A Sequel in the Making

Imagine: A NASA engineer goes to India for a few months, helps people in a village with his extraordinary engineering skills, ends up falling in love, coming back to America empty handed because the girl doesn’t want to leave the village’s needy people, finishes his project at NASA, resigns, and returns to India to continue helping villages with the help of his true love.  I know what you’re thinking, “Wow, this sounds a lot like Ravi”.  And you’d be right, except, of course, I would be able to convince the girl to come back to America with me.

A scene from Swades.  Yes, NASA is always this dramatic.

This story is the basic plot of this Indian movie called Swades.  Believe it or not, it was even inspired by a real person named Ravi.  I am actually convinced they went forward in time, read my blog, and then went back in time and made this movie (so maybe it was one of you that wrote it).  In this movie, the NASA engineer single-handedly saves the village by his design for a hydro-electric power plant.

Ravi Kuchimanchi - The similarity is uncanny

Before I started at IDE, I was told that I would be working with a small team of two additional people, and I got the impression (and actually sort of hoped) that this would be my project and I could run with it in whatever direction I wanted.  Wish granted.  On the first day, I found out that the two additional people were actually senior people in the company who would make sure that as I ran into problems or had any questions, that those problems/questions would get resolved quickly. 

As I’ve been working on this project alone, I’ve run into several problems, and for the most part, have had to find solutions for them myself.  I’ve had to dust off the cobwebs in my head and remember what I learned in my college engineering classes.  When I was debriefing my colleagues on my work, we agreed that we needed to determine the smallest profitable distillation unit.  I then asked if someone in their business department can do the economic analysis to determine how much oil needs to be produced to be profitable. They laughed at me and said there is no business department, and that I needed to figure it out!

Taking a break from working in a village.  It was a Bollywood moment.

While it’s been fun to be a one man team and design this distillation unit, I have gained a larger appreciation for working on a team of people like I do at JPL (and there I have the added benefit of working with people who are all smarter than me!).  I also better understand that any good design is never any single person’s idea, but a collection of several people’s co-inspired thoughts.  Luckily, a friend of mine at JPL, Joey Brown, is enthusiastic about helping me while I am in India, and I have been bouncing ideas off of him while I’m here, as I often do back home.  Something even as small as a few comments on a design has helped immensely.  And lately, I’ve been getting a lot of help from various nearby research centers that have expertise in steam distillation.

The type of geniuses I have helping me out

So it seems like I’m not going to be the hero that saves a village all by myself, and I’m completely ok with that.  I am very grateful for all the help I’m getting, from people at various centers in India as well as help back home.  It actually gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that there is no shortage of people ready to help out other people, and that I lucky enough to be surrounded by them everywhere I go.  And if we end up saving a village or two together, maybe they'll end up making a sequel  ;)