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If I ever have a girl child I'd name her "Oorja" and my wife endorses my idea... If it were to be a boy, his name would be "Ishaan"... What would be the names of my subsequent children is something that my wife and I are not decided on yet... :-)... But to start with, we pray and hope that the next seven months culminate in something fantastic for us - be it Oorja or Ishaan.
Well! The names "Oorja" and "Ishaan" hold some great significance for me... Oorja stands for "energy" and Ishaan stands for "the Sun". I always had a fascination for ENERGY (renewable energy in particular) and the power of the mighty sun in sustaining the enormous variety of life forms on our planet; ever since as a kid I learnt of the ingenuity of Archimedes in destroying enemy ships using massive "solar mirrors", the power of the sun always overwhelmed my senses. And my fascination for energy started then... in particular renewable energy... Little at that time did I realize the link between energy and environment... I was too young and of course a naive village-dweller to even have heard about what pollution meant...
In my Mechanical Engineering days at BITS, I tried my hand at a renewable energy project, but somehow could not make it big... Then inadvertently I got involved in an energy conservation project at Apollo Tyres as a plant maintenance engineer... That was when I realized the intricate link between energy and environment... The breakthrough project that I conceptualized based on simple thermodynamic fundamentals translated into an amazing one-crore rupee saving per year for the company and of course a reduction in the emission of quite a few tons of greenhouse gases... I had the satisfaction of having done something for the environment...
Post Apollo Tyres, during my MBA days at SPJain, I tried dabbling at energy and environment initiatives and floated my outfit called LIFE (a Lasting Initiative For Environment)... and was fairly successful in saving my college a few bucks (green bucks;-) thru an energy audit that cut down the college's electricity bill...I was encouraged and helped by some of my most favorite professors there… My successors there also tried their hand at initiatives like vermi-composting and creating environmental awareness among kids by organizing a contest involving the making of "eco-friendly Ganeshas" during one Ganesh Chaturthi... I don't have updates as to the current status of LIFE... But I hope the guys are still around...
From SP Jain I joined Satyam... While I was enjoying every moment of my association with the GRAMIT initiative, something used to keep pricking me about my loss of association with my interests in energy and environment. I thought it's just that Satyam, being an IT organization, would not deem energy and environment as a core idea. But then, my perception to this changed one Friday... Our chief took a wonderful initiative of calling the team for a discussion on "environmental issues" facing the Mother Earth. That was something unusual, at least for me... that a person involved in managing IT services also had an eye for such things...Present in the meeting were at least three other gentlemen with whom i keep discussing such things in spare time... Well!!! Seemingly unrelated interests of service virtualization and environment, but that goes on to show the "environmental responsibility" that exists in my team!!! What more, prior to the discussion there was a screening of an amazing movie on global warming, done at the behest of our chief... One keen insight... global warming can happen "virtually" from anywhere on the earth... reversing the logic, saving the earth can also happen virtually from anywhere... if you burn oil here, the entire globe warms up, if you plant a tree here the entire globe gets saved... THINK!!! I may be defining "virtualisation" - the cornerstone of eSupport in layman's terms.. but it does seem to me quite logical...
Hmmm.... My interests in energy and environment have been rekindled at Satyam... And hence the genesis of this blog... And in a surprising case of coincidental alignment, as I was heading home after watching the movie, I got a call from a friend in Dubai... He called me after a long time just to find out about how far my interests in renewable energy have come!!!
I think GRAMIT is one such initiative that makes a case of environmental justice by Satyam...
I'm heading home today with a great sense of satisfaction and with a feeling that people who matter to me also share interests similar to that of mine...
I can go home and tell my wife that to name our kids Oorja and Ishaan would be a great thing:-) We, as the parents are in fact handing over our piece of this world and environment to the kids and they shouldn't be blaming us that we had handed over a very bad piece indeed.. and definitely when we are quite old, we wouldn't have the power to undo the harm to environment that we had done in our youthful jest... I pledge to give my children a clean environment (at least my mom and dad gave me a good world to live in)... and my wife is surely feeling happy that she married the right man... I've a feeling that my glamour is increasing by the day...
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Part 2
I'm 100% sure this will be a very interesting reading!!! Coz it deals with your future as much as mine...
(I've always been a great fan of "renewable energy" and though I do not detest oil, I always feel that we should use this precious resource with a great amount of discretion.)
Subsequent to my last post ages ago on this blog, I was in a kind of hibernation following the tragedy of the loss of my little baby Oorja. I never felt like being part of the mainstream social business, but thanks to the kindness bestowed by the wonderful and people-oriented ecosystem at Satyam I could limp back to work. It took a good 4 months for me to recover from the shock. What I thought would be the harbinger of a new dawn in the world's energy scenario (Oorja is Sanskrit for ENERGY), seemed to have been pushed to postponment till eternity.
