With just a few days for the end of this year, we’ve been taking stock of our work this past year. Yesterday we published seven of our best stories—articles as well as videos of conversation—in Founding Fuel.
And here’s part 2 of the list—nine of the best stories in FF Life, the weekend edition of our newsletter.
We will be on our customary year end break till January 3, 2025. We urge you to explore these stories over the holidays.
Happy holidays!
Team Founding Fuel
1. AMA on EVs with Hormazd Sorabjee and Pranav S: 22 Takeaways
Whom is an EV best for? What is the viable life of an EV? Do they have resale value? The AMA with Autocar Editor Hormazd Sorabjee and Pranav Srivilasan builds on a story by Pranav on electric vehicles, titled What they don’t tell you about EVs in India.
Four takeaways from the AMA:
1. Are electric cars sustainable? An EV powered by the dirtiest source of power generation, is still environmentally more friendly than an ICE (internal combustion engine) car—and it can only get better.
2. Recycling batteries. There’s a whole second life industry for the battery, but the truth is, recycling is one of the biggest challenges. You are choosing whether you want to pollute the air or pollute the Earth.
3. Total cost of ownership. If you’re charging at home, the running cost dramatically drops, as opposed to charging at a public fast charger. On average, if charging at home, you can recover the delta between the petrol and the EV in two years.
4. Resale value. Resale values are actually pretty bad. Since batteries have finite life, about 12 years, someone buying a used EV could have a battery which has already degraded half its life. Some manufacturers are trying to address that with buyback guarantees. A lot of EV customers will probably accept the poor resale value because of the benefits of an EV—they're smooth, easy to drive, and stress free.
Watch the AMA/Read the takeaways here
2. Thirteen Most Memorable Moments: Lok Sabha Elections 2024
By all accounts, the general election this year was one of the most contentious, divisive and tightly fought elections in recent times. It was hard not to be swept up in its fervour, intensity and emotion.
We invited valued members of the Founding Fuel community to share the most memorable moments that stood out for them. Here’s a sample of what emerged.
The moment: “Tantra pe Lok ki Vijay” — The Triumph of the People
Yogendra Yadav, the Swaraj India co-founder, said: “This happens very very rarely that a political party which is in command of everything, which has money, which has all the mainstream media, which has the entire establishment — unfortunately even the election commission — that is defeated the way it is.”
The key moment of the election was not any election campaign speech. The seeds of the revival of India's soul were sown by the Bharat Jodo Yatra and the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. Rahul Gandhi is no Holy Grail, but his actions revitalised the opposition and stopped the country from falling into a spiral of unbridled authoritarianism.
As a media person, it was Yogendra Yadav's calm and understated response (watch time: 18:35 mins) to Rahul Kanwal and Rajdeep Sardesai during an interview with India Today that could, hopefully, become the turning point of India's media going back to its core values.
- Sachin Kalbag, Editor-in-Chief (Print, Digital, Social) at Mid-Day
Read the story here
3. Art Under the Eye of the Mother Goddess
For the past two years Ronaan Roy has been writing for Founding Fuel on the Durga Puja celebrations in Kolkata.
Ronaan takes us through his selection of the 10 best Durga Puja pandals of Kolkata in 2024. Durga Puja art is, more often than not, the art of social cause. This year, as many of you know, Kolkata was heaving under the trauma of the RG Kar incident. “It is in this sombre time melded with heated political tempers and cold anguish that this year’s Durga Puja happened to fall,” Ronaan writes. “Most of the pandals in the city didn’t go near the issue. Many were muted.” Yet, they displayed a burst of breathtaking creativity, he writes. His description of the pandals is rich with context, artistic detail, and vivid photographs.
Read the full story here.
4. The Japanese Way of Life and Business
In the land of the rising sun, there are many tell-tale signs of the unique culture across businesses, both big and small, writes Upamanyu Bhattacharya.
He was visiting with a group of his students of the Family Managed Business program at S P Jain Institute of Management and Research at Mumbai, where he teaches retail. They visited Kamata, Hiyoshiya, and 7Eleven.
