DHIRUBHAI AMBANI AND HIS JAMNAGAR REFINERY-A MIRACLE

Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State visited India to get refining of crude oil done for the US and then called India a refining superpower of the world. 

That is really an exaggeration because China leads the world’s refining capacity with 18.5 million barrels per day, 2nd is the US with 18.4 million barrels per day, 3rd is Russia with 6.8 million barrels per day, and then India in 4th position  with 5.8 million barrels per day. 

As Rubio visited Jamnagar Refinery, it is in focus now and I happened to see a video on the Jamnagar Refinery and the facts shown in that video stunned me. I have also done a bit of research on that. Giving a link to the video below...

India exported 65 million tons of Petro products in the year 2025 (for which data is available). Of this, Reliance’s Jamnagar refinery alone accounts for 70%. 

India has an aggregate refining capacity of 267 million tons or over 5 million barrels per day which is about 6% of the Worlds refining capacity.

Reliance’s Jamnagar refinery capacity alone is 1.4 million barrels of crude or 68 million tons annually. So, this refinery alone consists more than 25% of India’s refinery capacity. 

It is relevant to note here that the Jamnagar refinery operates over 100% of its capacity frequently. On one occasion it ran at 121% of its installed capacity which is simply unbelievable. 

This refinery is the largest standalone refinery in the world itself and contributes 1.5% to the worlds refining capacity.  2nd in the world is Paraguana Refinery in Venezuela with an installed capacity of 950,000 barrels per day. 

The Nelson Complexity Index (NCI) measures an oil refinery's level of sophistication, conversion capacity, and ability to turn crude oil into high-value light products (such as gasoline and diesel) relative to a basic crude distillation unit (which has an index of 1.0). 

The Jamnagar refinery complex features a high Nelson Complexity Index of 21, allowing it to process over 216 different grades of crude oil, including heavy and ultra-heavy crudes. It is the most complex refinery in the world itself by the Index. 

The US refineries average 9.5 on the NCI scale and the European refineries average 6.5. The Chinese refineries have an NCI of 12. 

The Jamnagar Refinery was built by Reliance on 7500 acres of barren land near the sea. The refinery complex alone covers 1000 acres. 

This massive and complex refinery was built with lightning speed in just 33 months’ time and commenced operations in Dec 1999. 70,000 workers were on the construction of the project day and night. 

Prior to the refinery commencing refining operations India was forced to import refined Petro products for its use. This refinery turned that around and made India an exporter of Petro products. 

India’s refining capacity in 1999 was a mere 70 million tons and the Jamnagar refinery alone has added a like amount to the refining capacity of India. 

The refinery did not bother the local areas for water and set up a desalination plant with a capacity of 400,000 cubic meters (or 400 million litres of fresh water) of water per day sufficient for its use. 

This water, after being used in the refinery is treated and is then used to water the massive greenbelt made of mango trees planted by Reliance. 

They have planted 130,000 mango trees of some 100 varieties of mango in the belt and the produce of mangoes is exported. 

This refinery does not need any Port to import its crude. It uses the Single Point Mooring Systems or SPM’s where massive crude oil carrying ships can anchor at sea near the moorings from where crude is pumped through undersea pipelines to the refinery. 

Luckily Dhirubhai Ambani who can be called nothing but a visionary lived long enough to see his dream come true. A much maligned man he is. Manipulative he is, yes but just look at his vision and futuristic thought. 

He dreamed of something that never existed in the world at that time and no amount of appreciation is enough for this man. 

And all that from a man from a relatively low industrialised country at that time. An American building such a refinery need not be appreciated as much but an Indian doing it is nothing short of a miracle.

https://youtu.be/a-mvR4-bZlc?si=9qP3cgHJJJ0rj77w

HERACLITUS, PARMENIDES & ZENO GREEK PHILOSOPHERS OF THE 6TH CENTURY BC

 

    HERACLITUS: He is from the Ionian city of EPHESUS and was born in 535 BC. He believed that everything changes continuously and all things are in a state of flux. He also said that you cannot bathe in a river twice because by that time the river changes too.

