What exactly is the use of electricity after 10 PM in rural areas where there are no huge machineries or industries run by electricity. I can of course think of some uses – to charge your Chinese emergency lamps to light it as soon as the power goes off after a few hours, to burn a bulb in the chicken coop for the ballooning broiler chicks, charge mobile phones and perhaps a laptop or two. Maybe it’s for the sake of hospitals. However, these reasons still do not satiate my electrifying desire to know what could be the other more useful uses of electricity for the public at midnight; maybe it’s for us to burn the ‘out-light’ at the verandah to scare off unwanted other-worldly pests... but there aren’t many were-tigers, goblins or evil spirits around these days preying on human flesh at the stroke of twelve. They’ve probably taken other human forms.
This continuous hide-and-seek game with electricity and my on-and -off relationship with all types of communication devices including mobile networks makes me wonder - why was this thing called electricity even discovered? Who was this madcap who thought such a thing would help mankind? Seriously, here in ZUNHEBOTO, no such thing exists. It’s a nuisance. When you need it, it’s never there and when you don’t, that is, in the dead of the night when the entire household is snoring dreaming of uninterrupted power supply, it just insistently lights up upswept cobwebbed corners of the house and someone has to sleep-walkingly switch off the offending brightness throwing in a few expletives. You just don’t know when the light is coming or going. It is supernatural -- amazingly out of this world. From darkness to more darkness, come storm, come rain, come wind. The only consoling fact is that after 10PM the citizens are assured that the power supply will continue till 6AM. I don’t know if it goes off in between because I’ve not yet done an all-nighter yet to monitor its visitations but once the town’s people are up and about after six in the morning, it goes off, for sure.
Only if the Sun rises at 10 PM then can it match the timings of our town’s power supply, and the Sun can set at 6 AM so that people can work at daylight with the added bonus of uninterrupted power supply, sleep when the Sun sets and not become nocturnal creatures waiting for electricity at sleep-time. The Solar System has to change its course to suit the moods of our town’s electricity supply, there aren’t better options. If there were, it couldn’t have taken 60 years.
Rural India connecting India? Absolutely not. No uninterrupted electricity, water supply, bad roads, it took six months to fix an existing broadband connection that went faulty and when it was finally fixed the entire network goes down, yet again. How is that connecting India? The day’s newspapers reach at night or days late, come rainy season and the roads are blocked with landslides. What are the other modes of communication? Pigeon post? How can a rural area with conditions such as these really connect and participate with the larger crowd outside in the country and the world? It’s not only about my town but there must be many other areas facing these frustrations.
It would have been a different ball game all together if we were kept at that rumoured anthropological zoo with no contact with the outside world, only unseen prying eyes studying, dissecting our every move. At least there would be no “need” created for electricity, water supply, internet and emails and connections and much more. Unfortunately, the Zoo did not happen... or did it and it backfired? Whatever the case, I hope this current zoo with major “current” problems get resolved soon.
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