Present Tense - Future Perfect

I have been working on this post interminably, the last two days were spent trying to figure out what I wanted to achieve.  Obviously not an easy task, knowing that the industry is still in a nascent stage here, even though Alternate Energy has been around for over 40 years.  My mind has racing, ever since I realized that the next 5 years are very critical, to the extent that they will be the commercially defining years for renewables in India.  We have seen the world progress and there is a lot to learn from them.  Here, in this post, I define the steps that one must take to create a viable renewable business :

1.  Create a Blueprint.
2.  Map out Existing Products in the Market.
3.  Define New Products to be created.
4.  Prototype the Products.
5.  Identify Markets.
6.  Extricate Customer share of the competition by research.
7.  Implement the S&M plan.

I walked over to the office of a gentleman by the name of Mohit, 12 years back, he a real estate developer based out of Gurgaon, the scope was and is still immense, Gurgaon is a bustling city in downtown Delhi, with development activity happening in every nook and corner of the the city.  It is based in Haryana, the one state in India that has promoted Solar Energy extensively, by way of subsidies, be at state or federal, capital or immediate.  I had last had a constant interaction with Mohit years back, and I have known him for a good number of years, actually 12 of them.  Last when I had met him, he had been adamant that my proposals wouldn't work.

This is way too expensive," he had expressed kindly, a man of gentle words, he seemed not to want to hurt me. "All the probabilities point to the government accepting Nuclear as the "de-facto energy mechanism.  The point here, Maninder, is that I don't understand why you want to push Solar on us, we are perfectly happy the way we are."

"Mohit, do you care about the future, the future of our children ?" I had fired back.
He nodded knowingly, he now saw me as a crusader of the lost environmental cause.
"See, when the money is flowing in, none of us want to change."
"What if the government proposed a plan that punished polluters and conventional energy usage."
"We will see when that happens, there's always a around in this country," he sounded like he had seen the world turn around a few times on the same axis.

Now for me the sun had never risen from the same spot, so my definition of the axis remained as confusing as the Axis forces of World War II, my country having been a slave to the Britisher during those times.  I did understand though that if Hitler chose to exercise his rights, there was fairly no chance that anyone would escape the assault without a third party espousing there cause.  The North Americans and the Europeans were with us, the Environmentalists this time around, and when the the Congress came to power some 10 years ago, the policy shifted to one of support for the cause.

Now, I was a technologist then, and today I am just a Sales Person, I understand that I have to talk and talk to reach an understanding with the client and the promoters, if I don't talk then I don't understand what are the issues in the region.  My normal Sales Pitch lasts for about 15 to 25 minutes, depending on what I have gathered during the first 10 minutes of listening and with Mohit I had gathered that he was a die hard traditionalist, steeped in the old school of thought, something that I call the Buchanan Syndrome, of having acquired his initial wealth by way of inheritance.  What else do I know about Mohit, that he and me are poles apart, he is slow moving sleepy giant who could buy a Ferrari tomorrow if he got his full quota of family money.  Yet I had taken a liking to this man, and I kept trying to poke him into accepting my point of view, even if in disagreement.

This time when I met him at Azad Apartments in Delhi, he had put on a little bit of more weight of which he had plenty in the first place.  I had a new proposal for him and this time it included a sizable share for his pocket as commission.  I was also going to give him all the marketing material to peruse and use, and I was ready for all arguments.  The government had come down heavily on polluting conventional fossil energy, coal was to be disbanded as an energy material in the coming years and it was proposed that by 2020, there would be 20GW of Solar installed, the installed cap as of today was 1000MW.  Wind was already hitting 18GW installed cap and add to it other sustainable technologies like Tidal and Wave, Hydro and Biomass and India was sitting on 25 installed renewable cap.
GW

Interestingly, this time around, Mohit was interested in me, new projects had taken a beating and lot of them were under pressure from the government to get NOC (No Objection Certificates) for renewables else get scrapped.  I am a realistic man and this time I understood his enthusiasm this time around, I wasn't going to take his earlier negations upon my ego, I gave him all the data he needed and provided him with supporting presentations to buttress my argument.  All was going to well, it was obvious, this thing had turned and turned around it had, my last 10 years seemed to be well worth the wait and if it took another 5 to make it a commercial success I was willing to go the way of the renewables.
"The feeling of possession is nothing compared to the more intense emotion of imminent or actual loss."