Darkness at noon

Power cuts are bad enough when the weather is fine. They are intolerable during a cold wave, such as Delhi has been experiencing for the pas...

Power cuts are bad enough when the weather is fine. They are intolerable during a cold wave, such as Delhi has been experiencing for the past three weeks. The sun may have now begun brightening our days, but prospects of the cold wave receding in a hurry are as dim as the candle-lit rooms in which we sit; the only warmth to be had is in the incendiary abuse we hurl at the government, power thieves, power companies, weather bureau, and the sensible neighbour who possesses an inverter and keeps his geyser piping hot overnight.

A colleague murmurs that the cold wave reminds

him of the characteristic gesture made by a senior opposition candidate during the last Lok Sabha elections. We greet this observation with frigid silence; stiffly and pointedly we reach for the unread newspaper.

And squinting at it, we find a report that, like a ray of hope, dispels the darkness within and without! Anguished at the state of power supply — rather, lack of it — in the Capital, the Supreme Court on January 17 sought an explanation from the Delhi government. In response, the government informed the court that the current shortage of electric current in the city was due to “heavy demand and deficit supply”.

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For sheer succinctness and honesty, could anything match these words? Our colleague said it reminded him of the honest Bombay entrepreneur who, in the 1960s, made and advertised a cockroach-killer that was “safe, foolproof, success 100 per cent guaranteed”. Upon sending the requisite money-order you received, in due course, a package containing two small slabs of polished wood marked A and B along with a slip of paper marked Instructions. These read: (1) capture cockroach, (2) place upon A, (3) press firmly with B.

Indeed, could there be any conceivable reason for the power crisis other than “heavy demand and deficit supply”? If all the sub-stations were submerged by flash-floods, if all the transformers and cables were dismantled and carted away overnight by enterprising metal-thieves, if the entire northern grid were to suddenly defy gravity and take off in the general direction of the Andromeda Galaxy — surely the government could still assert, accurately and in all honesty, that “heavy demand and deficit supply” were the causes of shortage of electricity? How wondrous and all-encompassing an argument; how fitting its universality in this our land of united and diversified perversity!

Suddenly the cold doesn’t bite quite as hard.