On Friday, Feb 23rd I switched on the OPOS Cookbot to make Sambar at 9 am. At 9.05 the lights went off. For 15 minutes we thought it was a general power cut and the generators would kick in. When we peeped into our neighbour’s house, the TV was running and that got us thinking.
My cousin Rohini lives in the next block, and my Athimber is the office bearer for these apartments, we called her. She asked me to check if the lift was working. If it was then the power cut was only in our apartment. Unfortunately, the lift was working :):). So this was an isolated incident with our apartment only.
The next 90 minutes of being powerless (pun intended) was quite difficult. Amma and I made dosas on the gas stove and we ate them with some leftover chutney. I was planning on making Sambar and Idlis. Well, we could have made it on the gas stove, but since the quantity was a little more, I didn’t want to shift it from the Cookbot.
All three of us were upset as we have forgotten power cuts !!! In Gurgaon, there is 100% backup and we have truly forgotten having scheduled periods of downtime for electricity. TamilNadu ofcourse is run by an inefficient government that hasn’t invested in infrastructure. Chennai still experiences power outages, and Coimbatore also has some power outage every now and then. In fact since we moved into this rented apartment, we have had two power outages, besides this one which was just our apartment.
The good thing in Coimbatore is people are super friendly and helpful. The security guard and my Athimber, both managed to get an electrician to come by quickly and he discovered the cause of the outage – two fuses had blown ! The plumber had used a power tool to cut some tiles out as he was fixing a new commode, the previous day and the electrician felt that it might have been an overload. While I didn’t get the logic of why the fuses had to blow the next day, I was just happy to be “powerful” again :):).
It’s just unimaginable that a 100 years back, people happily lived without electricity… they used candles, oil lamps, kerosene lamps to light up the house. There weren’t so many gadgets dependent on electricity. Today’s kitchen cannot do without a refrigerator, an induction stove, a mixer grinder, an electric kettle, in some homes an electric coffee percolator, a microwave oven and most importantly a RO/UV/UF water filter. Phew ! Then every human being has one cellphone phone, maybe two and in some rare cases maybe more.
Many of us can go without food and water, but if the internet goes down or the battery on our cellphones dies out, we really don’t know what to do with our lives. Am writing this blog on a laptop that again has to be charged. Krishnan is watching PM Modi’s speech on the television, which runs on electricity. The list goes on.
Being “powerless” was no fun, but it made me think of life without all these gadgets. Am planning on living one day in a month without a single gadget and without being dependent on electricity, just to remember how to do it. Will share my learnings.
For now, happy to have electricity in the house.
A few fun quotes on being powerless –
