17. Maa bulawa ! While working in HPCL, there was an employee benefit of availing LTC anywhere in India once in 4 years. Under that scheme I utilised my trip to Kashmir with my family ( wife and 2 sons). That was in Aug.1984, the time the Kashmir unrest was beginning to take place. On my second day stay in Srinagar , a curfew was imposed and all the outside visitors were asked to vacate Srinagar immediately. When we rushed to the airport to catch a flight to Delhi, the airline authorities could not accommodate our travel to Delhi but suggested to move to Jammu for safety. After landing at Jammu, since I did not have enough liquid cash in hand I did not know how to sustain then. Those days there was no credit or debit card system prevailed ; people managed safety only with the prepaid postal orders! When I approached the airport manager for enquiries, as if God's agent Mr Zutshi helped us by issuing a wait listed dummy ticketing and cancel them for converting the PO to cash. Then he suggested us to go to Maa Vaishnavi Devi temple at Katara. There, an unknown stranger Mr Gupta took us to the top in the night climbing the hill and in the early hours of morning some other unknown Telugu army jawans helped in getting the Devi darshan ! That was a literal Maa bulawa only. Year 1984
18.Positive Turn in Life. Accidental meeting of Sh K Krishnamurthy, former HPCL chairman at Hyderabad airport has changed my life ! His enquiring about my welfare and suggesting career change etc. are still a dream for me. Added to that, Bhuvana advising that "both KK and his wife Mrs Nagarathinam are our well wishers and we should follow their guidance "can never be forgotten ! That accidental meeting only made me come to Reliance ! Though I had several reservations at the back of my mind to start with, time flew just like that and I served Reliance for 32 long years and enjoyed my profession. Year 1986
19. While serving Reliance for this long, I had several surprise shocks, most of them ending in benefits only. Rather I can proudly state I am also the one who contributed to its growth and benefited - courtesy Sh Mukesh D Ambani, chairman of RIL. Let us look into some of the happenings !
20. Maternity warden During my innings at Patalganga- carrying out instrumentation construction work for Paraxylene plant. one day Sh Dhirubhai Ambani paid a visit to the site. He and Sh K K Malhotra, Chief executive were standing below a pipe rack and discussing something; when I happened to cross them avoiding the disturbance KKM called me by name to introduce me to that time chairman. Can somebody guess the chairman's reaction? 'Who does not know him; he is our maternity warden"! KKM was puzzled and could not understand the context for his uttering. Then the chairman explained that Ramanathan shall be there wherever any problem exists to resolve any issue similar to the maternity warden's presence during a child delivery. We all laughed then to relish his comment. Year 1988
21.Leave no stone unturned. While executing the Ethylene terminal at Hazira site, we landed in mess due to improper heat treatment of fabricated elbows done with M312 SS by M/S Rathnamani contracted by M/s L&T. While doing the completed lines for the cryogenic service hydrotesting, each and every joint cracked and could not hold the test pressure! Reliance & L&T on war footing carried out field welding of both lateral( longitude) and circumferential joints 100% and did complete X ray on war footing. Even then the inspection group insisted for the source of the raw billet stock ( from which the original pipe and the fittings were fabricated); but,since M/S Rangamani had wound up the business due to some tax raids, M/S L&T could not trace the original source of the material and its heat number. That was forcing us to resource the complete material and re-lay- meaning acost of Rs 6 crores (then in 1991) and waiting period for fresh material production in factory and delay in the fresh field work. That option was not acceptable to all concerned. Then Mr AM Naik , L&T chairman took that challenge as his personal task and attempted to trace the heat number and its corresponding Test certificate with all steel mills in the country. Luckily, in a short time he could identify that . It was from M/S SAIL Salem and that company cooperated in tracing its history and shared the copy of the original test certificate. Everyone was relieved of the tension and commissioning took place in April 1991 smoothly. Year 1991
22. Opinion Engineering .While executing the world largest petroleum refinery at Jamnagar (phI DTA) there were several involuntary propositions thinking that they are saving cost as well as ease the execution. Here I would like to cite 2 such cases : 1) Recommending to put 2X 84" diameter Cooling water piping in the pipe rack bottom tier instead of laying them underground ! The reasoning & justification was- in the Jamnagar site, the ground is of rocky soil and a lot of efforts are needed to dig the trench. The funny thing is that the suggested person himself was a qualified civil/structural engineer that too had a lot of field construction expertise. He completely overlooked the issue of the thrust load factor on the pipe rack. Similarly in another incident at the marine terminal, some one questioned the need and necessity for the provision of cross over bridge/s on a 4 M wide rain water drain. They thought they are saving the cost to the company, forgetting the requisite safety. Unfortunately all of them were very seniors and boss level executives. Over ruling and managing then itself was a big task to the project management function. Added to misery, M/S Bechtel being the engineering consultant was looking for my interference in settling these and issue clearances. Though these are literal challenges I enjoyed settling them rightly. Year 1997
23. Daylight robbery. For some narine related issue I was on an official visit to Hamburg, Germany. After completing that task I was supposed to fly to Zurich for the Cryogenic off gas compressor inspection at the Sulzer factory in Zurich. To meet that objective I reached Hamburg airport and went to the check-in counter. I handed over my ticket and passport to the airline assistant and stood there waiting for my boarding pass. After finishing when I looked down to pick up my briefcase it was missing! It had a lot of foreign exchange in cash as well as traveller cheques and everything was lost. It forced me to lodge the complaint with the police and cancel my journey to Zurich. Luckily my travel agent at Mumbai acted fast and arranged the replacement of all lost money immediately through their local branch but instead of going to Switzerland I returned to Mumbai direct- Airlines was considerate to reroute my ticket and arranged. Still I am not able to imagine how the robber would have managed to lift that briefcase placed near my legs! Year 1998
24. Challenge of internal lining for sea water service. I thought that by following specially developed paint spray coating we can achieve efficient throughput instead of the conventional cement lining. The coating material was the same that was utilized in the underground tunnel in English Channel for the train service between London to Paris in France. But in Jamnagar we ended in a mess due to the holiday generated during the application and no thorough manual inspection in 3X42" piping could arrest the leak whenever the lines were commissioned with the sea water to the refinery. Nobody was able to understand the issue.The only fear for all was it is already 11th hour and how to overcome? Sh MDA thought over the issue and called his classmate Sh Raju Narayanan,who specialized in corrosion technology and settled down in London. Raju landed at the site on 17th Dec 1999 at noon. I received him and started taking him to the marine terminal where the sea water intake provision commence. Raju being an expert in metallurgy that too corrosion noticed the inherent issue 50M front itself and said ' what mistake M/S Bechtel has committed ?' There itself explained the issue- it was a question of cathode of steel pipe in conjunction with the anode of nobel metal of isolation valve stem ! The sea water initiates perfect conduction and that is the crux of the issue. Immediately he came out with a solution of incorporating Zinc anodes at every manhole across the 16Kms X3 lines and resolved the issue. Unfortunately I could not be physically present at site during implementation since that was the day my mother died and I rushed to Madras; rather Raju was the person who consoled me after hearing that bad news and saw me off from the guest house. That implementation holds good and the installation is working fine all along. Year 1999.
Contd.....
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