Gandhiji from the land  If the intifada that precceeded the OSlo peace accords was non lethal and essentially non violent, could not there have been a more sustained movement for peace?  To recognize that Israel as a nation needs to exist where it stands because the followers of one of the most ancient of religions were almost exterminated during the Holocaust.  Cannot Israel recognize that Palestenians who existed as a colonized people needed their own country.  In this din, the day to day stories of coexistence remain buried.  It is violence that obfuscates,.  It is violence that prevents any reasonable pathways from unfolding.  It is violence that brings out the worst in human beings.  Gandhiji saw that very early in his life as he read the Gita, War and Peace, the Bible, and showed the way.  What will it take for a new Frontier Gandhi to emerge out of every conflict and show the way

Any unabashed adulation of Gandhiji the man faces the risk of becoming another fundamentalist dogma.  Given his immersion in the freedom movement, and solving Indias inequalities and injustices, he was not the best reader of world affairs. I do not know whether he came out and stood against the holocaust and showed a more nuanced understanding of the problems in the middle east. He died just when the seeds of the conflict were beginning to bloom, his views had such an overwhelming shadow that it took decades for India develop a more nuanced understanding of the middle east,. 

India lives in its villages, but casteism in rural India is as fertile as the gangetic plains in its villages.  A modern economy, with pursuit to education, jobs in manufacturing, retail, technology  and services is the best pathway to a society that is free from the shackles of caste and class.  I do not think India's leaders could gave envisaged in 1947 what India could have looked like today with at least its urban economy - not necessarily perfect but much better for the country as a whole.  It took a Nehru to recognize that start modernizing the country. The seeds of modern India were sown by him, while taking Gandhijis ideals of secularism and equality as the very core of India.  

That said, in a world replete with hateful ways there was one man who showed the path forward.   His ideas were not only his own, it was a synthesis of many streams of thought that he remained open to.  The message of non violence and fraternity above all remains an ideal that is hard to shake off.  At least in our India.  The ideal of keeping a mind that is open to all streams of progressive thought, and synthesizing them into our own framework is another.  Facing up to injustices and finding a better way is a third.

Thank you Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Is it time to play with a straight bat?

 The last four months have seen India in a sticky wicket, against some hostile bowling from DC.  Our smugness is coming apart from its seams.  Have we lost the art of leaving the ball alone.   Of ensuring that we play with a straight bat.   Sometimes the pitch is undone by the playing 11 and at times by spectators with business interests..

Let’s start with 2022.  A little country gets invaded by a big one.   While we wisely kept out of it in the U.N. we upped the crude oil purchase from zero to 38% of the total mix and it worked as long as we were not in the spotlight.  But we wanted to walk with the swagger of Viv Richards on world stage and the rather partial umpire shouted tarriffs in the middle of a trade war.  Switching to Russian crude was wide off the mark.  That was a ball we could have left alone, soften up the bowling, and quietly caress the ball later for runs. But all the grease has made the wicket nasty.  Is it time to quietly relay the pitch .

The second problem was H1Bs.  A visa system that was meant to attract the very cream, in areas where US is lacking..  chemical engineers who can decipher reaction kinetics while simulating turbulent flow,a  medical researcher that can unlock the autoimmune condition that eats up one’s own nerve cells, material scientists that can invent alloys that make a killer aircraft engine.  Instead Ranji trophy and club cricketers and the like somehow clutter up the queue to do coding jobs under H1B.  I don’t think the Indian government is responsible, but our private enterprises gloss over the letter and spirit of H1B, and now it hits the fan.  

So it is time to settle down and play better cricket,    Leave the greasy ball alone.   Be generous to the grizzly bear, tell them that the Teslas and F120s and Harley’s come in free.  A handful may buy it..  and tell that Chevy Malibu is the best car in the world and play cricket.  With the humility and class of Sachin, with the guile of Prasanna, with a straight bat  and decency like Dravid, with the calm courage of Dhoni.  

To fly like a metallurgist.

Retirement allows one to wheeze like an old wheezer.  While I was in the middle of an asthma episode i get  a call from another retiree who swings golf clubs when free saying why don’t we make our own aircraft engines.  Aircraft engines represent that final frontier in metallurgy.  

