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A pleasure garden in a timeless corner of a forgotten palace. Deeg did not much impact the history of the wider world outside, but in this palace can be seen glimpses of the glory it reflected after Suraj Mal’s victories over the Mughal emperors and conquest of Delhi. He brought back several buildings entire, marble and all, cut into numbered blocks and skilfully reassembled in his palace grounds. The seams are invisible, and the buildings include Nur Jahan’s favorite marble perch from which she presumably contemplated the blue flowing waters of the Yamuna River. Today that truly is a dream.

A timeless pleasure garden in a forgotten palace

The Maharaja’s pet tiger lived in adjoining quarters

What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to lie down and stare…

The artisanal excellence embodied in the Taj Mahal is to be found here too

Doorways to Neverland

Three thousand fountains powered by gravity feed from tanks with water from the River Yamuna still flow twice a year.

For more by this author, see his Amazon page here.

The wedding banquet was a long drawn out affair that began at seven in the evening in a brightly lit and freshly decorated marriage garden. Guests trundled in from 7.30 on, with a constant stream of arrivals greeting friends and relatives. Street food was prepared fresh by a handful of cooks who constantly replenished the buffet tables. Small molded plates were available, pressed from the large dried leaves of a local tree, the ultimate in recyclable convenience. Marriage gardens are a big business in India, by the way, and even the most modest ones enjoy a healthy cash flow, while upmarket ones in urban areas are more like themed parks that can cost € 50,000 a night or more. It was mind-boggling for me to think of the amounts of money being spent on the most lavish weddings. In contrast, the one we attended in Agra was a masterpiece of careful budgeting that looked three times more expensive than it actually did.

The ultimate in recyclability: compressed leaf bowls

Delicious street food made to order on demand

While all this cooking, eating and socialising went on in the marriage garden, the groom arrived in a carriage drawn by two white horses, accompanied by lights and music. A short while later, bride and groom mounted a raised platform where the actual ceremony is to take place. Traditional Indian weddings are a delight for the guests, who enjoy hours of free food and fraternity, while the bride and groom endure a long drawn out ceremony dictated by religious rites and countless local traditions. The couple are finally wedded at dawn, by this time numbed to exhaustion. This could be a reason why arranged marriages last and divorces are rare. However, as traditions die out, there are many signs of change.

The groom arrives in a horse drawn carriage

The raised platform on which the exhausted couple will finally be wed.

Signs of change next morning everywhere, ubiquitous cell-phones, ads for online shopping, fat cars muscling their way into narrow, overcrowded streets. But after last night’s banquet, we will rest a couple of hours and then drive to Deeg, the palace that time forgot. More in the next blog.

“Grace in the South China Sea,” is now available as an e-book on Kindle. For copyright reasons, it won’t appear on the i-Tunes bookstore or Google Play books for 3 months, till mid-February. Potential readers are encouraged to buy the electronic edition rather than the paperback. One, it’s much cheaper, at US $ 3.21 (€3, or £2.30 at various Amazon sites), as opposed to $10.63 plus postage. Two, no trees have to die for the sake of a few hours of escapist reading pleasure. Hint. Trees play an important part in the story.

For more by this author, see the Amazon page here.

Pity the poor middle management engineers at Volkswagen who are getting it in the neck for doing what their bosses told them to do, either explicitly or implicitly. There is a tremendous pool of superb engineering expertise at VW and at all the hundreds, if not thousands of ancillary companies worldwide that provide VW with components for the range of cars produced by the group. For decades they have been honing their skills, shaving ever-decreasing slivers of efficiency out of a mature technology that has been continuously refined for more than a hundred years. And now this technology has reached the end of a glorious innings. The automobile, driven by the internal combustion engine, has changed the face of the earth, has transformed the lives of every one of us. Let’s stand up and pay homage to all the brilliant men and women who developed and refined this means of individual transportation that gave us so much freedom to move, to explore the world.

