Category: Smart Living

Meet Piyush Gupta, the EV battery-swapping man

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Piyush Gupta is quick witted. He swaps numbers adroitly, intersperses his million battery-swapping dream and $1 billion investment ambition with his favourite refrain ,“anything that is good and cheap will sell”.

Spooning fruit custard in an upscale restaurant in New Delhi, Gupta pronounced the death of India’s 56,000 petrol pumps, is convinced that by 2030 (‘earlier’, he insists), India will switch to an entirely electric fleet and by 2019, no electric vehicle (EV) customer will be more than 2-kilometres away from a battery swap point.

Gupta is not riding a mythical high horse. He knows all about EVs and battery-swapping. He is the founder of Lithion Power, India’s largest ‘battery at service’ operator providing lithium ion batteries for e-bikes and 3-wheelers.

The New-Delhi headquartered 3-year old company, Lithion is also the world’s first EV company to make a sustainable battery-swapping model and aims to become the largest supplier of power to electric vehicles worldwide. Currently, Lithion has 6 EV Lithion Swapping Points (LSPs) in North and North-West Delhi. Soon, Gupta wants to scale to at least 500 LSPs in the capital and 10,000 across the country.

In the next 3 years, he is all set to manage 1 million batteries in its ecosystem, that is one-third of the predicted 3-4 million EV battery demand.

Sitting across the table over lunch, I wondered whether Gupta, an IIT-Kharagpur alumnus with MBA from INSEAD, has gazed into the crystal ball.

“No, it is not a dream. It is a tangible reality.”  Gupta cites the government’s edict that by 2030, India, set to be the world’s third largest car market within five years, will sell only electric vehicles.

The EV idea was sowed in 2015 with the launch Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of (Hybrid &) Electric Vehicles (FAME) under the National Electric Mobility Mission (NEMM).

If India switches to an entirely electric fleet, it can help reduce 1 gigatonne of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, and save India $330 billion by cutting oil imports.

The EV dream – and the benefits – are many, but is it really feasible? The past few years have seen a substantial increase in the number of EVs – e-rickshaws have grown to 15 lakhs and are expected to double by 2020, and the market for e-autos, e-bikes, and e-scooters is growing exponentially.

However, with no robust EV manufacturing capacity, India’s 2030 EV dream seems a little far fetched (even Britain has set 2040 as its deadline). There are murmurs of interest from big players like Hyundai, Mahindra & Mahindra, Nissan, Maruti, Toyota and Tata. According to BIS Research, a global market intelligence, research and advisory company, a slew of EV models (25, to be precise) will be launched by 2021.

At Auto Expo 2018, Mercedes Benz displayed a concept of its electric vehicle and professed that it is ‘hypothetically’ ready for a launch in India in 2019. In March 2018, Nissan announced its promise to sell 1 million electric cars by 2022.

What about range anxiety? The anxiety that EVs will stutter and die before one hits the charging station is real. Add to it the charging time trauma. Modern electric cars need an entire night to charge; even fast charging stations devour an hour.

Gupta believes the solution lies in lithium-ion batteries and not in lithium-acid batteries. Lithion Powerpacks are lightweight, longer-running and embedded with smart tracking and communication facility. And the swap can take less than 5 minutes – as easy as fixing the nozzle and getting the tank topped.

In the next 5 years, the battery chargers and swappers’ industry will proliferate and by 2030, there will emerge a $150 billion new industry with batteries, solar, charging and swapping stations, motors and drivers, telemetry.

To meet the demand, early this year, Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) teamed up LG Chem, a South Korean manufacturer which will supply Lithium-ion (Li-ion) cells based on NMC (Nickel Manganese Cobalt) chemistry with high energy density. Suzuki has planned a Rs 1,151 crore lithium-ion battery plant in Hansalpur, Gujarat, which is slated to be ready by 2020.

So, is the EV dream doable? As I twirled the gangly noodle in the chopstick, Gupta picked the last grape from the custard bowl and returned to the refrain: If it is cheap and good, it will sell. How? I drop the noodle and pick a question. “Because the EV owner no longer needs to invest in a battery. He rents it on a daily basis, does the last mile and swaps it. It is cheap, good. And the future.”

The birth of EV

In the early part of the 20th century, innovators in Hungary, the Netherlands and the United States began fiddling with the idea of a battery-powered vehicle. Robert Anderson, a British inventor, developed the first crude electric carriage.

In 1890, William Morrison, an Iowa-based chemist made the first successful electric car in the United States. The 6-passenger vehicle could hit a top speed of 14 miles per hour. In 1898, Ferdinand Porsche, founder of the sports car company by the same name, developed an electric car named P1.