Heraclitus said, there is nothing everlasting in the Universe and everything is in a state of FLUX. He was born as an Aristocrat and therefore detested Democracy. He claimed that he discovered something that no other philosopher before him did and said that the Universe evolved from FIRE.

He said that everything in the Universe is evolving and constantly turning into another thing. He believed that all things have dyads in nature. 

     PARAMENIDES: He was born in the Greek city of Elea in Italy in 540 BC. He is an interesting character and his philosophy is totally opposite to that of Heraclitus who said everything is in a state of Flux. Nay said this guy and made the theory of Parmenides stand on its head. He said that nothing changes in the Universe and it is an illusion to think that there is any change at all.

Like Socrates before him Parmenides too had disciples and disciples of disciples and is known as the Eleatic school. The greatest disciple of this guy is Zeno who is the founder of Dialectics.

Whatever is there will never change. It has existence. It is everlasting, indivisible, homogeneous, uniform, and motionless and does not change.

Then, what is all this change, differences, plurality, birth, death etc.? Parmenides says like our Sankara that all those are our imagination. There is no sensible world and it is only an appearance. 

No one created something that exists. Neither can anyone destroy it. It is complete, infinite, and motionless. One can never say that it existed before or will exist in future, because it is there at present. It exists as a whole, inseparable and continuous. It is motionless and stands still at one place. It exists in itself.

Parmenides said that motion is impossible. Does motion not mean an object going to a place where it is not present? Since there is no place that it does not exist, motion is impossible. 

     ZENO: He was born in Elea in 490 BC. Dialectics is the art of accepting an argument and then by logic try to find paradoxes in the argument to counter it. Zeno was the first philosopher top use Dialectics.

To support his guru Paramenides theory of no change, he narrated the famous 4 paradoxes which could only be answered in the modern day 2400 years after they were narrated. 

1^st Paradox: It is impossible to go from one place to another. For example if a person has to travel 100 meters first he has to travel 50 meters, before that 25 meters, before that 12.5 meters etc. infinitesimally. The time given to the person is finite whereas he has to cross an infinite number of divisions. This is impossible. 

2^nd Paradox: Remember the story of Achilles and the tortoise? Zeno was the first person to narrate this. In a hundred meters race the tortoise was kept 10 meters ahead of Achilles. By logic Achilles should easily cross the tortoise. But for this first he has to cross 10 meters. By this time the tortoise would have gone some distance. Again Achilles will have to cross that additional distance. In the meantime the tortoise would have gone a little ahead again. Like this an infinite number of divisions had to be crossed by Achilles in a finite amount of time, which is impossible.

3^rd Paradox: At any single indivisible instant in time, a flying arrow occupies a space equal to it and is at rest. If time is composed of these static instants, and the arrow does not move during any single instant, then motion cannot happen at all.

4^th Paradox: This involves objects moving past each other in a stadium at different speeds, creating logical contradictions regarding relative speeds and the assumption that time is composed of indivisible minimum units.

TELUGU LANGUAGE & PEOPLE-ORIGINS

 

Today as I was going through some videos on You Tube, by chance I came across a Video on Telugu saying that new facts are uncovered on it. I always have a suspicion on YouTube videos and feel they represent more of opinions on such issues than fact. So, I checked on the net and found it is true. There are some interesting facts about Telugu which I want to mention here. 

Recent breakthroughs in population genetics and genomic sequencing have revealed a highly unique, ancient, and rich ancestral makeup for Telugu.

Major studies on Indian DNA including extensive analysis by the University of California at Berkeley reveal the genetic profile of the Telugu population.

There are 3 primary ancestral sources for Telugu DNA.

1. Ancient Ancestral South Indian- dates back to more than 50,000 years.

2. Indus Valley Civilization allied ancestry-around 5000-4000 years ago the Indus Valley people mixed heavily with the above stream...and formed the Ancestral South Indian profile.

3. Ancestral North Indian- profiles show that Telugu groups carry minor to moderate amounts of Ancestral North Indian ancestry.

