The Fall and Fall of Boeing

Of the many thought provoking bits that Downfall pulled together in its presentation of Boeing's failures in the aftermath of the 737Max crashes, the one that struck me the most was the change in Boeing's culture in the mid 1990s. 

At the surface, the easy target is unabashed Capitalism. It is fair to say that over the decades, we have come to expect American companies to optimize moneymaking potential in all of their endeavors, skirting at the edge of ethics and moral compulsions but mostly behaving within the confines of civilized society. But it was not this urge to profiteer that affected me. The forces at play here are far more complex, and subtle. 

This phenomenon is more than just about profits. 

***

In 1984, Bhopal suffered an explosion in a pesticides and chemicals factory. In less than a few hours, the toxic gases spread around the city and killed, maimed and permanently disfigured not only the people that were unfortunate enough to live in the city at the time, but multiple generations thereafter. More than half a million people were injured, thousands died! 

The American company running the plant knew of safer (but more expensive) alternatives to the dangerous chemicals they were using in the production process. The facility also had a history of casualties from toxic exposure in the years leading up to the accident, but didn't institute permanent corrective actions to fix their controls. 

And yet, even nearly 40 years after one of the World's worst man made Disasters, condemnation of the American Manufacturer, UCC, is far from unanimous. Questions are often raised on the quality of the Indian managers running the Plant and the engineers and workers who were operating the processes. 

This is very relevant to the Boeing story, because the first public statements from Boeing and American Aerospace "Experts" in the aftermath of the crash ascertained at least a part of the blame on "Third World" pilot training. It was ironical when it eventually turned out that the pilot of the Lion Air that went down was actually trained in the United States. 

It is more than just about profits.

The issue is the purported unassailability of American Engineering. Obviously the USA cant be designing poor products and processes right? Is it not more likely that the operators from poor Asian and African countries cannot comprehend the complexity of the said American products? 

This is flawed thinking. As evidenced by Downfall, production engineers and operators (including users/consumers) are often at the mercy of design decisions made far away from the field, with limited ability to control their own destinies. 

In a World that is driven by Centralized Design, Decentralized Manufacturing, and Global Product Application, the control of critical characteristics in the product specifications is progressively moving further and further away from the end user. And unless companies strive to democratize within their supply chain and effectively establish the feedback loops to solve these engineering problems, disasters of this magnitude will probably, unfortunately continue to happen. 

And that's part of the reason why Homegrown Product Engineering and Manufacturing deserves the push in India. 

* * *

The Chernobyl Nuclear Explosion happened less than 2 years after the Bhopal Tragedy. In this case, everything was designed and developed by Russians, at that time one of the World's most technologically advanced nations. But it happened in a system that was occupied from top to bottom by the State. Engineers and Scientists were valuable, but not as valuable as the Polit Bureau member who could control through his whims and fancies the allocation of resources, and hence had to be pleased. 

In study after study, there has been critical analysis of the unintended consequences of this power dynamic - when in a moral dilemma, would an engineer owe primary allegiance to the quality of his engineering work or to the idea of serving his Motherland? 

It is more than just about profits. 

Boeing was in a rat race with Airbus and it was losing. To rise above this, quickly, was not just a matter of corporate rivalry, but one of national identity! Every part of the American Aerospace Industrial and Regulatory complex recognized this and agreed to work in coordination to fix it ASAP. 

Mission statements are great in aligning the forces of bureaucracy and paperwork in a large faceless system. The problem occurs when botched mission statements stand in direct contradiction of product integrity. Should the MCAS Engineer or the Regulator reviewing it have owed primary allegiance to the quality of his engineering work or to the idea of serving Boeing/USA by letting them get ahead in the race against Airbus? 

And if this happened in an Individualistic, Self Preservation before All Else society like America, what chance does the rest of the World stand?

* * *

Downfall was a very thought provoking movie and as shown above, got me thinking on multiple levels about the state of the World, and more personally about my role in the World as an Engineer. 

