A Blast from My Past -

 While going through my ancient files, I came across this little blue notebook with my pet name on the cover.

SUSHIL is my Indian name, a tradition started by my paternal grandfather. 

In the past, we were given our official name, in which the first was the House name that you belonged to from your father’s side. Then you added your father’s name and finally your own name.

The own name would then be made Malayali and would be used by your family and family friends. Occasionally, you also got called by a “pet” name which could be associated with your standing in society, your contribuion to society or just endearment.

My eldest maternal uncle  was the late Padma Bhushan K. M. Cherian (Chetpet Appachen), . He got the name Cherian as being my grandfather's eldest son, he was given his great grandfather's name - Cherian.

Padma Bhushan is the award he was given by the Indian Government for his contribution to Indian journalism and work for Indian Independence. K stood for his family House name, Kandathil. M stood for his father's name. which was  Mammen Mappillai.

Take a look at the names of all my mother's  brothers in order of birth.

1. Padma Bhushan K. M. Cherian

2. K.M. Oommen

3. K.M. Eapen

4. K. M. Varghese Mappillai

5. K. M. Jacob

6. Padma Shri K. M. Philip

7. Padma Bhushan K. M. Mathew

8. Padma Shri K. M. Mammen Mappillai

The ninth member of the family was my mother, whose name should have been 

Padma Acca K. M. Mariam (Padma Acca being my personal title for her) as she held 7 fiery brothers together to help them build MRF Ltd. , Malayala Manorama, MM Rubber Co. Ltd. amongst a host of other companies. 

(Her brother, K. M. Jacob, died early and my name is Jacob as I was born shortly after he died. )

Without her strong hand  and mutual love and affection with her brothers, this family would have broken up into fragmernts a long time ago. (This story will appear in my memoirs in due course.)

So you will note that each of them has the K. M. prefix before their own name.

My paternal grandfather took another route. 

His name was Raja Mantra Pravina Dewan Bahadur Maliyakal Kuriyan (Mysore) Matthan.

Raja Mantra Pravina Dewan Bahadur was the title conferred on him by the Maharaja of Mysore for his services to the State of Mysore. The House name is Maliyakal, which is also my house name. His  name from his father was Kuriyan (which be also spelt as Kurian). The pet name "Mysore" was given to him by the people of Mysore for his contribution to the state. His personal name was Matthan, but he turned it to his surname name. This was because he saw it as part of the western society he had become involved with and he changed from being a Syrian Christian to a member of the Protestant Church.

So his male children were

1. M. George Matthan (Commissioner Mysore Government)

2. M. Kuriyan Matthan (CEO Tata Engineering Consultancy Services, after being the Chief Engineer of the B. E. S. T. in Bombay)

3. M. Matthan Matthan (DCM) 

4. M. John Matthan (CEO BHEL & CEO Integral Coach Factory)

5. M. Jacob Matthan (LIC Chairman)

My mother's family were all professionals and business  oriented, while my father and his brothers were all professionals, all of whom reached the pinnacles in their professional life.

Coming to my name, it should have been Maliyakal Matthan Jacob, but as my paternal grandfather turned around the system, I got the name Maliyakal Jacob Matthan, but an Indian name was also added, which is SUSHIL. (My elder sister was Nalini, my elder brother is Ranjit, and my younger sister was Thangamma.). Sushil is used by my other family members and family friends who have known me since childhood.

But this is a digression, as the reason for this blog is that I found a small notebook a couple of days ago which had an article written by me in 1975 about the potential for trade between Finland and India.

Written by me 48 years ago, when I was just 32 years old, there may not be much technology  significance today.

What interested me is not the content of the article but that I was able to write an article before my access to a computer in beautiful long hand, something which vanished when I returned to Finland in 1984, 9 years later, as my handwriting skills vanished. With the advent of the computer, and arthritis hitting me quite hard simultaneously, I resorted to using the compuiter for my writing to avoid the pain.