Linguistically Telugu is an independent Dravidian language that split from Proto Dravidian around 1000 BC.

Historical linguists classify it under the South Dravidian II/Central Dravidian branch ..it is close to Tamil and Kannada.

The earliest physical evidence of Telugu words date back to Prakrit( script) inscriptions dating back to 400 BC to 257 BC

Telugu is spoken by over 8 crore native speakers and is the most widely spoken Dravidian language and the 4th most spoken after Hindi, Bengali and Marathi.

In his inscriptions Ashoka mentioned Andhra Bhrityulu which means Andhra vassals.

The Andhras were first mentioned in the Aitareya Brahmana of Rigveda dating to around 700-800 BC.

The Brahmana says that the Andhras were a non Aryan/Dasyu tribe who were exiled from Northern India near the Yamuna river, and they crossed the Vindhya range and migrated into the Southern Deccan. Andhras also appear in the Mahabharata and Ramayana. In the Mahabharata it is narrated that Andhras fought on the side of the Kauravas

PYTHAGORAS.

 

     Pythagoras was born in 582 BC and died in 500 BC. He is from a small Greek island known as Samos in the Aegean Sea. Samos was a very affluent Greek settlement and was well known then. During the time of Pythagoras Samos came under a tyrant Polycrates which made Pythagoras migrate to a city named Crotone around 530 BC. 

Before Socrates, Pythogoras was the most famous of all Greek Philosophers. 

Every child of today is familiar with the Pythogoras Theorem in Geometry over 2500 years after he was dead and gone. 

Pythagoras said that the origin of everything is numerals and without numerals there is no World. Today this may look absurd to us, but then, have our ancestors not said that everything came from “OM”. 

Amazingly the British did more research to discover Indian culture than Indians themselves. Arthur Anthony Mc Donnel wrote “A History of Sanskrit Literature” which was published in the year 1900. In that he said that it is highly probable that Pythagoras visited Persia through which he has imbibed Indian thought.   

In his book, he detailed several striking parallels between Pythagorean and ancient Indian thought. He said that the doctrine of transmigration of souls was never there in Greek thought and was brought in by Pythagoras suddenly, and had no indigenous explanation. The mathematical formulations for the Pythagorean Theorem, the philosophical assumption of 5 elements, and specific religious beliefs like taboo against eating beans had existing parallels in 6^th century BC India.

Pythagoras established a society in Crotone where the members lived together like  a family, wore the same type of clothes and had strict discipline just like in our Buddhist Sangha’s of that time. 

Pythagoras said Soul is everlasting and it does not perish. So every life form that is born dies and is again reborn as human or animal. Souls have afterlife. However, in this cycle if one goes around with good moral and ethical principles, then in some of the afterlives the soul would cease to have an afterlife. Now, this is much too close to Indian philosophical thought, so little wonder that Mc Donnel speculated that Pythagoras had a brush with Indian thought. 

Pythagoras postulated that the world is formed by dyads. He has defined 10 such dyads but does not deny other dyads. 

Greeks never had the concept of zero which India had at that time. So they did their addition, subtraction, division & multiplication through Geometry. 

Pythagoras ultimately said gave one number to everything; humans had one number while horse had another and so on for everything. Even feelings have been given numbers. 

This may look absurd to us but BAG Fuller in his “History of Philosophy” says that we need not think it to be so. The modern Physics and Chemistry rely completely on mathematics and even the definition of the elements is through numbers.  So, to that extent, if there are no numbers, there is no world.

Pythagoras assumed that the earth is not flat but is spherical. He said (as many others did) that Earth is the center of the Universe and the Moon, Sun, Planets and stars orbit it. He went on to say that these bodies while orbiting so make musical sounds. We may consider this absurd but again that was what he said. 

Western philosophy has 2 very important branches; 1. Materialism & 2. Idealism. While, Thales and other Greek philosophers were the originators of materialism, Pythagoras was the originator of Idealism. A war is on between the 2 basic systems for centuries and would continue to rage on.