In 1954 I worked as the chief engineer for Ceylon’s Laxaphana hydropower project. Laxaphana is in the Hill Country, the picturesque central mountainous area, where tea is grown so abundantly that almost all the mountains are entirely covered by perfectly trimmed tea bushes, making it look more like a fairytale painting than an actual mountain. I was one of the “foreign experts” who would make Ceylon’s ambition of becoming self-sufficient in energy a reality. Life here was good with its slow pace and laid-back attitude and a cup of Ceylon tea is just what you need in the cool Hill Country. But laid back is one word you could not call Somadasa a young man who worked on the project and did various odd jobs one of which was as a porter.
A man with big ideas, Somadasa wasn’t educated but considered himself a practical man and “a man of the world.” It was obvious that the Hydropower project had caught Somadasa’s imagination. So I was surprised when one day he came up to me and said that he had an idea that would make him rich, but he wanted to try it in his hometown of Galle first. He said he wanted to build an enormous tank, (he would collect money from the villagers to build it), which would be filled with rainwater. From this tank would flow water through a pipeline downwards which would be used to turn a Generator, from which he would get electricity, but most of the electricity would be put back into an electric motor, which would pump the water back to the tank, that way he said in a confident tone the generator would not run out of water. At first, I could not decide whether he was extremely intelligent or a little too simple-minded, but I soon realized that it would never work, for according to Lord Kelvin’s First Law of Thermodynamics, even if all the energy is used to pump the water back, it would lose energy through heat, and so would soon run out of water. But to my utter disbelief he wouldn’t listen, he was convinced that it would work and nothing I said could convince him to give up his idea.
A year or so later I heard he had tried to implement his idea and had lost a lot of money on it, had been beaten up by the villagers, and put in prison; I blamed myself for not having convinced him to give up his idea. Many years later I visited Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a tourist, and was walking in the dusty streets of Colombo with my son; memories of my earlier days on this adventurous island came flooding back when all of a sudden a Limousine stopped in front of us. The man who got down from it had the appearance of an important politician, but then I realized that it was none other than Somadasa. “Don’t tell me you made it on the Electric Tank” said I. “No” said Somadasa in his thick accent “But while working on it I came up with an idea to use the ocean to make Electricity, you see I invented a special mechanism where the motion of the waves pushes water through an enormous pipeline but because of the mechanism I invented it can move in only one direction, up, so I pumped it into a nearby cliff and from it I generated electricity.” “That’s unbelievable,” said I not knowing what else to say. But in a way it wasn’t unbelievable because Somadasa had always had ideas, most of them bad, but he had so many bad ideas that one of them turned into a good idea with experience. And that’s more than you could say about most people in this world, they do not have any ideas either good or at least Bad.
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