Saturday, November 29, 2008

The heart of our daily life!

A lot has happened in the past week; a lot of problems and sufferings were caused. There was this financial crisis in the international scene. Then, the terror attack in Mumbai at the national level. The cyclone and the flood in the state level. A lot has been said and done about these issues. We've probably had enough of it from the media and in our daily chats. Lets talk about a lighter issue. A relatively smaller, but none-the-less, an issue. I'm talking about electricity shortage..

Remember the old saying that we take things for granted when we have it in plenty! Well, we may not have had plenty, but we did have a good supply of electricity, but in the recent weeks, things have changed. Initially, they cut the power for an hour and a half daily. They did change the timings, but it was either from the moment I wake to the moment I leave for college or from the moment I return from college to evening. It really gets on my nerve to wake up to a dark, sweaty morning. By the way, that is how a morning is, without power - dark and sweaty.

If that wasn't bad enough, the Electricity Board got a great excuse recently. The cyclone, the rain, the flood and what not! Nothing could stop them now. They would cut the power whenever they want, as long as they want. They would cut the power in the middle of the night (2am to be exact) and we didn't have power till 2pm. A friend comes over to my place and we spend 15 minutes frantically trying to enter a room (in an online game client) and just when we enter, boom, the inevitable happens again.

That really made us wonder. Is there anything fun to do without electricity! I mean, surely there must be something that both of us would be interested in and would be fun to do. But I really couldn’t think of anything. We could go out and play some outdoor sport, but not in this rain. If its not the rain, it would be the sun/heat. Cards and board games, well, they are not really something we play at home these days. Sit and chat? Maybe, but we did that a lot already thanks to the regular power cuts. Go out somewhere? Again, the conditions outside aren’t exactly favourable to just stroll outside. All we get to do, is sit and stare at eachother till we fell asleep. And that is exactly what we did, time and again. It was like taking the life, out of our life. There simply is nothing we could do, that doesn't require electricity..

The only thing we could’ve done was plan. If we knew that there was going to be a power failure, we could’ve planned our day around it. We could’ve planned to go out, to meet someone, to simply sleep, or atleast have an idea of when the power would be back and what we could do till then. But sadly, our electricity board doesn’t believe in informing people, it doesn’t care about the discomfort it creates. It believes that it has a god given right, to give or take the power, as it sees fit. It is no wonder why people hate the electricity board. This blog, is dedicated to those energetic and enthusiastic chaps working in our EB offices. Cheers…