In 1908, Henry Ford’s mass-produced affordable and easily available Model T dealt a blow to the electric car. In 1912, the gasoline car cost $ 650 while an electric roadster sold for $1,750.

(Source: www.energy.gov)

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Places to go: Santa Fe, the City Different

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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It calls itself City Different. It’s old – exactly 408 years old, the second oldest city in the US. The walls are adobe and its famous residents include George RR Martin and Georgia O’Keffee.

Perched 7,000 feet above sea level, it’s the capital city with highest elevation in the country. It puffs about 325 sunny days in a year. No, it is not a desert. The weather is mountainous/foothill. With half a mile packed with nearly 100 art galleries, perhaps the densest in the country, it is an art town.

This City Different is Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, which in 2017, was listed no. 1 in a ‘Sense of the Place’ in the entire world.

Preeti Verma Lal is a Goa-based freelance writer/photographer. 

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Salvador Dali: An ashtray, an erotic cookbook and a reincarnate

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Turn the clock to 1967. Pin Spain on the world map. And imagine this conversation.

Air India official: “Mr Dali, how much would you charge for designing an ashtray for the airline?”

Salvador Dali: “An elephant.”

Gala (Dali’s partner) chirps in: “And $10,000”.

Air India official: “An elephant. Why?”

Salvador Dali: “Because I wish to keep him in my olive grove and watch the patterns of shadows the moonlight makes through the twigs on his back.”

This is not an imagined conversation. It actually happened 51 years ago. Maybe the exact words were not uttered but Prakash Dubey, former Chief Commissioner of Income Tax, can sew the sequence of events that led to Dali designing the porcelain white/blue ashtray for Air India. Titled Double Image, it has two surrealist headstands — an elephant on one side and a swan on the other.

Over a phone call, Dubey narrated how during a meal at Duran restaurant in Figeures (Dali’s birthplace), he noticed a newspaper clipping with the Air India Maharaja logo emblazoned on it. Intrigued, he spent several months and made countless phone calls to trace the ashtray and the forgotten story behind it.

And yes, Air India kept its promise and sent a two-year-old elephant and a mahout to Dali’s home in Cadaques as the promised remuneration!

An elephant? That’s tame. Salvador Dali had a pet anteater that he walked on the streets of Paris. He was certain that his drooping moustache was an antenna that received alien signals. He once filled a Rolls Royce with cauliflowers and drove around town. He created a ‘cologne’ of his very own. No roses or musk in the phial. A pongy cologne made of boiled water, fish glue, goat manure and aspic oil. He sure must have smelt like a ram.

That was Dali. Eccentric. Whimsical. Capricious. Quirky. Supremely gifted as an artist. And a man of many whims. I thought I had counted all his idiosyncrasies until I stumbled upon Les Diners de Gala, a 1973-erotic cookbook by Dali in which he calls first courses “the supreme lilliputien malaises”,  meats are “the sodomised starter-main dishes” and ‘I eat GALA’ is a section devoted to aphrodisiacs.

Outside Paris’ Bastille station, I had walked the step where Dali once walked his anteater; in Westin Palace Madrid, I snoozed in the room where a then-unknown Dali checked in; walked through a Dali Sculpture Garden in Stiges; and stared at a Dali bronze girl at the entrance of MGM Macau.

Too many Dali encounters for a lifetime, I thought. Wasn’t enough, I presume. On a frosty day in Pargas (Finland), I bumped into a Dali-reincarnate. “Salvador Dali is not dead. I am his reincarnation.”

I froze on the threshold of Art Bank when its owner Ted Wallin leaned and murmured Dali by my ears. In Art Bank’s Salvador Dali Private Collection, Dali (the real, not the reincarnate) loomed in a black/white photograph and a bronze Venus’ breasts could be opened as drawers; one could sit on gigantic red as a clock melted on a tree branch.

Everything in Art Bank was so surreal. So was Wallin. With a curly pouf, ruby red shirt buttons, silver ornament on the coat collar, a colossal ring burdening his middle finger.

“You know, Dali has reached a fourth dimension. One day, Dali told me that I should arrange the room as if it were his,” Wallin muttered. Again. He has never met Dali. Neither have I met the real Dali. On a frosty day, it was a self-proclaimed Dali-reincarnate that I met. Or, was he really a Dali apparition?