When I joined the University of Oulu, I was given access to IBM XT and AT computers, along with the IBM Mainframe. 

My earlier computer access was when I was working in MRF.  IBM opened their computer centre in Madras. All we had was preparing punched cards relating to the stocks in store. 

I did not stay with the IBM Computers for long as I spent most of my time trying to remember key strokes and functions and less time creating my documents.

One day, a young lady arrived at the door of my University room from a company called Systema Oy. She convinced me to look at what she was selling. It was an Apple IIC computer which had a "mouse" and the commands were simple to remember.

I took to it immediately and my productivity went up 2000% compared to that of my colleagues. 

Soon I had others working on my Apple IIC all day creating all sorts of scientific experimental stuff. 

I had to wait till they went home to get my work done, which became quite simple as it was productivity oriented. What took them 4 hours on their computers, my productivity with my Apple Macs took hardly 2 hours! (This was at the time of the cumbersome DOS system.)

Within a year, all my colleagues were clammering for their own Apple computers, but I had moved on to a Mac, the Mac Plus,  the Mac SE and then the Mac Portable and then the Mac PowerBook, my first own computer. 

There is an interesting side story when I bought my PowerBook. I claimed it as an expenses and claimed depreciation for the whole year, although I had bought it only in December. 

The Oulu Tax Office declined to give me the depreciation for the whole year. I went to Oulu Court. There I showed that I could do a whole year's work in less than three weeks. The judge ruled in my favour. 

After that the Oulu Tax Oflice never questioned me on my claims!

I was continually ahead of my colleagues who were always playing catch up with me.

I would go in on a Saturday morning and upgrade all the software on the Macs of my colleagues.

As a result, despite being a third world country intruder in Finland, I got upgraded from an ordinary researcher to the Laboratory Manager and then to the Chief Engineer.

The secret of my success was that they needed me more than I needed them! 

I do hope you will enjoy this handwritten 20 page article of mine. 

It shows my vision of 35+ years ago, even  before I moved to Finland. It also shows my commitment to promoting India and its culture, products and technology to Finland.

Remember one of our Guiding Principles:

"Go where you are appreciated!"

Appendix:

Nobel Prize - Living Green in India

I return to subject of the environmental chaos in India - this is not a political statement but a continuation of what we have written about continuously for over 30 years. 

We are lucky today to live in the 4th most Living Green country in the world, Finland,

India comes in near the bottom of the global rankings at 168th place worldwide, and only Afghanistan (178th place) ranks below India in Southern Asia. Leading the region is Bhutan (107th), with relatively high scores in biodiversity & habitat protection. (Many Indians will claim that is a western conspiracy against India to run it down!)

Yesterday, I read in The Wire this article by Elisha Vermin:

‘If Only the Government Worked as Hard as Waste Pickers’

Hundreds of scrap dealers are recycling most of Delhi’s plastic waste while being on the run from the government.

Elisha Vermani

Bahadurgarh: Among the flurry of lush green farmlands at the Delhi-Haryana border, hundreds of scrap dealers are involved in the process of recycling nearly all of Delhi’s plastic waste tucked safely away from the city’s eyes.

A few kilometres from Tikri Kalan’s PVC market, one of the biggest legitimate plastic markets in Delhi, acres of agricultural land in Shiddipur and Lowa Kalan has been turned into an open plastic market. Each trader in this area deals with nearly 300-500 kg of plastic waste per day.

 

According to a report by the Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi generates over 600 tonnes of plastic waste daily. Most of this waste is brought to plastic markets like the one at Tikri where these dealers or aardhis segregate and reduce it to shreds before selling it forward. They are the most important link in the plastic recycling chain, and also the ones facing the most harassment.

Running nearly entirely as an informal economy, aardhis have the skill and eye to sort the waste without any chemical testing or lab equipment. All they need is empty stretches of land. However, they are constantly caught in a cat-and-mouse chase with the authorities. “First we were removed from Mundka, then from Kamruddin Nagar and they are still chasing us away even after we’ve crossed the Delhi border” said 38-year-old Rajesh, an aardhi at the Shiddipur market.

