POWER CUT...

   I figured we're all too familiar with this topic, but I suddenly got a bit obsessed about with it today. Finally I decided to make a post about it..

   I'd been trying to read Faust lately.. ( the guy who sold his soul to the devil..familiar? ) Anyway, there was a line which caught my eye..

Wagner : Sirrah, hast thou no coming in?

 Clown  :  And goings out too, as you may see sir

   In simpler terms, the clown is just telling he loses whatever he earns. In case you wondered what Faust and power cuts have in common, here's the thing. 

   Power cuts these days are cruel. My home town doesn't have power supply for more than 12 hours ( 4 in theory ). Here  just 2 hours a day seem like a million years. I just felt like going back in time when mankind hadn't invented electricity. But then, I decided it wouldn't work out like it did in the past. Reasons,

  1. Kerosene is rare these days. Anyway we'll just exhaust fossil fuels sooner, and finally we'll end up using bicycles, bullock carts.. for people like me who don't know how to ride a bicycle..Walking!!

 2. Going farther back in time, when we discovered flint stones and used wood for fire.. I don't think we can afford any more deforestation these days..We'd be just sitting in a big desert seeing mirages of trees. And mirages aren't a big help, right?

   Our Government has promised that these problems will be minimised once the nuclear power plant at Kudankulam starts operating. Fine..Since we haven't invented any economical way of producing power from renewable sources of energy,& I'm not in that field of study, I don't have the right to argue against it. I'll just be one of the many sitting ducks, living near a virtual time bomb. 

   Ok, bringing Faust into the picture now, as long as there are goings out, it makes no point to increase the comings in..isn't it? I know quite a number of people living in my neighbourhood who bribe  TNEB to escape paying electricity bills. They haven't paid their bills in ages..even a decade. And all those meetings of political parties with a zillion lights, cut-outs illuminating the night, speakers blaring way past mid-night..who pays those bills? Most of them tap power illegally from our lines only. May be I can't prove all these, but most of us are witnesses to street lamps glowing to light up the day, right?

   If power is just getting wasted this way, despite all our power saving measures (read : power cuts ), generating more power isn't going to solve this problem much. At least that's what I thought. It will be a temporary solution. Agreed. But for starters, is it wrong to try and correct the unnecessary wastage before thinking of generating more power? I'm pretty sure if we minimised wasting electricity , it would at least partially solve our current deficit. Afterwards, if we generated more power, I think it would be more than sufficient for us. Finally we as a country would have a hope of improving.

  This is democracy, where the filthy rich and the poor get richer, and the average middle class Indians get poorer..I am as helpless as anyone else sadly. May be I don't know much of the technical stuff regarding this issue..May be I'm wrong about the whole thing..But then, I just think this view point is something we can all consider.

  Have a good day. :)