Power Cuts

Last evening brought me some sweet memories from childhood. We had almost a 3 hour long power cut, our inverter is not working so I had spend the time in candle lights and with the single emergency light. I remembered how we used to enjoy power cuts when I used to stay in our village.

The earliest memory is how amma used to light up the kerosene lamp and some times the lantern, which I used every year in my school drama as a shepherd who visited Jesus when he was born. I guess these will be some sort of antique pieces today.

I used to love the smell of the soot. Cleaning that soot used to be quite interesting. amma would ask us to use the rangoli powder for the cleaning the glass shade. But still there will be not a single scratch on the glass shade, and would sparkle. I used love it when the glass was put back in the slot. A perfect fit.

Power cuts would be a major problem during the school exams and we used to study with those lamps and I always felt good when I scored well in those papers. I guess candles were expensive or may be it was not freely available in our village, so it used to be just these lamps. Having these kerosene lamps were luxury too, as I remember our tenants and neighbors would use a empty medicine bottle and put some old cloth for a wick through the lid and use it for a lamp. Of course it was not fuel efficient with excess smoke and one cant raise the wick as it burns.

But power cuts were always interesting as the neighbors would all come to our house and we would sit outside in the "thinnai'. Play word games, talk about the last movie we saw in detail. Count the stars. Enjoy the summer breeze. All in all I would regret when the power came back, as everyone would go back to their homes.

But slowly things did change in our village and we got the first TV in our neighborhood. So Sundays meant having atleast couple of dozen people from the near and far neighborhood descending to our house to watch the Sunday Tamil movie. It used to be a mini mela. My sister cursing the TV as she cant prepare of the board exams and power cut was a blessing for her.

But then there were days when all of us wanted to watch the movie and a fault on friday evening near our house meant no one would attend it till Monday. No way to raise a complaint as we didn't have phones and we had to walk about 4 kms to the electricity office. Me and my friend were desperate to see that week movie and we did walk down to the EB office on one such Saturday, but the lineman simply refused to attend the problem till Monday. We were heart broken, as we missed the weekly movie.

Things were no better when we moved to Madras in the early 90s. It just got worse. Power cut meant no fans, which never bothered me in our village. It was worse with the mosquitoes singing into our ears and hurting us by biting for our anemic blood.

Today life is relatively better, with inverters, power cut is not something my son feels much about. But, still there are villages whch have 12 hours powercut during summer or even no power.

And life goes on, I found this site http://www.thrive.in/index.htm with some intresting actions happening, in case you want to help.