Preeti Verma Lal is a Goa-based freelance writer/photographer.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Despite cost worries, China’s Trina Solar bets big on India

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Changzhou, China: It is the niftiest car I have ever seen. A 5 metres x 1.8 metres x 1 metre machine. Its aerodynamic body tiled with 565 blue solar cells. Not ordinary cells. Trina Interdigitated Back Contact (IBC) solar cells. A sleek high-efficiency vehicle powered solely by sunlight. This one-seater solar car can hit a top speed of nearly 100 kmph. Wait! Did you pucker the nose at the 100 kmph? Don’t. The Trina Solar Race Car has won two FIA Alternative Energy races in Suzuka, Japan. Call it the Solar F1 Champion and the clean air messiah. No carbon emissions. No fossil fuel. Certainly not a climate hellhound.

This futuristic solar car stood at the entrance of Trina Solar Laboratory in Changzhou, China, the headquarter of Trina Solar, the world’s largest manufacturer of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels globally and India’s largest supplier. The first solar company to be listed in the New York Stock Exchange, it specialises in the manufacture of crystalline silicon PV modules, ingots, wafers and solar cells. Currently, Trina Solar has about 10% share of the global market and 25% share of the Indian market.

A clean, renewable-energy tomorrow is what Jifan Gao, the company’s Founder & CEO, has been envisioning for the past 20 years. Founded in 1997, Trina Solar has so far shipped 32 gigawatt (GW; 32,000 megawatt; equivalent to 100 regular power stations) of PV products and services to more than 100 countries and has so far connected nearly 2 GW of solar projects to grids around the world.

In an interview during the recent 20th anniversary celebrations of Trina Solar, Gao tagged India as ‘a prime market’ and expressed hope to start manufacturing in India. With acquisition of nearly 90 acres of land at Atchutapuram in Andhra Pradesh, Trina was ready to set up a manufacturing unit. However, the ambitious plan has been put on hold. “If costs of making in India do not support the economics of production for the customer, it makes our job difficult. Our basic principle is to provide value for the customer. If the local customer cannot afford our products, that makes it difficult for us to produce,” explained Gao who also rued the “lack of  PV manufacturing supply chain in India”.

Speaking on the occasion, Yali Jiang, Analyst Bloomberg New Energy Finance, traced the growth of India’s PV market from 1.0 GW in 2013 to 8.6 GW in 2017 with an optimistic prediction of crossing the 12 GW mark by 2020. In 2017, India imported 90.2% of PV cells and modules from China at a cost of $3,648 million. A recent report by global accounting firm KPMG says that in the absence of strong local manufacturing, by 2030, India will need to import $42 billion of solar equipment (approximately 100 GW of installed capacity). Despite the bottlenecks, Gao is trusting the forecasts. “India has a mammoth rooftop domestic market.” To meet the demand, Trina Solar will soon launch TrinaHome, a solar home kit in India.

“Trina Solar’s fleet could offset approximately 20 million tonnes of carbon emissions per year. This is equivalent to planting about 3.7 million acres of trees,” enumerated Gao and promised to “uphold the concept of innovative, sustainable, and green development accomplish our corporate mission of Benefiting Mankind with Solar Energy”.

Beyond building a cleaner world, Trina Solar is also lending a hand around the world. The company donated 7,000 watts of solar modules to Lapubesi village in Nepal after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2015 destroyed nearly 95% of homes. Prince Harry of Britain participated in the installation of the modules. It has provided PV modules in Africa and Tibet and established a Sunshine Fund for Entrepreneurship and donated 10 million RMB for poverty alleviation, youth entrepreneurship training and support for the college students in need.

Preeti Verma Lal is a Goa-based freelance writer/photographer. 

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

A (Swiss) house for Mr Chaplin

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Never before have I been so lost in a 37-acre, 19-room, 3-storied manor. A white neoclassical manor, with carpeted wooden staircase, manicured lawns, a grand piano, a deathbed and junipers and oaks bent with age. I was looking for the Tramp, the little vagrant with baggy trousers, derby hat and bamboo cane. I knew he lived here.

But the silver-haired nearly-leaping old man in the foyer of Manoir de Ban or Champ de Ban Estate Manor in Vevey (Switzerland) startled me. He was not The Tramp who once inspired the hungry-me to eat my shoes (his edible shoes in The Gold Rush were made of licorice) and made me look utterly silly when I, like him, tried the dance of the dinner rolls.

The made-of-wax silver-haired old man? Did I get the wrong address? I was about to walk away when I noticed that impish glint in the old man’s eyes. I knew it was him.

The real Charlie Chaplin, the English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who featured in more than 80 films in his 75-year career.  Tagged ‘the most famous man in the world’, he boasted “I am known in parts of the world by people who have never heard of Jesus Christ”.