The journey probably starts with a propulsion model that provides a system level look of the engine comprising of a turbo fan, which sucks in air from ambient and sends it aft, some through the core and the rest to bye pass the engine whose only purpose is to generate thrust.  The passage of air ingested through a low pressure compressor, high pressure compressor, combustor, high pressure turbine and a low pressure turbine.  At it’s heart is the Brayton cycle that takes in compressed high pressure adiabatically heated air from the compressor into a combustor,  mixing it with fuel and burning it to generate high velocity combustion gases at temperatures that can exceed 1500C. Very close to the melting point of the alloys used.  The high pressure turbine extracts part of that energy converting it to rotational energy which enables the compressor to compress ambient air to higher temperature and pressure and providing further axial thrust as the combustion airplane travels to the aft of the engine.   Further energy is extracted in the low pressure turbine till almost all the useful energy is extracted and the combusted air exits.  Remember the turbofan?   In a commercial engine it is the biggest part of an aircraft engine.  90% of the ingested air travels aft bye passing the core generating thrust.  It’s only 10% that travels through the core, getting compressed, burning the fuel to provide energy for the fan to rotate, and finally exiting as hot air and providing the thrust.  In a military engine we need speed, acceleration, manoeuvrability.  The turbofan is smaller.  Most of the airflow goes through the core; to get the added acceleration an after burner is added at the exhaust.  When fuel is introduced there with exhaust gases already at several hundred Celsius the energy released is tremendous.  The exhaust gases accelerate as they exit, generating tremendous thrust and acceleration.  The Mach 2 velocities come from the after burner. 

Thus from a system design as described above one comes to the mechanical design.  Where each sub system, the compressor, the combustor and high pressure turbine and low pressure turbine is broken down to components.  Each component is reduced to a finite element mesh, where each mesh point is defined by stresses acting on it along with the prevailing temperature. The stress-temperature is in essence an ask from the selected material.  Can it withstand the conditions at each mesh point taking into account failure modes,  yield strength, fatigue strength and creep strength, along with oxidation.  Since each subsystem, such as compressors, turbines and combustors are actually an assembly of components, some welded, some bolted, many sliding to form a fit, relative motion comes into picture and wear remains a matter of concern.  In the high pressure turbine, temperature are so high that it takes a combination of thermal barrier coatings and cooling airflows to keep temperatures where known alloys can operate.   Thus translating the design to practise becomes an exercise in materials selection. 

The rubber starts to hit the road here.  The jet engines we or our parents may have first flown in the 1970s, five decades back still in a Boeing 747 consumed twice the fuel and generated half the thrust compared to the same engines today per passenger kilometer.  Technology has advanced relentlessly.  And with it, so have the designs and materials used.  

So this brings us to why can’t we make an aircraft engine?

Are our designs up to speed. And do we have materials that meet those needs?   Can we manufacture those materials with the required integrity?   Can we life those materials and predict how long will they last.  

The purpose at this point is not to provide a yes or a no to these probing questions.   But articulate a possible strategy to get there.  A cursory review of open domain literature will give us compositions of alloys used for compressors airfoils and disks  turbine airfoils and high pressure turbine disks.  Our first task is to ensure that critical alloy families can be manufactured to the end geometry.  By the required process; disks are forged, high temperature airfoils are cast as directionally solidified grains or as single crystals.  The national labs serve as nuclei where some capabilities exist to cast airfoils as. Single crystals or directionally solidified.  High temperature rotors have alloys which start as powders which are compacted and forged to provide defect free components with required composition.   Can the technology be transferred to a select few private sector companies.  Can private sector companies step forward do their R&D and make the first entry at the component and subassembly level.  

A target for this exercise is to at least reach a point where the select world leaders were at 2000.  In 2000 a twin engine aircraft could fly from London to Singapore.  This could be our Maruti moment in aircraft engines.  But while we are catching up in manufacturing our scientists need to design the next gen aircraft engine with new materials.  The infrastructure created for manufacturing needs to be advanced to make new materials. Simultaneously we need to advance subsystem  level testing capabilities so that designs and manufacturing are continuously validated. 

The road ahead is long.  The key cultural shift that needs to happen is that we need to be ruthlessly honest and recognize the current status and the efforts needed.  But we need to be confident.  Knowing that once we enter the arena we will succeed.  Even if it takes 20 years we will prevail. 

Dr.  Anand K

GE Retiree 

 

A Teachers Day

 Been blessed with great teachers.  A clear but low key”oxygen is a supporter of combustion but not a combustible gas” rings in sometimes even today.  Her name was Susan.  She was as balanced as her equations in chemistry. In College, we had a fair, semi bald headed, with curly hair at the back, teaching physics tell us on October 1st about what Einstein thought of Gandhiji, a physics teachers opinions on someone who held the moral compass. That was Popli…. While I had a bunch wonderful teachers in IISc, here is a special one for Dr Kishore, who would show up at 8 pm on his Rajdooth to see how my experiments were going and ask whether I had dinner.  .. he would take me bike to the machine shop to get the discs ground.  A gentle pat on the back helped me change track from being an aimless wanderer with an engineering degree to someone who fell in love with research, with Tribology, that has stood the test of time and kept me relevant 44 years later.  In IITM it was KAP,  whose concepts  on tensors helped me connect to Peach Koehler formula but more importantly learn who to facilitate others in their pursuits setting aside organisational imperatives.   If KAP reads this he will know. 