Rajesh and Bablu weren’t the only aardhis angry with the government. The huddle of two gradually swelled to about 15 men and a few women all expressing their frustration at the treatment they receive from the municipal corporation and National Green Tribunal officials. “They come and raze our temporary structures whenever they feel like it. I want to quit this profession now. If the government worked as hard as the waste pickers, the country would be elsewhere,” said 55-year-old Mangeram, who lost most of his business when he left the market at Mundka.

Aardhis believe that they are not the problem, but a solution to a problem. “The plastic is not going to decompose itself. If we don’t clean this mess then there will be heaps lying around in the city,” said 25-year-old Sonu, who works with his father at the market in Lowa.

Truckloads of plastic waste is unloaded at the market every few hours.

The aardhis told me that it’s not just Delhi’s waste that makes it way to these plastic markets. The government imports plastic waste, charges a custom duty on it and then the dealers pay an 18% GST on subsequent trading.

 

“Nobody is trying to shut down the bigger factories contributing to pollution in broad daylight because their owners can pay off the officials. We are preventing pollution on the other hand but nobody cares,” a 36-year-old aardhi who did not want to be named, said.

 

These traders work under the scorching sun without access to toilets or a clean resting place in the absence of a refuge away from the piles of waste. While they pride themselves on keeping Delhi “from coming to a standstill, trapped under its own garbage”, most of them seem to have lost hope and plan to move back to their villages if they face further harassment by government officials.

It is ironic that their contribution to waste management doesn’t guarantee them any financial or personal security. To quote Kaveri Gill, the author of Of Plastic and Poverty, who was one of the first few to document Delhi’s informal recycling markets: “If we can’t help them, leave them alone.”

Developed in collaboration with Ekaansh Arora. 

As I am, by profession, a Plastics Technologist, this article specifically interested me. Now that I am retired for over 15 years, the only subject in plastics I do still follow is the recycling of plastics as it is a highly controversial one. 

Plastics as a material is demonised rather than the people who misuse plastics.

When I was working in England at the British Rubber and Plastics Research Association (RAPRA) of Great Britain, one of my several projects was to counter the complaint by many professions, especially archiects that claimed that plastics did not have any durability!

One of my tasks was to prove to the the scientific world that plastics was a durable material. I searched all around England to find proof of the durability of plastics.

The oldest use of plastics I found then was an acrylic dome roof light system in the centre of London which had then lasted 30 years with no problems. 

This was documented in a paper "Weathering of Plastics" published in October 1968 in the journal Plastics which was authored by Dr. Crowder of the Building Research Station and myself. It shows a photograph that I captured during my time at the research centre.

Over the two years of my study, which took me across and up and down the English country, I found many uses of plastics which had withstood the elements and performed better than any comparable material. 

I stood on the roof of Wembley Stadium, confident that I was standing on a thin reinforced plastic sheeting with no loss in its strength as the sheer drop was many tens of metres!

I authored over 11 major reviews which covered all the plastics materials and their durability that were exposed to the elements.

That established the lovengity of plastics and should have been the guiding light to users that plastics was going to be a problem if it was used in applications where they would not be degraded! 

In 2022 the production of plastics was estimated as 450 million tonnes. Of this, it is estimated that 44% is used for packaging, a totally unnecessary waste of an most important resource!

Unfortunately, plastics became fashionable and started to be used in disposable packaging, something that should never have been permitted. The first step should have been that the use of plastics for packaging should have been subjected to the obsolescence law.

Today we are suffering the environmental consequences of the misuse of plastics.

When I returned to India I saw the use of plastics was becoming rampant in packaging. I took up this matter with the late Lavraj Kumar who was the Advisor to the Ministry of Petrochemicals. He listened but was powerless in the face of political pressure.