And before we sit down again, let’s observe a minute’s silence for all the thousands of people who will be out of jobs unless they are flexible enough to retrain, whose expertise will no longer be needed. The VW scandal shows, more clearly than any technical study, that the internal combustion has finally reached its limits. It can no longer cope with the air pollution standards demanded by the finite limits of our planet. Locomotion by means of controlled explosions within a confined space, the basis of internal combustion engines, cannot compete with the smooth power of an electric motor.

I first rented and drove an electric car six years ago. It was an expensive car, very basic, and the battery drained alarmingly quickly. Nevertheless, I could see the potential of the electric motor, and was immeasurably thrilled as the partially drained battery re-charged on a long hill descent, putting back nearly 50% of the power it had used to climb the hill. Not only that, but I hardly touched the brake. The speed of descent could be controlled by selecting between various levels of regenerative braking. That was the epiphany. Range anxiety is like fear of flying. Very real, but irrational.

For a conventional car company like VW, the imperative to continue doing what it knows best is irresistible. Otherwise what are they going to do with the hundreds of specialists on their payroll because electric motors are compact and virtually maintenance free? e-cars don’t need elaborate cooling systems; regenerative braking reduces wear and tear on conventional brakes; service intervals are much longer and costs are lower… the list goes on. What about batteries and range I hear you say? Yes. Batteries are a weak point, but they are getting better all the time. In 2010 my electric bicycle had a range of 25 kilometers with a 7-kilo lithium metal hydride battery pack (the battery pack was susceptible to the memory effect. i.e. it had to be completely drained before recharging). By 2012, my bicycle had a range of 50 kilometers, the lithium ion battery weighed less than 2 kilos and could be charged at any time without worrying about the memory effect. With ICE’s the fuel has to come from far away (often from troubled parts of the world). With an electric car, you can potentially make your own fuel at home and then it’s virtually free. Apart from concern for the planet, the biggest argument is when you think in terms of efficiency. The operating efficiency of an electric car is around 88%. For the best ICE’s after accounting for friction, losses in transmission, combustion, etc., the comparable figure is 15% to 30% (Energy Trends Report, 2008)

So if you have to buy a new car in the near future, project your thinking a little bit into the future and ask yourself: do I want to invest in a dinosaur?

Grace entered the world yesterday. Readers take note. Grace entered without fanfare, a good omen in these days of multi-level international conflict, air disasters and general gloom. This is the first book in a trilogy.

Boats, sampans in Abderdeen Harbor, Hong Kong. Cover photograph by M. MacInnes

Grace is a young woman of twenty-six when she discovers her unusual gift, a gift that enables her to find a lucrative job and acquire a modest fortune over the next five years. She sees at close quarters the environmental destruction caused by the company she works for, resigns from her job, and retires to an idyllic island in the South China Sea while trying to decide what to do with her life. A chance encounter with a lonely old woman grieving over the death of her beloved pet mongrel sets her unwittingly on a path where she has to use her burgeoning powers to avenge a murder and save her own life.

Although part of a trilogy, this is a complete novel  in itself. The second book about Grace, The Trees of Ta Prohm, is forthcoming in 2016. See the Amazon page here for more details. The e-book version of this novel will appear  in mid-November.

I promised to post more about Grace several weeks ago. I apologise for the delay. Life intervened. In the interim, I also had feedback from readers of the manuscript that suggested a few changes. One change led to another and an extensive re-write ensued. This work is now almost finished. In the meantime, my sincere thanks to the several readers who invested so much of their time to proofread and comment on the manuscript. They will remain anonymous here, but will be acknowledged in the book, when “Grace in the South China Sea” finally appears a month from now.

There is a story by Arthur Clarke that Hemingway, challenged by fellow writers at a dinner table to write a moving story in less than ten words, did it with six. His short story read: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it takes words to say it. The power of words. Grace, a young woman slowly becoming aware of her powers. Grace: def:. The exercise of love, kindness or goodwill; disposition to benefit or serve another. Watch this space.