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Obsession: Mr. Singh's Search for the Holy Grail
American visionaries, cranks and con men have long sought the simple key to boosting the efficiency of the gasoline engine. Now a barefoot tinkerer in India believes he has unlocked the door. Is he for real?

By Charles Graeber

“I am no great genius man, no man with letters after his name,” Somender Singh says, “and what I have invented is really very simple.” At his workbench in Mysore, India, he uses a Dremel tool to work his magic.

India is booming. The expanding population has overwhelmed the Bangalore-Mysore road the way a river floods its banks, and the flow of two-way traffic is choked with a living history of human transportation. There are belching herds of diesel trucks, diesel buses and iron-framed diesel tractors. There are wooden-wheeled carts pulled by brightly painted Brahma bulls, and two-stroke-motor rickshaws fueled by kerosene or cooking oil or whatever else is flammable and cheap. There are mopeds and bipeds and bicycles and motorcycles, and every conceivable type of petrol-powered, internally combusting automobile, from doddering Ambassador cabs to gleaming 16-valve Mercedes miracles. But there's only one car like the one Somender Singh and I are riding in right now.

That's because Singh invented it. Or rather, reinvented a piece of it: a small detail on the engine that he calls “direct drive.” He claims that his invention makes an engine cleaner, quieter and colder than its internal-combustion cousins around the world—while using up to 20 percent less gas.

“Some people say to me, 'Singh, why are you wasting your time on such a thing?'” he yells, his singsong Indian English barely piping above the tooting traffic. “But I tell you sir—I tell the world: I have conquered the internal combustion engine!”

To hear Singh tell it, his story has all the makings of a Bollywood movie, a classic heartwarmer about a small-fry Indian grease monkey who challenges the big boys armed only with a dream and a dirty wrench. And there's no doubt that he has come up with something new, at least in the eyes of the U.S. Patent Office. But has a potbellied philosopher- mechanic from Mysore really discovered the efficiency El Dorado sought by every auto manufacturer, R&D center and thermal engineer from Detroit to Darmstadt?

Well, maybe. So far, all Singh's invention has earned him is a few polite rejection letters from presidents, professors and auto manufacturers—while costing him tens of thousands of borrowed rupees and an untold number of sleepless nights. His eyes are glazed with the heat of an idea he can neither sell nor surrender. Mostly, he seems to have discovered the hard way that in 2004, it takes more than a patent and personal conviction to reinvent the automobile.

Even though Mysore is only a few hours south of the Indian IT epicenter of Bangalore, most of its 700,000 inhabitants lead traditional lives seemingly untouched by technology. The poor still work the fields and factories as they have for centuries, weaving silk or hand-rolling sandalwood incense; the last raja still lives in a whitewashed fairy-tale palace framed in stained glass and 97,000 lightbulbs. And every fall rich and poor alike make their pilgrimage up Chamundi Hill to pray to the mountain goddess who has watched over their tile-roofed city since time began. This is a place of yoga and vegetarian food, of barefoot men swathed in traditional white longhis and women draped elegantly in colorful saris.

In such a place, Somender Singh has long been an eccentric—a blue-jeans rock-'n'-roller, a leather-jacketed motorcycle race champion and homegrown Evel Knievel, an autodida