What must a man do to be heard? Isn’t it enough that he has invented a near-revolution in personal commuting, that he has found a way to make cars 40 per cent more fuel-efficient, that he has a US patent for his design "to improve turbulence in combustion chambers"? Why do carmakers keep telling him without ever testing his design—a set of grooves on the cylinder head—that he will ruin their engines?
Fifty-four-year-old Somender Singh, an unreconstructed garage mechanic from Mysore, is certain he’s stumbled on something very important. His elderly two-stroke Supra motorcycle runs happily at 10 km an hour in fourth gear. His Hyundai Santro car is still more mysterious. Climbing a steep incline on the outskirts of Mysore, he shifts from first to fourth gear and never once changes thereafter during the climb, even at 20 kmph. He even performs a 360-degree turn in fourth gear. "Show me anyone who can do this in a car and I’ll give you my head," he offers.
Back in his shed, a grateful Cielo owner is on the phone. The owner says, "I get 15 km per litre after the design change. I have driven it for several thousand kilometres and I can tell you that the engine is in good shape. Earlier I felt I was driving with the handbrakes on. Now it feels like a racing machine."
As a boy, Singh would remove his motorbike’s brakes and race down a slope with his friends, one of whom died in that madness. He has also raced cars and flown a glider with an engine sourced from a Jawa bike, taking aerial shots of his beloved Mysore. He also once won a mileage contest, squeezing 210 km out of a litre of petrol on a Hero Honda. He continues to work on combustion chamber design improvements. So what must a man do to be heard?