But God had something great in store for me and Sirisha. Just short of a year since disaster struck us, we now are blessed with a baby boy and as I mentioned in my earlier posts of March 2007 on this blog, we are going to name him Ishaan (root Ish = Almighty in many languages Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, etc) that is another name for the mighty Sun!
It seems that the earth needs about 10000000000000 watts of energy to support her 6 billion people and other life forms, whereas the almighty Sun endows us with about 100000000000000000 watts - that is a clear 1000 times than what exactly is required!!! In fact if one were to go through the theory, wind energy, tidal energy etc are derivatives of solar energy. It is the Sun who energises the air and causes winds to blow and the tides to rise.
Well! Now the question is about when will solar energy become economically viable? Let's get into a bit of economics for this (twinkle in my eye - I read economics long back and am trying to apply some of the theory).
Let's take an example - the current inflation in India that's hovering at about 12-13% at the time of me writing this blog. Inflation elsewhere is higher (with Zimbabwe topping the inflation chart at about 2 billion percent!!!! that the government had to recently print a 1 million Zimbabwe dollar note and one would get only about 2 loaves of bread for that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). Coming to the point, there is one key driver for inflation that even our Finance Minister has put the blame on - the price of oil globally. It seems during the second world war, inflation in Germany shot up manifold that a newspaper cost more than a million Marks or whatever the currency was at that time. The driver then obviously was a tremendous demand for resources that used to get converted to war material. But that was a temporary phenomenon. But the current scenario that is oil-driven might be a slightly more permanent phenomenon than what Germany faced during the war days. The one thing that qualifies this permanence is the "limited reserve of oil" that we keep talking... Oil is going to deplete, if not now at least in the next 100 years... 200 years.... 300 years... IT IS GOING TO DEPLETE. Add to this the impact on environment the fossil fuels have. They disturb the carbon equilibrium to the extent that inhabitation might be a difficult thing on earth! So, given this explanation and this example, it is easy even for a novice to understand that "economic viability" is a function of a few "drivers"... Today one of the most powerful drivers is oil prices... So, in a way, probably the salary I'm drawing has some link to the oil prices (far-fetched it may sound but it is possible). In the same way, we are living in what we can call the "oil age".
But as oil becomes scarcer and scarcer, in all likelihood the focus would shift to something more renewable... call it solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, hydel, etc. Nuclear energy is a quasi-renewable source, just enough to buy time of about 300-400 years before some other technology comes in or the human race ends (cynical, but think-worthy). So, we now understand that what seems economically not viable today would be perfectly viable in a different economy... call it the "renewable economy"... The frame of reference would have changed and my salary or the inflation would be a function of how many solar panels are installed or how many windmills get destroyed in an earthquake...
I quote a wonderful article by Thomas Friedman (World is Flat fame) -
"Anyone who looks at the growth of middle classes around the world and their rising demands for natural resources, plus the dangers of climate change driven by our addiction to fossil fuels, can see that clean renewable energy -- wind, solar, nuclear and stuff we haven’t yet invented -- is going to be the next great global industry. It has to be if we are going to grow in a stable way. Therefore, the country that most owns the clean power industry is going to most own the next great technology breakthrough -- the E.T. revolution, the energy technology revolution -- and create millions of jobs and thousands of new businesses, just like the I.T. revolution did."
Please read this article at http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,568983,00.html and you will appreciate my argument further. So, there is no question of "renewable stuff" being unviable at any point of time. It is about our willingness to change our plane of operation - from an oil-driven economy to a Sun-driven economy.
There are of course people who argue that we need not unduly worry about future generations because they're likely to be born more intelligent than us and will figure a way out of an energy crisis. But I've my doubts.
I spoke to Ishaan yesterday (who is about 20-days old. If you already forgot who he is, he is my son and a future leader). His eyes seemed to be telling me - "Dad, leave some oil for our generation. We'll use it as an emergency resource. Once I grow up I'll make sure that the world switches over to more sustainable energy sources than oil. I'm going to be THE LEADER that would change the world energy scenario and make the earth a more sustainable planet. Thanks for naming me after the Sun. I promise I'll do justice to your expectations and also to the billions of my fellow beings and trillions of life forms by being a champion of sustainable development. But please tell my uncles and aunts to be a bit conscious about the way they use oil and energy. Other things I'll take care of. In fact when I grow up.... I'll do that.... I'll do this..... "
Little Ishaan's speech went on and on... And I could see a great promise in his unspoken words... and I'm learning from him... The new dawn that seemed to be a distant dream suddenly seems like a close reality to me... And I'm pretty sure that Oorja is lending her divine hand to her brother Ishaan in his Sustainabiilty Championship Journey...
All thanks to the woman in my life ... my wife Sirisha, who, with her resilience took a major loss in her stride and without complaints delivered on a major promise - Ishaan... Women ARE women... matchless...
