A near-perfect blackout

While returning home late last night there was a power cut.Not that power cuts are anything out of the odinary, but they almost always occurred in the afternoons in my locality. The darkness would have been pitch black but for the lights in the Brigade Gardenia apartments..trust those people to have uninterrupted power supply. And right in front of my home too.

Immediately the power cut took me down memory lane back to younger days when power cuts were amazing fun. Having lived for quite some time in apartment colonies, I remembered that in those days nothing was as fun and scary at the same time as playing hide and seek in the fading twilight, with no current powering up apartment lights and TV's in the various houses. And its not an everyday experience to be sitting on an open terrace under the stars with friends and family. You could do this any day, but its not quite the same as doing it on a power cut day. A power cut sort of gives you the moral license to sit back and relax without worrying about mundane daily 'action items'.

Theres something magical, naughty (I don’t mean eloping couples, but that’s probably a good way to spend a power cut too right?) and unnatural about a power cut. Its like going back in time. With no instant gratification like the TV and the net, time dilation seems to occur, suddently there is too much time on one's hands and nothing immediate to do till power comes back again. I get an eerie feeling thinking .. so this is how my great-great-great-great-grandfather must have spent his time in the evenings! A little depressing really.. Im so lucky to be living in this generation!

The other side effect of a power cut is the 'family bonding' thing which happens. Suddenly you have to spend time in the house together with only family members for company. And you realize how much you take the main people in your life for granted. In fact a routine power cut may do more good in the family bonding sense than a hurried visit to a movie in a mall through maddning traffic jams.

This also got me thinking - how five minutes of a power cut can trigger thoughts which I can never get even if I force myself for two hours. There must be some sense to these soft "stuff" like ambience, setting ,architecture of a place etc..things which we genarally take for granted.

Anyway, the power has come again, and the ambience has changed! Time to go, the internet is calling …

An abysmal joke before signing off..
Which is the most proactive environmental organization in Karkataka?
The Karnataka Electricity Board of course!