It was very appropriate those days to push the use of plastics for packaging of consumable foodstuffs as the losses due to infestation and rodents due to poor packaging and storage was enormous. 

Plastics became the life saver but it grew and grew unchecked with no control on the environmental impact.

But India had its own solution as the jerrypuranawalla moved street by street collecting the waste materials and these were then regenerated back to useful materials, going down the chain till finally it was used in non critical applications.

Hence, India had a solution and as can be seen from the map it topped the world in the recycling of plastics. 

I still remember driving in Bombay from Sion towards Chamber where, on one side of the road, there was a "plastics ghat" where used plastics film could be seen drying in the sun after washing till it was then sent for re-extrusion and generation into plastics granules for further use.

This scavenging and regeneration provided employment for many thousands of people around  the country. The chain was perfect as everyone benefitted financially.

The purpose should have been to develop this as a regular industrial activity with adequate input of technology, but it has stayed for generations in this unorganised fashion.

It is, therefore, no wonder that the recyclers of Delhi are treated as persona non-grata instead of valuable contributors to the Indian economy.

This 1993 article written by me, which appeared in ”Findians Briefings”called for "Western Recycling Doomed" was reposted in our blog in 2020.

When we wrote our blog entry "The Garbage Dump - India" we pointed out that the Environmental Minister of that time, Jairam Ramesh, had stated that India should be given the Nobel Prize for  the filth of the world!

If there is a Nobel prize for filth, India will win it: Jairam Ramesh

In this, plastics is a major contributor. 

If the authorities are not able to control it with the correct approach in technology, do not punish those who, by their own initiative, are trying to reduce the impact on the environment.

I firmly stand with the people, who despite all odds, are part of the chain reclaiming plastics in India!

Jolly, Molly and ….

 If you have Jolly and Molly as husband and wife, the quiz is what is the daughter’s name?”

The answer will be revealed at the end of this blog entry!

Dr. M. V. Kurien was known as Jollychayan to us. His wife was called by us as Mollykochamma. 

The old Syrian Christian marriage rules stated that you should not marry anyone who was closer than your ninth cousin. When my mother’s brother, Mr. K. M. Philip (Peelukuttychayan and also known as Pappa) wanted to marry his fourth cousin in the 1930s, special dispensation was required from the head of our church. His wife Chinnammakochamma, was the elder sister of Mollykochamma. 

Jollychayan with his wife’s brother-in-law Pappa at the wedding of my niece.

They had one more sister, Thangammakochamma, who married my father’s younger brother, John Matthan (Johnnyappapen), an engineer who worked as General Manager in Indian Railways and later was CEO of BHEL in Ramachandrapuram  in Hyderabad and retired as the CEO of the Integral coach Factory at Perambur, Madras..

All this still maintained the fourth cousin rule as no one was related to anyone who was closer than the church dictum. 

When my sister married Babu, the rule still held as although Babu was the cousin of Jollychayan, and there was close interaction between the families, the church dictum still held.  

Complicated way of saying that Dr. M. V. Kurien was close to us and one of our extended family!

Verghese Kurien, Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel, and Harichand Megha Dalaya

Dr. Kurien was the person who, with a Gujarat politician, Tribhuvandas Patel and engineer Harichand Dalaya changed the face of milk production and distribution, first in Gujarat snd then around India with the Whose Revolution, also known as Operation Flood.

The way he did this is by reaching the farmers in Gujarat by testing the milk they brought to Anand and paying them in cash based on the quality of the milk. This put hard cash in the hands of the farmers. He then made sure the farmers got the best feed for their cattle ensuring the quality of the milk increased. He then took steps to raise the quality of the herd.

This led to the Gujarat Milk Cooperative becoming the best run in the country with the farmers getting their benefits directly with no middlemen.

His next stop was Bombay where we still got milk delivered at the doorstep. He set up the same model in an effort to move the cattle out of the city area and ensure the quality of the milk increased by setting up the diary in Worli. 

