The Kathmandu dusk seeped into my cramped faculty room at Golden Gate International College (GGIC), Battisputali. It was way back in 2013, feels like a lifetime ago now. Outside, the usual evening clamor of scooters and those insistent bicycle bells was finally quieting down. But inside my head? A riot. It was all thanks to this dream, see? A dream from eleven years back that just wouldn't let go.
I, Jay Sharma, just a physics
lecturer then at GGIC, had this incredibly vivid dream about a device. Not some
sci-fi fantasy, mind you. It felt… real, somehow. Like it was born out of the
very forces holding us down, but cleverly twisted to give us something back.
Electricity. From gravity.
In my dream, I could almost touch
it – this intricate dance of weights and levers, perfectly balanced to catch
the Earth’s constant pull. As one weight gracefully descended, it wasn’t just
dead weight at the bottom. Oh no. Through this clever network of gears – the
kind you could probably find in any bicycle repair shop around here – and a
modified old electric motor acting as a generator, that downward push
transformed into smooth, spinning motion, and then… a steady hum of
electricity. It was… elegant.
“Come
on, Jay, seriously?” That cynical voice in the back of my head piped up even in
the dream. Perpetual motion alarm bells were ringing, loud and clear. But the
details! They were so sharp, so seemingly engineered, they just stuck with me
when I woke up, like the lingering scent of masala chiya.
The next few weeks? Forget about
it. I was a man possessed. My lectures, the same old stuff about
electromagnetism and Newton’s laws, suddenly felt… urgent. I was practically
bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm. My colleagues, bless their hearts, must
have thought I’d finally cracked. Ms. Shrestha, the English guru, always had a
wry smile for me during our tea breaks, the sweet, milky steam swirling around
us.
“Jay
ji,” she’d say, her eyes twinkling, “you’re practically glowing! Did you
finally figure out where all the college’s missing stationery goes?”
I’d laugh, trying to sound
normal, but my mind was miles away, already sketching madly on the back of some
poor student’s forgotten assignment. That core idea from the dream, that
gravity could be tapped… it just felt right, deep down. Even if I couldn’t
quite put my finger on how, without breaking every law of physics I knew.
So, I did what any self-respecting, slightly obsessed academic would do. I dove headfirst into research. My evenings were spent not just marking papers, but hunched over dusty textbooks in the GGIC library, and battling the glacial internet to access digital archives from universities across the globe. I remember those late nights so clearly – the glow of the screen in the dim room, the distant hum of traffic. I was devouring research papers from Europe, poring over complex equations from the States, even trying to decipher translated abstracts from China and Russia, hunting for any hint, any forgotten footnote that might support the crazy contraption from my subconscious.
I learned about potential energy, that stored power just waiting to be unleashed. I wrestled with the intricacies of turning that into motion, and then into electricity. And then there were the ghosts in the machine – friction, air resistance – those sneaky energy thieves that plague every single mechanical system. The data was overwhelming, often a cold splash of reality, reminding me of the near-impossibility of creating a perpetual motion machine – which, let’s be honest, my gravity-powered dream device was flirting dangerously with.
But I wasn't aiming for the impossible. The dream had shown a system, a flow of energy. Gravity pulling down, electricity flowing out. The real puzzle was the reset button. How could I lift that weight back up without using more energy than I generated? Maybe a tiny fraction of the output itself? That was the key to making it a cycle.
One afternoon, I found myself in Mr. Thapa’s chaotic engineering workshop. He was a senior lecturer, a man whose hands understood mechanics better than most textbooks. The air was thick with the smell of oil and solder, a comforting scent in its own way. I was trying to explain my barely formed ideas, my hands gesturing wildly as I pointed at my scribbled diagrams.
“Jay,” he said, peering at my
sketches over his thick glasses, “the basic principle – potential to kinetic –
that’s solid. We see it in our hydropower plants, right? The real beast is
efficiency. How do you beat those energy losses?”
That was the question that kept
me up at night. My dream hadn’t magically solved that. It had just shown the what,
not the nitty-gritty how. That’s where the science, the real grind,
began.
