It was at my first job at a hydro-electric project, that I
began to learn my subject seriously. (I
mean, who does in college ?) I purchased all the Electrical Engineering text
books prescribed by my erstwhile Alma Mater with my first and second salaries
and then started studying, albeit with a glass of whisky in hand. Learning came late to me in life... like a...
I had this large team headed by three electrical
foremen – one in charge of plant and machinery, the second heading the work of
transmission and distribution lines, while the third was an assistant to the
other two. Managing this bunch forced me to study many things.
I have written about foremen in the past; this class
of people, a genre that has held the traditional industries in thrall for more
than a century – from the days the first factories were born, and up till now, exist
in their pristine form in the traditional industries.
In those days back in the eighties, each had his own
style of work or “gharana” with their own fan following that extended from the
lowest workmen to the highest project managers. And they went to ridiculous
lengths to preserve their brand of expertise, with the firm belief that nothing
of what they knew could ever be gleaned from books or any other source, but
them… Contesting anything uttered by one of this species could be quite similar
to a short visit with a mamma crocodile guarding her clutch of eggs, only more
dangerous……
The eldest among these three men, let us call him “Sen
Babu”, was a man old enough to be my father, and who had learned his work the
“hard way”. A quintessential Bengali, the only thing that made his blood boil
was the word “nonsense”. It was from him that I learnt the basics of electrical
engineering practice – right from how to assemble a motor to identifying the
gauge of a wire.
I must admit that the expertise and meticulous
approach of these foremen were unparalleled. My team, under Sen Babu, did a
fantastic job. With only about ten or fifteen men, a couple of winches, a few
rollers and no loudspeakers, tea-boys or compounders, we laid miles and miles of
cables up and down the hill-sides, along trenches, up along steel structures or
strung them with wires across hill-tops.
Sen Babu had a healthy loathing of the way the utility
companies went about the cable laying job. If any of the workmen did not work
properly, or was out of synch with the rest of the gang while working, he was
threatened with banishment to these utility companies…
Sen Babu had heard about Fleming’s left-hand rule and
joked that he must have been a Bharat Natyam dancer, because this rule, in his
opinion, was useless in real life. If one wanted the motor to turn in a
particular way, all one had to do was to switch terminals…..why enact “mudras”
with the fingers ?
To make an honest statement, he actually demystified
my subject for me…While explaining three-phase circuits and wiring, he would
often exclaim, “Teen gachha taar – eteo confusion ?” (Just three wires… and you are still confused ?)
*****
There was this newly-arrived high-power motor at the
site, which I had been asked to install. I did remember a thing or two about
motors from my college days – they whined and kind of spun uncontrollably when
powered up – but they were supposed to have three, or at best six terminals.
This particular one had nine !!!! It was not mentioned in my professor’s notes.
And neither in those books that I had bought. And the metal plate from the
manufacturer that contained the suggested connection diagrams had fallen off in
transit. A conspiracy of Fate, if there was one – stupefying an already
bewildered engineer….
I stared at it for so long that my foreman brought me
some tea… and then he confessed that he too, had not seen a motor with nine
pieces of wire sticking out of it like some freak octopus. One smart fellow in
the team (an aspiring foreman) explained that these motors worked with “German
connection”, but could not explain what that connection was… It took us two
full days to solve the “mystery of the nine terminals”… and there was nothing German about it!
(I came across this “German
connection” thingy once again many years later at one of the steel plants in
India. This time it was a couple of transformers that had the disease. What I
learnt was that they always gave balanced three-phase voltage irrespective of
the load. Pretty smart people, these Germans, I must say…..).
About four hundred odd motors and fifty odd
transformers later, the installations were complete and the plants and
equipment started running. We entered the support and trouble-shooting phase
while the civil engineering group started building the actual dam. Sen Babu
simply amazed me. He could put his screw-driver to a motor and diagnose its
problems straightaway. He could repair circuit-breakers within the hour. And
all this while he kept teaching me. We had star and delta connections for lunch
and dinner. And complex control circuits, wire splicing, cable-jointing in
between. And let me share a secret with you – in all the control circuits I
have devised, implemented and maintained
ever since, I was never bothered with any stability calculations of the kind
they taught us in college. Remember that
funny control circuit theory paper in college in which half the class failed
routinely ? I, for the record, had managed to scrape through, like a cat
hanging from a ledge… The control circuits worked just fine without those
calculations. If they did not, they blew a fuse.
Time and again, Sen Babu would ask me, “Ei sob ki
college ey shikhechhilen ?” (Did you
learn this in college ?) and “Ei bepare apnar boi-te ki bole ?” (What do your books say about this ?) If
my text book did not explain a particular practical problem, he would flash a
knowing smile…. “Bujhlen shaheb, engineering amader kachhei shikhte hobe….. Oi
Phleming aar Eewton ki korechhe – apnader jibon ta khali kothin
korechhe…Electrical shudhu konsep… haath lagate parben na… tipey tipeo dekhte
parben na…. dekhte gelei shesh.” (You
need to learn engineering from us… All that Fleming and Newton did was to make
your life difficult…Electrical (engineering) is all about concepts… you cannot
touch electricity, neither can you squeeze… try it and you will be finished…)
Food for thought there…. In all the years since then,
I am yet to fathom out why they taught us the rest of the stuff across all
those ten semesters. My expertise grew to the extent of those five chapters and
it was enough to win me laurels then. And it has remained limited to those five
chapters ever since.
One fine morning, a conveyor belt called it a day. We
rushed out to investigate. He brushed aside the crowd milling around, pressed the starter button and declared,
“Motor ka khatiya khadi.” (A rough translation would be : This motor is ready for its last journey.)
I was amazed. I asked him how he knew.
He then propounded his greatest theory on electrical
engineering – something I remember to this day, more than thirty years later :
“Shunun Shaheb - jeta cholbe, seta jolbe na; jeta jolbe seta cholbe na; jeta
cholchheo na, jolchheo na, setatey power nei.” (Look, Sir, that which runs will not burn, that which burns, will not
run, that which neither runs nor burns, does not have power.)
A truly original hypothesis that I am yet to find
fault with. Wish they taught that to us in college and built the entire
electrical engineering syllabus around it……
