The South American country of Guyana is known to most Americans, if it's known at all, as the site of Jonestown, where 913 members of a San Francisco-based religious cult committed suicide en masse in 1978. Type "famous Guyanese" into Google and you'll get a few lists of people you've never heard of - with the possible exception of Eddy Grant, the reggae star behind the '80s hit "Electric Avenue."
And then there's Nizam Ishmael, a Guyanese man who's not on any of those lists but may soon top all of them. His parents entered the US illegally; his father found work in a clothing factory and his mother cleaned houses. Ishmael joined them when he was 5, and in time they settled in Lufkin, a small town in East Texas, where he started tinkering on and programming a Tandy TRS-80. Along the way he converted to Christianity (his parents are of Indian descent; his mother was Hindu, his father Muslim) and enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a degree in computer science. He interned for a few years at IBM, landed a job there, and designed GUIs and message systems, work that quickly became the staging ground for his remarkable rise to prominence. "I have 13 patents granted," including document search tools and "an apparatus for converting a visual-image into a tactile image," Ishmael says. He has 40 more patents in the process of being granted, and last year, when he was 30, IBM made him a Master Inventor, an honor bestowed upon only the most promising and proven members of its teams.
So what does our young man do with his knowledge and his free time? He buys a car, tricks it out, and races it - as anyone with a similar joie de vivre and the means to carry it out might do. In his case, the car is a silver 1998 six-speed Corvette - his second, because he totaled the first. He hasn't fiddled with the engine, but the peripherals help him make the most of it: For driving, a GPS, a radar detector, and a defuser (it disables laser speed detectors by shooting a laser back at them), which minimize visits from the state troopers, though he has been pulled over a half-édozen or so times, presumably just for looking too badass. For entertainment, there's a tiny motherboard in the glove compartment and a touchscreen on the console to control Wi-Fi access, a Web browser, an MP3 player, a video library, a mapping system, and satellite radio. What's more, he can monitor and modify some 200 parameters from the car's own onboard computer - fuel-air mixture, the load on the engine, exhaust composition, and so on.
"I got the car up to 140 mph on the Texas World Speedway," Ishmael says, adding sotto voce, "I get it going pretty fast on IH-35 heading up to Dallas." One hot summer night, he takes me for a drive on the highéways around Austin. "Do you want to see it go?" he asks. All I have to do is nod. He downshifts and accelerates, and suddenly the Corvette is flying like a sled down a steep slope, in and out of commuter traffic, while my eyeballs roll in my head. The car does a quarter-mile in 13 seconds from a standing stop: It feels like we've gone halfway through Austin in about the time it takes me to figure out if there are passenger-side airbags. "That's what it can do," he says, as we mercifully reach a stoplight.
But the Corvette is not quite finished. "I parked at the airport," Ishmael says, "and someone backed into it. I thought, man, if I had a camera on this thing that would kick in when motion was detected "
So a video security system is next. In the meantime there's work at IBM, and life as your well-above-average Indo-éGuyanese-Christian-American-Texan car geek and gadabout. He taps the touchscreen a couple of times and the baffles ease out of the Corvette's mufflers. He drops me off at my house, pulls out into the street, and as he guns the car to the corner, the engine opens up and roars.
- Jim Lewis
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Little Engine That Could