What caught me the most by surprise was that one of the World's most iconic companies, through a series of changes up at the top ended up with a culture that discouraged people, especially engineers and subject matter experts to speak their mind. 

Surely, of all places in the World, the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave would have given its brilliant engineers and scientists the platform to debate on merits and demerits of technologies on scientific principles with absolutely no other consideration.Unfortunately, no.

Indian Engineers around the World are now involved in the design of most products you will encounter in your life. And in their pursuits of excellence, they might do well to remember India's motto which in times like this seems more far sighted and timeless than we have given it credit for. 

In the end, Satyameva Jayate. Truth Alone Prevails.

The Soil of the Motherland

Kaansen Khronicles #6: Revisiting songs from years past, that have been lost in the chaos of the social media-era content explosion!

 

 

Patriotic songs have always had a special place in Indian pop culture  - from the original Vande Maataram in the 1930's to the sensational 1997 reinvention by A.R.Rahman. Rahman in particular has added a great deal to the genre through his compositions for The Legend of Bhagat Singh, Swades, and Rang De Basanti. But another album in this genre is arguably his most underrated ever -  Bose, the Forgotten Hero. And no song shines brighter in this forgotten album than Desh Ki Mitti.

Desh Ki Mitti came during Rahman's most productive Symphony Orchestra Phase - the early 2000's. The use of the symphony has produced memorable pieces in A.R.Rahman's music throughout his career, but the early 2000's were when he used it in as many different scenarios as he could, producing some wonderful results - Zubeidaa, The Legend of Bhagat Singh, and he even managed to incorporate it into Lagaan, in O Ri Chori, and the Waltz piece, continuing years after in the out-of-the-world Tu Muskura, from Yuvvraj in 2008. 

Set to the Amir Kalyani ragam, a piano stringing the song together, and the orchestra providing the drama, the song is anchored in the lyrics of Javed Akhtar - a poem that describes the difficulties of an Indian stranded abroad looking for his motherland in these foreign surroundings during Bose's exile in Germany. 

The best piece of this beautiful puzzle comes in the form of Sonu Niigam's voice. Of the few songs that Sonu Niigam has lent his voice to A.R.Rahman, this one shines brightly at the top in large reason because this song needed his voice. Few songs demand one specific singer, and the choice of Sonu Niigam to sing this one was smashingly apt. Anuradha Sriram's accompanying vocals in the background lift the mood of the song significantly. If Sonu Niigam's voice represents the protagonist of the song, Anuradha is the voice of nostalgia that is drawing Bose back to his motherland. 

Each component of this song is carefully chosen and used with a level of finesse that matches the best of ARR's music. 

 

Why then has this song been forgotten? Several factors - not having a huge star, not being a very big production, and patriotic movies not necessarily being the flavor of the 2000s (none of the Bhagat Singh movies of the early 2000s worked at the box office). The lack of dedicated visuals for the song probably also played a role - not many people can necessarily picture this song in their heads. 

ARR famously doesn't pick his favorite songs - to him, they are all created equally through the same process. And it is a song like Desh Ki Mitti that demonstrates why that is an important stance. Here's a song that is as close perfection as can be, and yet didn't achieve the popularity it deserved, unlike even lesser ARR classics. 

Make for India

When was the last time an Indian product truly wowed you?
When a product was crafted so beautifully and was so uniquely Indian that it taught you something new about the heritage of the people who created it...
When you were so enamoured by the product that you didn't really care what the price tag was, and all you wanted to do was procure it...

It is not that such products do not exist. We have all seen these products. In temple streets lined with overstocked shops, along highways near level crossings, at airports, at railway stations, and at the gazillion bazaars that 90% of India shops in. We just do not know these products - there's no popular brand associated with them. There's no colorful packaging that differentiates the product from a million other less distinguished sellers of the same product. This causes a grave unintended consequence which will prevent the product from ever generating large scale economic value - a lack of sophistication! 