During my PhD it was Conrad who hung on to concepts that I had uncovered which Scattergood  nudged me towards, helping me rise from a “oh will i get itmy PhD” to here is a good one.  Kosel in Notre Dame got me to come completely out of my comfort zone, measuring velocity of 100 micron particles rebounding in all directions with a true focus on the fidelity of physics.  

Can a teachers day be complete without writing about Jerry Schell, who knew whether, how and why and where components underwent wear in an aircraft engine and was willing to mentor and teach to anyone who showed up at his doorstep at the end of a 11 hour day.  In those few years I was a pupil again in love with my field, and the engines and coatings and everyone who worked around me. 

I think this continued for life   Finding that Guru in every organization.  There was this Dr Otto Schneiper who knew about every application for thermal sprayed coatings in the industry and tell me about the value story it offered.  

At some point as we get older our ability to soak knowledge like a sponge becomes equal to or less than what we impart.  When we impart do we put blinders on how, or whether we learn?  In my world today i continue to learn from the team, i don’t blank when people talk about repassivation or microstructure based lifing or life limiting locations, or on how to review programs.  But assuming the mantle of a guru should not come in the way of becoming a shishya, a sponge who wants to soak all the knowledge.  

On that note, a Happy Teachers Day.  Happy Pupils day.  Keep your pupil wide open. 

Back to that 1S2 Orbital.

 So here I was back in Chennai.  A place that we went to because the family was there.  My grandparents.  My dad and mom. Aunts and uncles.  In those old neighbourhoods where the trees were older than grandparents. Verdant.  Everywhere.  Spreading their canopy, and enveloping all in the comforting shade.  

A city so enclosed and ensconced that everything seemed a twenty minute commute.  Now in airconditioned Ubers. 

No wonder that those who found comfort in such stable states never left the city.  I know some who escaped to higher orbitals who returned back to their core.  Their 1S2 state in the C atom, Chennai.  Organic to the core.

Where would that place me?  Like many others who seemed to have escaped the inner orbitals to find higher energy states.  Consigned to find that higher activation energy in some other country or some other city?  

 I think i find solace in the metallurgical bond.  Relishing in donating and being surrounded by free electrons.  Like those free electrons i find my belonging everywhere, in the cool or warm and humid canopies of Chennai, in the new rootedness of Cooke Town, in good earth which seems to have goodness transplanted from everywhere across, and in Whitefield surrounded by young and old with pulsating talent.  Or when I visit US where the nostalgia of different phases of life envelope me. 

It is good to be a free electron in that metallurgical world. 

Every now and then tunnel into the core orbitals and come back. 

Pondicherry hues

 A quiet birthday to celebrate the 78th birthday of my mother in law got me to escape the humdrum of life in Bangalore.  A bit of a circuit.  By train to Chennai.  And a cab to Pondy.  It had been a while, those train rides. 

It had been a while to Pondy too  

My Vande Bharat pulled out on time, the guy floored it past KR Puram   The display said 130 kmph and Whitfield was a blur.  The gentleman next to me was well turned out, with a little red dot on his forehead, like gentlemen from Chennai often do.  I nodded to him and went back to my messages till out of boredom we stuck a conversation.  He ran a business.  Believed in simple living. He wanted to know about my career in GE, about airline safety, referring to the recent tragedy of course.  And then things drifted to fate, Gods way, creation, statistical thermodynamics, order and disorder in life and society.  A couple of hours drifted by   A kid in the next row offered us chocolates   Her mom wearing a headscarf turned back and smiled at us   My neighbour rummaged through his laptop bag a pulled out a chocolate   The kid threw a glance at her mom, her mom nodded and said, oh thank you so much.  My heart felt a bit warmer  

I have spent much of my life being my own self, never quite putting on an act, i think.  And surely after nearly four decades of married life a visit to my in laws felt like home.   The road to Pondy from south of Chennai was a ripper   At 100 kmph one was keeping up with traffic   Past verdant roads, wooded hillocks we were soon near Pondy   Into that warm liberal enclave where there was a bit for everyone  

The ashram perhaps sets the tone   Order disorder, chill, loosen up, be yourself it seemed to say   And so the visitors and residents seem to be able to slow down more than a tad to soak it all in.  The promenade amid the rocky  beach   The pastel coloured buildings, quaint little cake shops, restaurants serving continental cuisine with a chilled mug if you want one, all had the unsaid message.  Unwind   

As did Maisone de Perumal, with it’s dual open courtyards, with large pots housing small trees, and gentle piped music with men wearing dhotis and rooms immaculately furnished, and a kettle with a French press for coffee.  A room that was truly nap-worthy and certainly a wonderful brew to wake us up.  And thus flew a day and a half with walks to the beach, the French quarters, morning runs, walks to the temple and of course the ashram  

And that morning for breakfast, Maison whipped out a cake   The ID proof was not just for compliance but to note down those special days  

Those hues of Pondicherry   Still wrapped in it