Saturday, May 06, 2006

Light out

Visited home last week. While nothing beats the feeling of being home, nothing beats the summers too. If anything comes close to fighting these summers for an average Indian family, it’s the coolers, their God in summers. And I am no different.
So there are the coolers, water, ACs for the relatively privileged ones. It’s like everything is set but there is just one little problem – electricity. Any time of the day any time of the night for any number of hours in any number of homes the lights can just turn off for reasons unknown.
An option is to take connections from 2-3 areas of the city, so that when one goes off ‘may be’ the other works. All other connections except one are ofcourse illegal. But most of the people do it, paying only for one. They don’t have options besides nobody minds a little free supply. But dad isn’t too keen.
One fine day some lads from the electricity dept come and cut the supply off. Some one from the shop outside comes and tells us that they are planning some changes in transformer or something. Our supply needs to be shifted to another pole, but they don’t have enough wire right now (as if they didn’t know this before cutting the supply). If we need the wire from them we need to write an application which I am not sure will take how many days to process. So we rush to the market and busy the extra wire needed, from our pocket. When we come back and ask them to connect, there is another little problem, its already 6 in the evening and they have to go home. I am furious from inside, but as always - there is a way. He will ofcourse do it for a ‘tip’. And so its done. And we consider ourselves lucky that it was done without ‘much hassles’.
Among all this and some frustration I get an inverter at home. Just praying that there is some electricity to charge that inverter atleast.


Passing thought: Light no light, one things always rules 'ghar ka khana' :)