Sophistication in a product comes from several different means - but the ultimate goal is always the same: improving customer satisfaction. It may come from a choice of better materials, it may have longevity arising from a simpler process of production and fewer constituents, it may offer a myriad of customizations, it may come from better insight into customer preferences or it may feature the best consumer preference: low cost. All of these improve the product by a notch and give the producer a measure of protection against competition, and drive innovation. A lack of sophistication makes the product replaceable by a better version. And in a globalized world, the better version is normally a cheaper version, mass produced in a factory in China, and sold by a "brand" that has spent some time applying the above mentioned sophistications.

With the advent of GST in 2017, India has the World's largest open market, and the largest population of consumers under the age of 35 in the World. No other market has a larger sample set of consumer preferences available to analyze and tune products to. And even in an era where e-commerce rises to new heights every day, a vast majority of purchases happen offline. This gives entrepreneurs at every level of the value and supply chain to understand and analyze customer preferences, build a better brand and improve their reach to a wider market. A few iterations of this Measure-Analyze-Improve-Scale routine can succeed in creating a sophisticated, well recognized product with wide ranging economic impact that generates wealth and creates jobs. All it takes is focusing on the customer the product is being created for. 

It turns out, the best answer to the trillion dollar Make in India question, is Make for India.

Falling in Love with America's Best Idea!

The image of Yellowstone forever stuck in my head came from a Bing Wallpaper years ago. 

Years ago, logging on to Windows, Bing picked out a lock screen wallpaper that I have not forgotten. It showed a bright blue pool of water surrounded by the colors of the rainbow with fire blowing around the edges. It looked out of this World, and the image stuck in my head and carved out its own little corner in my hippocampus. Further investigation revealed this spectacular feature to be the Grand Prismatic Spring, arguably Yellowstone's most unique and celebrated feature, and that day about 8 years ago was when I subconsciously started planning America's favorite Summer Vacation. 

Our travels through the other jewels in the National Parks System had only elevated the sense of anticipation we felt for this trip that was yet destined for some time in the future. The opportunity arrived in 2019, when we finally decided that our Memorial Day would be spent in Wyoming. For years, I had dreamt of the Grand Prismatic Spring, wowed at the towering Teton peaks in photography exhibitions, and been amazed by the Serengeti of America in the Lamar Valley. This was our chance to be there and see for ourselves if these images in my mind were a product of the Great American Marketing machinery or if there was substance to it.

If you have only one shot at viewing the Tetons, and want the best picture out of the trip, head to Schwabacher Landing early in the Morning. 

P.S: Remember to go low when you get the picture. Very Low. Lower. 

Memorial Day is a great time of the year. It's late May and the fickle minded nature of the weather makes way for a more consistent Sunny experience, with the occasional rain shower keeping things fresh and interesting. Our previous Memorial Day sojourns had taken us to the Badlands & Custer in South Dakota, and we wanted to take our Wild West experience a notch higher with the trip to Wyoming. Up in the mountains, May always carries the risk of a late season blizzard, but it had the benefit of thin crowds that only start to pick up when Summer kicks in, and more importantly, increased observable wildlife activity from animals emerging from Hibernation, descending upon the Great Plains, foraging while the day temperatures are still relatively cool. 

While in Yellowstone-Grand Teton, chances are you will be in Bear Jams, and chances are that some of the bears you see will be young. Young bears are still fairly large like we found out when we encountered this family near the Pilgrim Creek region in Grand Teton.  It is fascinating to learn that a lot of the bear moms like hanging out near the roads because that keeps them safe from Eternally Hangry Grizzly Dads who like killing cubs that ain't theirs. Something to do with establishing genetic supremacy. Getting rid of the grizzly obsession is crucial to enjoying the Park. We got over ours after the 15th bear in the first four days of trip, and once we got that out of the way, the natural beauty of the park was even more stunning! Before the trip, we really would've liked to see bears. By the end of the trip, we had seen so many (both black, and grizzly) that our focus shifted towards their more elusive competitors at the top of the food chain: The Gray Wolves. We didn't see any wolves on our trip. Guess we need to head back soon.... 

