The PowerCut

Darkness. Mankinds greatest fear since evolution. Most people deepest fears evolve in darkess and hence mankind despises it to extremes.

Yesterday Velachery came to a standstill when it was made to suffer in darkness. The moon looked prettier than usual but unfortunaltely not many were ready to share my enthusiasm or poetic sense at that point of time. Literally i could feel the meaning of PowerCut as everyone seemed to be deprived of power and people behaved as if without electricity mankind never survived. The powercut brought me memories of my childhood and college days.

As a child i used to hug my mother out of the fear of darkness after i saw some stupid sitcom where a character got killed in a power cut sequence.I remember times when power cuts were as regular as Ganguly's batting failures in test matches. It happened every saturday and i remember how everyone would finish their samayal activities earlier on saturday.

The college days powercut are cute to remember. Immediately after power cut we used to play hide and seek. Nobody enevr knew what or who hit them and it was damn fun for everyone ...except the sufferer. We used to play Anthakshari where everyone singing talents(or the lack of it) came to lights (!!). We used to walk along the road in the moonlight talking about everything from Bush to babes. Most of us used to stare at the Ladies hostel and wonder what they must be thinking at this time:-)

I particularly loved power cuts during exam times. It was a good pretex to keep the book down and avoid studying although there were pazhams who studied under candle lights. Otherwise even if u dont want to study you had to force the ritual after watching the rest do it.

We seem to be pampered by technology. When i told my 8 year old niece about how i got lost in my childhood, she asked innocently "U did not have a cell phone to call?" She talks as if people lived in rock ages before cell phones came to existence. Powercuts are the rare times when people listen to radios and i could see it that every house in the locality had Suriyan or Mirchi shouting at the top of their voices. Also it was a relief away from the idiot box as we all friends chatted endlessly till everyone fell asleep tired of the days chores.

My roommate seemed so much pissed off that he decided to go to his company and sleep in the dormitory. Another friend of mine told how the dormitory in his company got filled after employess living nearby realized that power was not to come at the earliest.

Have we become slaves of technology? People did survive before us without these luxuries, then why do we behave as if we would be dead without them?