Twenty Five Years

Switzerland – and this home – was fortuitous. In 1952, while on an ocean liner with  his family in Europe, Chaplin learnt that he could not re-enter the United States without submitting to an interrogation about his leftist leanings and morality. He refused to return to the ‘moral pomposity’ of the United States with its ‘hate-beleaguered atmosphere’. “A friend suggested Switzerland,” he wrote in his 1964 memoir, My Autobiography, though author Peter Ackroyd in his 2014 book Charlie Chaplin suggests the lenient Swiss tax code was the big lure. Whatever the ruse, Chaplin lived in this 1840-built manor for 25 years (1952-1977).

The manor has been restored and refashioned into a museum that is part of Chaplin’s World that also includes as immersive cinema space where unforgettable Chaplin movie scenes have been recreated. In the auditorium, images of him flit on a large screen.

The real man melding funnily with the reel man. The restaurant upstairs serves fish and chips in a nod to his London boyhood. In the garden is the ancient cypress, Michael Jackson’s favourite tree that the singer would often climb in a moment of mirth.

His Life on the Walls

However, it is inside the house that one sees the real Chaplin. There’s a grand piano on which he edited the music for his films. Blue walls chronicle his life with Oona, his fourth and last wife, 36 years his junior and the eight children he had with her. In the boudoir, he watches a film unspool from the large projector. In one corner stands Sophia Loren in red; in a bathroom, Einstein is acting goofy.

There’s a large collage of overnight guests who visited him (including Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru). One room houses the original luggage with which he travelled around the world and an interactive map narrates his visits to various countries. Death silences laughter in the room with a wooden bed dressed in blue linen on which Chaplin breathed his last on Christmas day of 1977.

In Vevey, I spent the day with Charlie Chaplin. When the gates to the manor closed,  I waited at the Chaplin World bus stop to take me to the banks of Lake Geneva where his bronze statue stands amidst a bed of flowers. The bus was late. No one was watching. I am no Chaplin but I tried to trot jauntily. Like the Little Tramp.

What more in Vevey:

Walk to the banks of Lake Geneva for a look at Vevey’s famed 8-metre tall Fork Sculpture in the sea.

Step into Nestle Art Museum. Do not miss the museum ‘nest’ which is located at the  exact location where Henri Nestle first developed his infant cereal in 1866. The Y-shaped Nestle headquarters in Vevey is still considered one of the most beautiful buildings in Switzerland.

“The whole point of the Little Fellow is that no matter how down on his ass he is, no matter how well the jackals succeed in tearing him apart, he’s still a man of dignity. He is a man with a soul. A point of view. He has an air of romantic hunger.” – Charlie Chaplin describing the idea of the Tramp, his most famous creation.

Preeti Verma Lal is a Goa-based freelance writer/photographer. 

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

The story of how an Aussie wasteland became a green paradise

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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It is a gripping tale of a dainty Lady Elliot, a fervid floatplane pilot, and a faraway cay of crushed coral. A tiny island at the southern tip of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef sitting in the middle of the turquoise water, so far from the coast that if you craved for a midnight kangaroo jerky or cheesymite scroll, you’d have to hop into a plane, fly 80 kms to Bundaberg, pick the jerky and fly back to the eco resort.

That’s Lady Elliot Island. Located as part of the planet’s most extensive coral reef ecosystem, it was once a mine site – mined for sea cucumber and guano (bird poop used as manure and for production of gunpowder) in the 1860s. The island was stripped bare of vegetation and nearly abandoned. Then, came a knight in a floatplane – a man named Peter Gash, the chief pilot of Seair Pacific that ran flights into Lady Musgrave Island.

Every day Gash would fly over Lady Elliot Island and in his heart ran the constant dream of ‘owning’ a part of the land where the white-capped noddy comes in hordes, turtles lay their eggs, a whole caboodle of mantas and sharks swim by and is one of only two places on the Reef where endangered red-tailed tropic birds breed. In the 1990s, Gash ditched the floatplanes, added wheels, flew visitors to Lady Elliot and in August 2005, when the island lease was up for grabs, he raised a hand.  Today, Gash is co-owner of the island and operates the Lady Elliot Island Eco Resort.

That fortuitous day, Lady Elliot found a passionate reef warrior who kicked out greenhouse emissions and changed its fate. When Gash took over in 2005, the island used 550 litres of diesel daily just to produce power. That added to almost 200,000 litres per year. A staggering emission-evil that bothered Gash.

Instead of crying hoarse about the emissions, he turned it eco-friendly. In December 2008, the island had its own three-phase solar hybrid power station which remains one of Australia’s largest privately-owned systems of its kind. Having halved the island’s fuel consumption in just two years of implementing the solar power system, Lady Elliot uses less than 70,000 litres of diesel and produces less than 195 tonnes of emissions each year.