For months, we pondered and debated every last detail of the trip - where we would stay, how many days we would spend at each part of the park. You see, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is huge - large enough to be a State by itself. And as experienced roadtrippers, we knew only too well not to get caught in the trap of having one home base throughout our trip and drive around to the destinations - that simply doesn't work. Instead, we decided to break our 10 day trip into 3 days at Jackson Hole near the Tetons, which was the far south portion of our itinerary, 3 days in Cooke City, the eastern most part of Yellowstone and the Gateway to the Lamar Valley wildlife experience, and 3 more days in the central"8" Loop of the park, so we could easily access the Thermal features, and make multiple trips to the Grand Prismatic Spring. At the time we planned it, we did not know the park and driving distances too well, but in hindsight, our stay locations gave us the best shot at taking in all of Yellowstone-Grand Teton on a slow and relaxed schedule. 

Hot water sculpting layer upon layer of limestone with its own acidic carbonic acid solution is a spectacle worth seeing at the Mammoth Hot Springs area - as a side bonus, you are guaranteed the observation of elk at close quarters, present in large numbers in the parking lots and around the village. Even when they don't really care about you, you are obliged to move 6 feet or further away from them. They are biig, and can do significant damage without much effort. 

Our typical day on the trip went something like this. We woke up for the Sunrise, every single day and stayed up for Sunset. The dawn and dusk are when a lot of excitement happened in the park. The Golden hours of Sunlight made for great pictures, and wildlife was up and about. Around the time of our trip in May, the Sun typically rose at about 6 AM and set at about 9.15 PM. So maximizing our daylight hours meant we went to bed a little after 10 and woke up at 5 every morning. We caught up with sleep in peak Sun hours - about midday, after we had scraped bits and pieces for lunch.

As it turned out, there were more things to learn about the Grand Prismatic Spring before we could cross it off our bucket lists. In early spring,when the air temperature is still fairly cool, and the surface temperature of the hot water spring is significantly higher, a steady stream of condensation blows over the spring, making it hard to visualize the colors in all their glory for more than a couple seconds now and then. Oh, and you realize you can never personally view the spring from right up above as seen in the Bing Wallpaper....duh! Not unless you are in a helicopter that stays low while you admire the beauty. 

Lunch and Dinner were arguably our most difficult planning assignment. Food for grass eaters such as ourselves is hard enough in any non-urban American setting. Add to that the vastness, and remoteness of traveling through Yellowstone, and the problem compounds. On our very first day in the park, we realized, we wouldn't necessarily be able to drive to a restaurant or concession stand precisely when we wanted food - we went hungry for lunch that day. We would have to plan our meals in advance, and stock up on food whenever we found some, even if we didn't really need it at the time. This change in strategy meant, each time we were able to find a restaurant and fresh food, we would buy two more of whatever we ate to-go, so that we wouldn't go hungry if we found a grizzly or a wolf pack on our drive back on Lamar Valley. And trust me, that happened several times. 

The Pros of traveling to Yellowstone in early-Spring - Exhibit A. Spring is shorthand for Baby Animal Season. This moose calf was likely days old when a traffic jam spotted it, and this was one among several young animals we encountered on the trip. Cons: Remember, baby elk and moose are staple diet for Grizzly families (who also tend to have really young babies this time of the year), and you cannot wish away everything you are about to see in the Wild. Not the kind of stuff you want to remember from vacations!

