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The year was 1971. I was at sea on my first ship. In the well furnished Smoke Room, we had a gem - a top-of-the-line Grundig Radiogram and, as the name suggests, it had an all band radio, a gramophone, the ship having been built in the decade before cassette tape recorders. In the adjacent drawers were hundreds of LPs - long playing records - and EPs - extended play records. Those were the days before digital music. We had music albums and smaller EPs of various types of musi

Gopulu and Norman Rockwell. One illustrated for the weekly Tamil magazine "Ananda Vikatan" in India, a 100 years old this year, while the other was the illustrator (for a major portion of his life) for the "Saturday Evening Post", a magazine started by Benjamin Franklin in 1728, making it almost 300 years old. 30 years, 2 vast oceans, an ages old civilisation and tradition separating the two, culturally vastly different, one having seen both world wars, but bound by the vibra

I started this article with one destination in mind. It somehow meandered along to a different end point. I thought that a comparison of two stalwart illustrators / painters / cartoonists from yesteryears and totally disparate backgrounds will be an interesting project. Little did I foresee the deluge of prodigious work from one will make me rethink my course of action. At the outset, let me unabashedly confess that Google has been my source for most of the material I have pu

Note : This story is part fact and part fiction. I leave the reader to sort it out for themselves. We were 40, they were more than a hundred. They boarded us by sheer weight of numbers. The fighting became hand to hand, fierce. We kept ourselves together in two groups and kept repelling attack after attack - they were not very organised. In the midst of the fighting, I noticed several women fighters, with one being outstanding in fighting and, furthermore, very beautiful. As

Note : This story is part fact and part fiction. I leave the reader to sort it out for themselves. The world knows my name as Koundinya, the name that my parents gave me lost to posterity, lost because of the tumultuous changes that took place in my life. From an unknown boy, I became Koundinya I. This is my story. As I lie on my deathbed, my faded memory has flashes of my life as a young boy, in the Kingdom of Kalinga. As I decline, I slowly waft through the breeze of memori

Chapter 4 Arni On the occasions that my Father came to Vandavasi, he would stay for a very short period at his Father-in-law’s house and escape to Arni, to meet his numerous nieces and nephews, children of his elder sister, who had passed away. He was very popular with all his sisters’ children – I think he had six sisters, all elder to him. He also had one younger brother, my Chitappa. His Father, my Grandfather, was a Police Circle Inspector during the British Raj and was w

A look at the three stages, as envisaged by Dr. Homi Bhabha, in simple terms. . Fission and Fusion While Fission has been found to be and remains a practicable energy source, Fusion is an on going Engineering challenge, likely to be resolved in the distant future. Why is Fusion a goal, sought more than Fission? Nuclear fusion is more powerful than fission because it yields significantly more energy per unit of mass of fuel, driven by a greater change in binding energy and a h

To Summarise: (AI Generated Details and Graphs) (with my son’s help) India Power Sector: 10-Year Historical Review and 10-Year Capacity Outlook Verification and methodology notes Historical data cover FY2015-16 through FY2024-25. Forward capacity projections cover FY2026-27 through FY2035-36. Installed capacity is a power rating (GW), while generation and consumption are annual energy quantities (TWh). Graph 1 uses a two-panel layout. Graph 2 shows percentage shares of act

INDIA’S ENERGY WOES: Coal is a commodity that will trouble India in the near future. With about 70% of the total power generation depending on coal powered plants, India will be hard put to scale it down, especially in the light of the Glasgow Protocols. A schematic of a coal burning unit generating power Of all the energy giving entities, coal is the only product that India is nearly self sufficient. But the coal is of medium grade, found in Jharkand and Orissa. Lignite - a

Chapter 1 / 3 Foreword Wars decisively intrude into the peace of nation states and, consequently, into the peace of societies and individuals. Wars deny the free flow of goods and commodities, stretching the fragile fabrics that bind together a people, a culture, a civilisation. Oil is one such commodity. The dependency on oil and its spin offs has escalated to the extent that governments have more or less sold themselves to the mindset of plunging ever deeper into oil debt,

To the Marine Engineer who has had his baptism by fire in the 1960s and 1970s, he has seen the transformation of most of his routine work being taken over by hydraulics or pneumatics or electronics, under the grand heading of " Automation". On the one hand, Automation is the angel which has eased his workload, for example the monitoring of a pressure or temperature, which he now does from the confines of a sound proofed and air conditioned Engine Control Room, rather than a n

This one is off the beaten track. Probably a few others similar ones are likely to follow. The New Rolls Royce Phantom It was in 1985 that I boarded my first Car Carrier and, thus, began a love for cars. Subsequently, I worked on a total of 8 Car Carriers. All of them could not be termed pure Car Carriers as such, as we carried large components that could not be containerised and were put on tractor trailers. Later years saw a mind boggling variety of cargo coming in and wer

Of Sunrises and Sunsets I had a habit that I preferred never to break when I was a Chief Engineer at sea. I would be up-and-about by 5 every morning and, by 5.30 - or earlier - i would be on the Bridge when the vessel was at sea, having my first cup of the day of coffee, brewed by the Chief Officer who would, then, be on watch. Navigational watches are lonely. Except for the Helmsman, who would be acting as a Lookout, the Chief Officer - or any Duty Officer for that matter -

LIFEBOATS AND SAFETY AT SEA Lifeboats, by supposed definition from the bodies - such as SOLAS - that define such things, are the last...

INSV TARINI Route taken by the Tarini to circumnavigate the Globe NAVIKA SAAGAR PARIKRAMA With the abundance of news reports and...

The Sinking and the Salvage of ‘Tricolor’ She started life as the Nosac Sun , a vehicle carrier, built in Japan in 1987. (I had been on a...

A Set of Copper Plates that Traversed a Millennium and a Continent - Chapter 2 Chola Treasure in the Netherlands! | Anaimangalam...

A Set of Copper Plates that Traversed a Millenia - Chapter 1 Chola Treasure in the Netherlands! | Anaimangalam Seppedugal (Or the Copper...

The Cap and the Logo The Formative Years Then I am writing this at the behest of 4th Year Cadet Mr Kush Rana, who wanted me to write...

The Ten Sadans that Powered the World A "Fall-In" in the Junior Hostel Quadrangle - A Recent Feature A largely unknown and unused tract...