“Now that I was there, I didn’t realise how deeply I would be affected by the country’s culture and its social contracts,” he writes. One striking aspect is timeliness.
“Timeliness is one expression of a culture that is endemic to Japanese society. It is never an end in itself. It is an expression of respect, if I value your time, I value you. And timeliness is only one aspect of this sense of respect.
In the extensive metro train networks across Japanese cities, no one pushes or is impatient to get off or on to the trains even at peak hours. Everyone is waiting to board in neat lines, waiting calmly as the doors open and the passengers deboard, just as calmly. With a lifetime habit of jumping on and off Mumbai suburban trains (and now pushing on and off metros) this was a bit of a shock to me and I found myself getting fidgety with my ingrained habits. Once on the train, no one is speaking on their phones, this is considered to be disrespectful, and getting into the spaces of people standing or sitting close to you. People are on their messaging apps, but rarely did I see loud conversations on the phones, not just on trains but also in public spaces.”
Read the story here
5. Mexico City - A City of Dualities
[The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Senor Xolotl]
How does one decode a country? There can be multiple ways. We choose the lenses of our interest—food, art, culture—to learn about Mexico, writes Uma Narain about her four-day visit. She explores Frida Kahlo’s art, the election of the first lady president, and little insights into the contemporary culture of the land.
She writes about Frida Kahlo and her home—La Casa Azul (the blue house) with its cobalt blue walls with red trimming: “Born at the beginning of 20th century (1907- 1954), her life was cut short, yet her legacy lives on. She brought Mexican art to world attention….
Frida’s home serenades Frida the artist. It is both the signifier and the signified. Polio-stricken in childhood, Frida meets with a life-altering and life-shattering bus accident at 18 that damages her spine and pelvis—requiring 30 surgeries later in her life. She has to wear a cast and a corset (that she paints on) all her life. The pelvic wounds cause greater damage; she faces difficult pregnancies that leave her childless.
I am at her ‘home’ that understands her pain, caresses her and heals her. The museum captures the process of her healing and the emergence of an artist. The pain is located in the body and her brush pierces the anatomy, seeking the brutal catharsis of the wounded soul, to discover the ‘self’. The 55 self-portraits, like reflective selfies, are an attempt at soul searching. She writes: “I paint self portraits because I am so alone, because I am the person I know best.”
Read the story here
6. A Beginner's Guide to Graphic Novels
NS Ramnath takes us along his discovery of the power of visual language reflected in graphic novels.
He writes: “The first book that made me sit up was Art Spiegelman’s Maus. I picked it up because it won a Pulitzer Prize back in 1992. I read it in one sitting because the story — of Spiegelman’s father, a Holocaust survivor — was so compelling. And then I read it again, slowly and carefully.
Eventually, I found Joe Sacco’s Palestine. It’s a journalistic work. Sacco tells the story of his visit to the conflict zone. But it was different from what I read in newspapers or watched on television.
I could relate to what philosopher Edward Said wrote in the introduction of the book: “As we also live in a media-saturated world in which a huge preponderance of the world's news images are controlled and diffused by a handful of men sitting in places like London and New York, a stream of comic book images and words, assertively etched, at times grotesquely emphatic and distended to match the extreme situations they depict, provide a remarkable antidote.”...
It helped me understand the power of visual language and helped me as a journalist and storyteller. For example, in Maus, Art Spigelman depicts the Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The imagery is so strong that even when he is narrating a happy episode, you are aware of the dark clouds above, and the impending doom. Recognizing its power helps me whether I was working on a deck, or an infographic series like this one.”
Read the story here
7. Rashid Khan: A Voice as Pure as the Rain
[By Krupasindhu Muduli, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
In his homage to Rashid Khan, Swarup Gupta delves into the traditions of Hindustani Classical Music and Khan’s legacy. (This is the second piece on the eternal genius. You can read part 1 here.)