Weather is the other element you've to be watchful of. Days before the trip, the forecast looked really discouraging with every day in the week we were going to spend at the park showing either rain or snow. The Park Cams on the NPS website that relay real time park conditions and traffic was almost always showing dense fog or wet roads. I even went as far as buying rain protective covers for my telephoto lens preparing to always be shooting in rain. Fortunately, the reality of the situation was not as bad. There were a couple days passing through the mountains when the snow did give us some anxious moments (there's not much shoulder on the roads on the Mt.Washburn pass). We could never make it down the spectacular Beartooth Highway due to heavy snow and landslide in that area. But for the most part, we could stay informed on the weather and prepared accordingly, and managed our expectations. We did enjoy bright blue skies, and sunny days during most of our trips. Clouds during Sunrise and Sunset actually helped the landscape look more dramatic! 

 

Yellowstone is popular as America's first National Park. It's goal is to preserve the wilderness that once spanned the entire North American continent before the colonization and industrialization of the 19th & 20th centuries. Once away from the roads, on hikes at least a few miles away from the road, the feeling of isolation and having the whole World to yourself is real. It is not hard to find yourself the canopy of a large tree and a lush green meadow to lay upon for a little siesta, with scarcely other people to disturb you. Although, in that scenario, it would be wise to have your wife awake and on the lookout for any curious bears because they like the same exact thing.  

America is proud of Yellowstone - it is often called "America's Best Idea" - and the ideas of preservation started at Yellowstone have been emulated through the rest of America, and the rest of the World. And yet, the scale of Yellowstone - the area of land owned and developed with road networks and infrastructure - is virtually unparalled. But the cost of creating this park was significant too. It is easy to forget the decades of Armed conflicts in the Yellowstone region, and the forcible eviction of the Native American tribes who called the vicinities of the Park home, and tied spiritual significance to the thermal features of the parks. A visitor to Yellowstone today does not encounter relics from the grim past when millions of bison were slaughtered for a multitude of reasons ranging from creating more grazing lands for cattle, to beating boredom on long train journeys on the Pacific Railroad. There is no other way of looking at it - Yellowstone was built on blood and tears. 

The story of the park is captured in great detail in the book "Empire of Shadows" by George Black. Page after page, the book sums up the price nature and humanity paid so that two hundred years later, the people of the World could appreciate what nature was before the destructive forces of the Industrial Revolution. 

When you are done enjoying the treasures Yellowstone has to offer, try to read more about the price Native Americans and Nature had to pay so we could appreciate the Wilderness centuries later. 

When we were planning our trip to Yellowstone, the years of pent-up excitement and anticipation often made us wonder if we had maybe built it up too much in our heads - surely, there was no way it could be as good as we were expecting it to be, and that we would likely be underwhelmed when we finally got there. We were pretty sure we would come back with pictures and memories, but that we would move on to our next trip and forget everything about this place when something cooler came along, like every other State and National Park we had been to.  

It wasn't. 

We knew exactly what we were going to be seeing, and we were still awed at everything we experienced during our 10 days in the area. After our trip to Yellowstone is when we started questioning our goal of giving every US State a chance, and getting to all 50 of them before we started to pick favorites. Yellowstone spoiled us, and has made it an involuntary compulsion for us to keep returning there for every vacation for the rest of our lives.

 And I don't blame us. We are humans after all. When you can fall so much in love with something so familiar and accessible, and still gain a generous measure of excitement from it, why then would you ever go looking for anything new? 

When the Stars Align.

Kaansen Khronicles #5: Revisiting songs from years past, that have been lost in the chaos of the social media-era content explosion! 

In the fall of 2004, the collective attention of every music channel or TV show covering Bollywood was focused on a Shah Rukh Khan movie that was a huuuuge hit even before it was released. Veer-Zaara was the mother of all love stories, a story that brought India and Pakistan together, made by Bollywood's Royalty, Yash Chopra. To add another feather to its cap, music for the film came from old unused compositions by Madan Mohan, a storied music producer from the 1950's - 60's. Every music store you walked into had Veer Zara songs playing and the cassette's and CD's were flying off the shelves.