Thinking about those local
markets suddenly felt important. The dream had emphasized "local
resources." Kathmandu was a treasure trove of discarded materials, if you
knew where to look. Sturdy metal rods, gears from old bicycles, dead electric
motors from who-knows-what appliance. That’s where my mind started to go. A
heavy weight – maybe a solid stone from the hills – suspended by a strong
cable. As it dropped along a track, it would spin a series of gears, turning a
repurposed motor into a generator. And then, fingers crossed, the electricity
generated would power a small winch to lift the stone back up. Simple, in
theory.
My
notebooks started filling up with equations:
· Potential
Energy (PE) = mgh
– that felt like the starting point.
· Kinetic
Energy (KE) = ½mv²
– the transformation as it fell.
· Efficiency
(η) = (Energy Out / Energy In) x 100% – the number that would make or
break the whole thing.
My late-night research wasn't
just theoretical anymore. I was hunting for specific solutions. European
research on low-friction bearings caught my eye. American engineering journals
had articles on high-efficiency magnetic induction generators. And those
translated papers from China and Russia? They often focused on practical,
robust designs using readily available materials – exactly what my dream seemed
to be hinting at.
The "local resources" aspect wasn't just a quirky detail from my dream. It resonated with the reality around me. So many communities just outside Kathmandu struggled with unreliable electricity. Could something this simple, powered by the Earth itself, offer even a tiny bit of sustainable help?
The calculations were a
nightmare. Trying to guess the efficiency of a cobbled-together system was more
art than science. Friction in those old gears, the power lost in the generator,
the energy needed to lift the weight – it all added up, chipping away at my
already slim theoretical output.
I
remember one evening, hunched over my calculations, trying to figure out the
perfect gear ratios, my wife, Maya, sat beside me, her knitting needles
clicking softly in the quiet room.
“Jay,” she said, her voice
gentle, “you’re completely lost in this, aren’t you? It reminds me of when you
spent weeks trying to perfect your mother’s aloo paratha recipe.”
I chuckled, rubbing my tired
eyes. “This is a little more complicated than potato bread, Maya.”
“But it’s the same fire,” she
said, her eyes full of that quiet understanding she always had.
The biggest stumbling block was
always lifting that weight. If the whole cycle – the fall generating
electricity and that electricity lifting the weight – wasn't significantly more
efficient than the energy lost, it was a dead end. My numbers, based on the
rough estimates for my scavenged components… well, they were worryingly close
to breaking even, if not a net loss.
There were these fleeting
moments of pure excitement, when a certain combination of gears looked
promising on paper, followed by the inevitable crash back to reality as I
factored in the real-world drag and inefficiencies. The dream had given me the
spark, the initial what if. But the scientific method demanded cold,
hard proof, a working model.
And so, I started collecting
things. That heavy stone – with permission from a construction site, of course!
– a pile of rusty bicycle parts from a local kabaadi (scrap dealer), and
a small DC motor I was hoping to coax into working as a generator. My faculty
room slowly morphed into a chaotic workshop, much to the silent bewilderment
(and perhaps a touch of alarm) of the college administration.
I’d just offered a slightly
embarrassed smile. “Something along those lines, sir. Exploring… unconventional
applications of physics.”
The
truth was, I was driven by this almost childlike curiosity, this burning need
to see if the elegant simplicity of my dream could actually exist in the real
world. The research papers from those fancy universities had given me the
vocabulary, the local scrap had given me the potential building blocks, and
that persistent dream… well, that had given me the unwavering nudge to even try.
I never did get that
gravity-powered generator to hum to life during my time at GGIC. Life, as it
often does, had other plans. But that intellectual adventure, that deep dive
into the possibility sparked by a dream, was incredibly valuable. It hammered home
the crucial role of scientific rigor, the frustrating but necessary gap between
a brilliant idea and a working invention, and the enduring magic of a simple
concept, even if it originates in the strange landscape of our sleeping minds.
The calculations were tough, the data often discouraging, and the final working device remained just out of reach. But the dream, and the journey it
sent me on, that’s a story – a very real one – I still remember vividly from my
days lecturing at Golden Gate International College.
***