 Today, 80% of the island’s need is solar-powered (it hopes to go 100% solar by 2020), it desalinates seawater for drinking purposes, maintains a waste water treatment plant and recycles its rubbish. Recyclable waste is removed by barge every three months – an 18-hour trip to Gladstone on mainland Australia.

Prince Charles visited Lady Elliot Island on April 6. He participated in a  roundtable discussion on climate change and said that decisions made in the next decade will determine the fate of the Great Barrier Reef.

Lady Elliot is the first island in Australia to completely ban plastic water bottles, has no high-rise buildings and has the unique distinction of producing its own soil through food waste. Using thousands of native plants, the island is being regenerated to its former pre-European settlement glory.

Says Gash, “Sustainability and sustainable tourism means ensuring that whatever we do today does not have a negative impact on the Island, the reef or the greater planet for tomorrow. It means leaving the world a better place than we found it.”

Honoured with the prestigious Marie Watson-Blake Award for Outstanding Contribution by an Individual at the Queensland Tourism Awards in 2014, Gash is zealously striving to keep the world – and the Great Barrier Reef – ‘alive’.

Preeti Verma Lal is a Goa-based freelance writer/photographer.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

The history of Gold Coast, which is hosting the Commonwealth Games

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

In Malaga, memories of Picasso hang in the air

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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He sat there. Under the jacaranda tree with a book in hand. The shirt sleeves rolled, the trousers creased. A wrinkle on his broad forehead and a smile mislaid into the thick laughter lines. Behind the artist sculpted in bronze was 15, Plaza de la Merced, the yellow house with green slat windows where he was born one autumn afternoon of 1881. I had flown thousands of miles into Malaga (Spain) just to see the man I swoon over. His name: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso.

I swoon over Picasso. But he was not there. It has been 45 years since Death knocked his door on April 8, 1973. In Malaga, I walked where he must have walked once – El Castillo De Gibralfaro, the 10th century Moorish Palace, the 16th  century Renaissance Cathedral and the 1st century Roman Theatre. But I did not find his footprints; Time has erased them from Malaga’s sidewalks. In 1891, when his father found a job as an art teacher, the family left Malaga for La Coruna, returning for three years in summer. In 1901, Picasso finally left Malaga. Never to return. He was 19.

Children First, Just As He Finished

Picasso did not live long in his birthplace, but Malaga, the largest city on the Costa del Sol in Spain’s Andalusia, seems to subsist on the memory of the artist. Here, the aesthete needs no map – his feet know where to go first. To the Museum of Picasso, the world’s second largest collection of his art. With ticket and an orange folder in hand, I waited at the entrance. Suddenly, there was the hubbub of innocent laughter. A bunch of kindergarten students had walked in for a day with Picasso. I had to step aside for them. In Picasso Museum, children have priority. That is how Picasso wished. Children enter first. I paid heed to the painter’s wish.

Then I saw him. An old Picasso. Nearly 90. He was peering from a tiny screen on the Museum’s wall. In the black/white video, I watched him paint. A bull. A woman. A horse. Eloquent, magical strokes on canvas. Picasso is oblivious of the world. To the man who pioneered Cubism, only the form mattered. That’s the form – and Picasso – I swoon over. That’s the Picasso I met in the Museum housed in a former Renaissance-style building that sits on the remains of 7^th century Phoenician Malaga and is now a National Monument. Donated by Picasso’s family to the city of Malaga are 233 works of art, most never displayed for public before.

Malaga on a Canvas

I walked back to Casa Natal, the yellow house in which Picasso was born. Picasso’s father had rented it in 1880 and stayed until 1883. A heritage site since 1983, the building was taken over by the Picasso Foundation in 1998 and officially reopened by the King and Queen of Spain. The Picasso Birthplace Museum houses the artist’s prints, ceramics and graphic art from the period 1931-1971.

Before leaving Malaga, I had to see Picasso one last time. I sat next to him on the bench. He was silent. Under the jacaranda tree, I tried saying the full name of the man I swoon over: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso. I fumbled. Perhaps Picasso smiled. I don’t know.

When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. – Pablo Picasso

The signature of Paloma Picasso, the artist’s daughter, on an oak cask in Malaga’s El Pimpi restaurant.

What more in Malaga:

Automobile and Fashion Museum houses the private collection of Portuguese car fanatic Joao Magalhaes and is listed in Top Ten of Museums of Spain

Preeti Verma Lal is a Goa-based freelance writer/photographer. 

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow