It's one of the prizes of fame.

People swarming to get an autograph - and now a selfie.

Fame by association.

The selfie with a celebrity seems to be the in-thing now.

Adoring fans with smartphones held high, pleading for the celebrity to walk into the frame.

Followed by frenzied postings on social media with a flurry of likes and emojis.

Was the signature mania any different?

What happened to those endless coming-of-age signatures with a flourish?

Were they retained and kept as encounters to be preserved for posterity?

Or forgotten just like the temporary touch of fame and fortune.

I find it hard to understand because this frenzy never took hold, even in my teenage years.

The only time I got an autograph was eminently forgettable.

I was in the airport lounge catching a flight to Mumbai.

And in one of the seats was Lata Mangeshkar.

The nightingale of India.

She looked bored.

I walked up to her with a smile and hesitantly held out the back of the boarding pass and a pen.

She signed, and her expression didn't waver one bit.

By then, she could have done it in her sleep.

What's more tragic than fame being a routine?

Google Glass did not disappear

In its first avatar, Google Glass acquired a bad rep.

It was seen as a Frankenstein version of spectacles - the one that allowed people to do things that were not socially acceptable.

Priced at $1500 at launch, it looked as if the market for it would be miniscule.

Except that it wasn't.

Google found that there was a massive market available but they would have to rework it altogether.

So, you'll now see Google Glass on manufacturing lines where workers can figure out complex routines guided by it.

Doctors are using it to get stored patient data streamed while they examine them and decide the next course of action.

It's being used in outdoor situations where service engineers are guided by the stream when they have to fix equipment.

Google went back to the drawing board and did a lot more listening than designing. Seems to have worked.

It's being used to speed up training routines and do the 'show while telling' way to train.

Possibly more useful than being instructed in classrooms and figuring things out in practice later.

Google Glass has had a makeover away from the limelight.

And changed character along the way.

Is there a business model in idling airplanes?

We board a flight.

And the engines are switched on as the aircraft pulls out of the bay and taxies to the runway.

Depending on the congestion (before the pandemic) it would take about 20-30 minutes before the aircraft was airborne.

During that time, the plane has already burned through hundreds of litres of expensive aviation fuel on the ground

A Boeing 747 guzzles 1 tonne of fuel every 17 minutes.

That's where Israel Aerospace Industries saw an opportunity. They invented a passenger jet-towing vehicle that could be remotely operated.

It was called the TaxiBot.

And planes had to switch on their engines only 5 minutes before takeoff.

There was another tangential problem the TaxiBot solved.

The jet engines could suck in things on the ground while taxiing leading to engine damage - solving another major problem.

The TaxiBot operates at New Delhi international airport and was the first airport globally to reach over 1000 TaxiBot movements.

In the process, the estimate is that it saved airlines nearly 2.1 lakh litres of aviation fuel in the last couple of years.

Multiply that by airports around the world.

And you have a business model built around idling airplanes.

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