But even with all the uniqueness and speciality of Veer-Zaara notwithstanding, the most remarkable album of 2004 came with a completely different SRK movie, the buzz around which started out with an obscure music video featuring SRK and a disheveled fakir driving through the arid central-Indian countryside in a camper. It would've been hard to say at the time, but in a span of a few years Swades became one of A.R.Rahman's most iconic albums of all time, a full suite of musical genius unleashed all at once. 

Several songs from the movie are all time Rahman fan favorites, with the aforementioned Yun Hi Chala occupying a permanent place on all roadtrip playlists, and Yeh Jo Des assuming the role of spiritual successor to Vande Mataram. Between the two of them, the Swades experience is summed up as traveling through life and country, learning to accept and love your life and country for what it is. 

And yet, there is another song in the movie, one that is not as appreciated as the above two gems, that captures the essence of what Swades stood for in that moment in our history, and helped it become one of the greatest cult classics of my generation. Sung by Udit Narayan, and written by Javed Akhtar, the song talks about stars, and the place Indians can occupy among them. It is called Yeh Taara, Woh Taara.

The song came at a time when it was still acceptable to have songs with 3 Charanams. It came at a time when songs could be 7.30 minutes long and people still enjoyed listening to the song unfold at its own pace. It came at a time when there were Directors still crazy enough to take a 7.30 minute song and use it without cuts in the movie - granted, the audiences punished the Director, Ashutosh Gowariker dearly with the utter failure of this 3.5 hour long movie at the Box Office. 

Time and again, we've spoken about the importance of context to a great Indian movie song. We've talked about how much a song is elevated when it is subservient to the story it is trying to tell. When the role of the song is not to promote the movie, but to help the movie accentuate its premise. When the intent with releasing a song early in promotions is not to have a catchy tune with fast beats stuck in the minds of the listener, but instead portray a character that you are interested in learning more about. 

To that end, the premise of Yeh Taara jumps out in the first 30 seconds - the protagonist, who happens to be a NASA Scientist, is trying to demonstrate to a village the  joy of being together, all divisions removed. He shows people stars - this star, that star and every star - and tells them about how the stars put up a show when they light up the sky in constellations - all together. 

The music of this song, in keeping with the theme is plain, non-distracting and very simple. Udit Narayan's voice carries the song, other than the interludes when the symphony, and then the flute help maintain a somber mood.  In successive Charanams the metaphors extend to the colors of a rainbow, and drops of an ocean as well, before eventually landing on his point in the ultimate uptempo charanam - the fact that every member of the society has their role to play that they excel at, and the true victory for society is when they all work together! Rahman even brings in a couple of really young singers to lift the energy of the song, and succeeds in giving it an authentic feel by letting the kids sing like any normal kid would at a large gathering - with gusto and enthusiasm trumping the studio recording perfection. Small touches like this emphasise the meaning of the song, and its significance in the movie.

True to the character of the song, everything about this song lines up perfectly - the lyrics, the voice, the music and the visuals are all dedicated 100% to extending the story. In that regard, the song in itself is a metaphor for the message it delivers - each artist in the song, from SRK to Javed Akhtar, from Rahman to Gowariker, and the myriad of support artists, bring their speciality to elevate the effect of the song, like the stars he talks about.

A quick check on YouTube reveals that Yeh Jo Des is 3x, and Yun Hi Chala is a staggering 5x more popular than Yeh Taara, The lag can be explained with the usual reasons - Yeh Taara is slow, doesn't possess the universality of the other two songs, and is the longest of the three. Much the same could be said about Swades the movie - slow, not universally relatable, and fairly long. But Swades was a milestone in thought in our society - it presented a blueprint for a growing educated middle class that worked outside the country and showed them a path that may draw them back to their roots. And Yeh Taara is the only song that captures that essence of the movie - it captures the tension of a person who belongs, but is an outsider, the dilemma between letting things be and doing the right thing, the opposing forces of realism and idealism - and the result is a song, that while underappreciated, will be cherished as a representation of what was one of the most iconic films made in India!