Dream India, Dream Bigger!

 

Let me begin with what I quote frequently from the great visionary, our people’s President, Late APJ Abdul Kalam,

 

“Dream is not the thing you see in sleep, but is that thing that doesn't let you sleep”

 

It is this spirit of dreaming big by our Space, Missile and Nuclear scientists, supported by the governments over the decades, that India earned its pride of place in these areas. They did not merely sit on their dreams, they had the vision, an audacious commitment and an action plan to realize their dreams, particularly in the face of denial of technology by those countries which had it.

 

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet are perhaps the most well-known minor characters invented by the bard, known for foolishly carrying a letter to the English king requesting him to kill them; sample their interesting conversation with Hamlet:

Guildenstern: …the very substance of the ambition is merely the shadow of a dream.
Hamlet: A dream itself is like a shadow.

Rosencrantz: Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow's shadow.

 

Ambition, or whatever that drives the desire and the passion to attain a goal, is merely a fraction of what the bigger picture is to the dreaming and ambitious? Is ambition of people restless to achieve something big only their deep-rooted unrealized fantasies? Circular arguments on bad dreams, overreaching ambitions, overpowering angst, dissatisfaction in living a dream et al but what I want to emphasize is that dreams and ambitions are fine but they should lead to a clear vision and extraordinary commitment or else, remember what Maxwell said, “Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.”

 

Let us talk of my dream which became a reality.

 

My take on dreams, especially for youngsters. Don’t live your dream at once, look after your bread and butter first, but never let the fire of your dream get extinguished, an opportunity will come your way some day to fulfil it. I had the dream and I thought the vision too, so I waited. Once at the helm at Integral Coach Factory (ICF) Chennai, the most ideal platform to design and build a train and finding a great team bequeathed to me there, it was then the time for my dream to not let me sleep any more. Not just a great team in competence and commitment but a team of dreamers. The core members of team ICF too had a dream similar to mine. So we never looked back and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

A two-step process, beyond my capability to express prosaically, so here goes:

 

KHvāb hote haiñ dekhne ke liye

un meñ jā kar magar rahā na karo 

(Muneer Niyazi)

 

Dekh us ko ḳhvāb meñ jab aañkh khul jaatī hai sub.h

kyā kahūñ maiñ kyā qayāmat mujh pe tab laatī hai sub.h 

(Taban Abdul Hai)

 

(KHvāb: dream, sub.h: morning, qayāmat: the judgment day, commotion. 1. Dream you must, but do not go start living the dream. 2. When that dream wakes me up in the morning, it brings great restlessness and tumult in my mind)

 

Dream, vision, commitment, action! All this can fall prey to hype. And that would be the undoing. Hype enters when one is unsure of one’s ability and the feasible attainment so the grandiose declarations. Touchstone, the fool, says in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Like the Fool says in Twelfth Night, “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.” Not knowing something is not shameful. Pretending to know everything is. It's Ok to say "I don't know." Or that, we may not be as good now but we would reach there soon.

 

I say this today as I do see hype overtaking the reality and that has the danger that the good reality would not advance to better reality but recede into something poorer. That said, I would briefly outline my dreams. Simple dreams not encompassing the entire Atmanirbhar Bharat arena but simply those I would think are well within the realm of possibilities in my chosen field of railways and allied transportation. Dreams which, of course, I no longer have the power or authority to act upon. Dreams, nevertheless, which I am free to dream, hoping wistfully, that better sense would prevail and someone would bell the cat

 

An Indian design of 200 kmph train set, to be tested at the new test track Indian railways is building in Rajasthan. Not an imported design but a design by ICF and allied private industry together.

 

And Indian design of High-speed train. OK, we are not there yet. But can we not insist on meaningful learnings from the Japanese design for Mumbai-Ahmedabad project and take up a project, perhaps collaborative with the Japanese or otherwise and develop one with our own IPR? It is feasible and as a proof of the pudding, I quote the collaborative project I led at Research Designs and Standards Organization (RDSO) in 2010 to design a 5500 hp state-of-the-art diesel locomotive, albeit in collaboration with EMD and the then DLW.

 

Remember the Calcutta metro train design of early 1980s. It was entirely a baby of ICF. A nostalgic indigenous initiative, which admittedly was not the top-notch design then but it was our own. Instead of building on that pelf of pride, we let it be frittered away and today all the Metro coach designs are imported, barring the 3-phase Kolkata Metro coaches of ICF. Are Metro trains, which operate in less stringent conditions compared to ICF’s EMUs in Mumbai area, holy cows that Indians cannot design them? So much for our Atmanirbhar pitch. This needs to be corrected.

 

Same is the story of Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) trains, many of which would soon be in the pipeline. What an irony that a government which sees such great vote-catching value in Train 18/Vande Bharat trains cannot permit indigenous designs in a similar area! The ministries of Railways and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) have to walk the ubiquitous Atmanirbhar talk.

 

Do we see future in Hyperloop? Perhaps unsure but why not invest in it in collaboration with a large technology-holder, at our terms leveraged by our size and capacity to bankroll it and take a lead over the entire world. Assigning a team in India to develop it is fine in the longer term but the need is to get going now and for that a technology partner is a must. I see more value here than Hydrogen trains which would be rather infructuous in a system which would soon be fully electrified.

 

A couple of allied fields. Large E-Vehicles (buses, self-propelled coaches) and Kavach. The government, which is a big spender, must make the field skewed in favour of Indian designer cum manufacturers so we obviate the present trend to import the heart of these E-Vehicles, batteries, convertors, motors and controls and that too mainly from China. As for Kavach, much faster proliferation of, a robust system which matches the current technology signalling system ETCS level 2 at one-fourth the price.

 

The list is long, friends, but I stop here with a simple observation. India should not merely try to be a factory of the world, which is largely a matter of simplified policies but strive to be a designer and maker of world-class products. That alone would make India Atmanirbhar and perhaps even a Vishwaguru.

 

We have indeed come this far but there is a long way to go. Remember what Allama Iqbal said:

 

Sitāroñ se aage jahāñ aur bhī haiñ

abhī ishq ke imtihāñ aur bhī haiñ

(There is world beyond the stars and so many inquests of love that we still have to go through.)