Those who were getting good quality milk and milk products from the Parsi Dairy situated in Marine Lines in Bombay, suddenly found milk booths at every other corner in Bombay where the sealed blue aluminium top striped bottles was available twice a day at a reasonable price with no adulteration.

I returned to India in September 1969 from my studies in England. My cousin’s wedding was in progress and as Mollykochamma was the aunt of my cousin getting married, 

I got to interact with Jollychayan almost immediately after landing in Bombay. 

I was fresh from seeing the milk distribution in Finlsnd using plastic bags. Bring a plastics technologist full of myself, I told Jollychayan of my experience and how it would be economically viable to distribute milk in these plastics satchels. He was at about the very start of his Operstion Flood program which started in 1970.

He was enthralled with the idea and asked me to give him a report on this as he was discussing alternate means of distributing milk as the recycling of glass bottles was very costjy and energy intensive.

Finland, however, discarded the plastics bags and moved to coated paper cartons which suited their paper industry base even though they were paying a royalty to an American company on every single carton produced. The Swedish company Tetrapak was also growing in this field.

Jollychayan was being bombarded with offers to set up these paper carton lines.

He however had other alternatives up his sleeve. He first choice went to setting up booths with refrigeration facilities manned by disabled veterans to dispense the milk. 

There were several problems as irregular electricity supply. Breakdown of refrigeration machines and insufficient qualified technicians to look after these units were other headaches to be considered.

By that time I had prepared my paper on Co-extruded plastics satchels for milk. As soon as that was ready he moved quickly to implement this in a couple of dairies including the Bangalore Dairy.

It was an enormous success and this became the approved means of milk distribution all overt urban India.

Jollychayan thanked me for this innovation. Although I may been the catalyst, it was the immense respect everyone in India held for Jollychayan that made this a success.

This biography by Dr. M. V. Kurien does not tell all this backstory as I had already left for Finland.

At the wedding if my sister’s daughter in Chennai in 2999, he drew me aside and talked at length to me about milk distribution and how he had had to face much opposition to implement the pladtics satchets as the lobby of paper cartons was very strong. He had held on for as long as possible but finally permitted that distribution mode to enter into India but only as a parallel to the plastics satchets.

Even in Finland, when I talked to the major milk distributor, Valio, they held Dr. Kurien (Jollychayan) in great awe.

I was fortunate to be there at the crucial time of the launch of Operation Flood.

No, you were all wrong. Jolly and Molly’s daughter was not named Dolly, but the beautiful name of Nirmala! :-)

Continuation of Blog Entry Western Recycling Doomed

 This is clear proof of our 1994 article "Western Recycling Doomed" in Findians Briefings, which was republished on this blog last year.

India recycles 60% of all plastics products whereas the USA, the largest consumer of plastics products, recycles just 9%.

The question is "WHY?"

The answer lies in motivation of the consumer.

Take this with the question why Finland recycles 98% o all plastics bottles, ther answer is self-explanatory. 

'Monetary motivation.

Even if the refund is just €0.20 per large PET bottle, the consumer knows the value for money and recycles the product. 

After large festival events, unemployed and hard-up students scour all the trash cans to pick up the empties which they convert to cash at almost all retail shops.

This is why in India, the thrifty housewife keeps all the recyclable waste and waits for the trash collector to come crying down the street and converts it to money.

There are several ways western countries can motivate the consumer to recycle all the waste generated in the course of their normal life. Any sane thinking government should explore the obvious possibilities.

However, to find sensible politicians is a rarity. Till then they will take stupid steps of banning plastics bags or other ridiculous solutions which will make no dent in the amount of plastics waste being generated or recycled.

Sadly, the plastics industry is tilting at windmills with their solutions. None of the players consider that plastics waste is an enormous resource and that this resource can be converted to a monetary stream for BOTH the consumer and the country!