He writes: “The first time I heard Rashid Khan, I burnt my fingers. It was the end of a May nor’wester, thunder and lightning was giving way to gentle rain and the maestro was warming up to his signature bandish in Desh raga, Karam kar dije and my newly acquired music system was starting to throb with his dulcet baritone voice. I listened, spellbound to a voice as pure as the rain, until the cigarette unmindfully dangling from my fingers gently seared my fingertips, breaking his spell and bringing me rudely back to real life. …
What made the voice of the dearly lamented Rashid Khan so special? It was at once deep, sonorous, rich and flexible, adaptable as easily to the gravitas of Malkauns as it was to the playfulness of Desh. Like Bhimsen Joshi, who continued to sing during Rashid’s times, therefore, the pianissimo-fortissimo effect of his voice was without peer. Over time, his tendency to set off his rocket-propelled taan, was tempered by a notable thehran. Now, assured of the power of his voice, the ustad could create such slow burn performances of Todi and Darbari, mesmerising the audience with a skilfully knit web of notes.”
Read the story here
8. Ramzaan in the Bohri Mohalla
The Mohalla in South Mumbai is a magnet for foodies during the holy month. Now as an ambitious redevelopment project slowly changes the landscape, the traditional food businesses are morphing too.
Indrajit Gupta, Cuckoo Paul and Sveta Basraon take us through the decades-old iconic food outlets here—Haji Tikka (for kebabs), Surti Bara Handi (for slow cooked meat preparations), JJ Jalebi (for mawa jalebi), and many more—and talks about how the redevelopment is changing the neighbourhood.
He writes: “Many of the delicacies like malpua and rabdi aren’t widely available once Ramzaan is over. Only limited quantities are made, since demand tends to reduce drastically after Ramzaan. The hope is that the redevelopment project might even out the visitor footfalls in the areas round the year. Some of that is already starting to take shape. On September 27 last year, the newly restored and elegant Saifee masjid, the largest of its kind in the city, opened its door, drawing thousands of Bohri worshippers, both from the area as well as from elsewhere. The more than 100-year-old masjid has ample space, can accommodate about 5,000 people and is centrally air conditioned. … As the cluster development takes shape, the gentrification of Bhendi Bazaar is underway.”
Read the story here
9. The Mountain’s Call
“An arduous, painful, agonising trek… And I can’t wait to do it again!” writes Shailesh Kochhar about his trek to Sandakphu near Darjeeling, with his wife Nayantara, a first-time trekker (read about her experience here). An excerpt from his experience:
“She looks at me with raised eyebrows. I can almost hear her mind racing. “When we’re done, you’ll remember this,” I say. She just shakes her head and keeps moving. Daju continues his pep talk.
“First day mein sabko lagta hai nahin hoga. [On the first day, everyone thinks they can’t do it.] You go, your pace.
Woh aage vale ko bhul jao. [Ignore the people ahead of you.]
First aane ka koi medal nahin hai. [There’s no medal for coming first.]”
His words revisit us the next afternoon. Thighs burning and lungs pumping after hours of climbing steep slopes, I take in the scents of the forest around us. Through the day's seemingly endless and gruelling climb we’d been wandering in forests — first oak, then lush bamboo, then oak again and now beautiful towering pine. I stop for a moment and try to soak in the scented air ruffling my damp brow. My wife is ahead, waving to me, the low sun framing her between the tall pines. The seconds stretch out forever, my legs grateful for the minute’s rest…
It’s now almost 6 am. Yesterday’s aches, call time, breakfast and departure are behind us. As the pale light of dawn turns pink, I huff my way up a bend in the trail to find an expanse of mountains stretched out in front of my eyes. I stop in my tracks and turn to look behind as she bounds up to where I stand, “Why did you …” she starts. The sight spread across the horizon before us snatches her breath. Range after range of mountain shimmering blue between our feet till the distant horizon. And there: jagged, icy peaks of the Kanchenjunga massif tearing through pale blue sky. A tiny veil of cloud coyly drifting across the summit.”
Read the story here
