… and I’ve used up my bad line dance reference quota for the next year. But really, there’s nothing quite like walking around a small city in India in the evening as the power goes out.

It’s certainly nothing like a power outage in the U.S., which almost always has a readily identifiable cause. Nor is there any sense of fear or concern, as there would certainly be for anyone caught in a power outage in a U.S. city. Power outages in India are like the monsoon. Dependable, yet with a life of their own.

This evening, I was just stepping out of my hotel to get some dinner when all of the sudden the entire neighborhood goes dark. No good reason whatsoever. I’m standing right near the biggest junction in town. No one stops. A few headlights from motorcycles illuminate the dusty urban silhouettes, along with the dim gas lanterns of food carts in the street. Young people on bikes continue to wind around pedestrians, who continue along as if nothing happened. Shopkeepers busily hook up their generators (they all have them, and they all keep them ready to go for this seemingly daily ritual). The blaring horns are neither more nor less frequent. The urban equilibrium is dynamic, yet unfazed.

I walked down the street to the bus stand area, which conveniently had power, and walked into another hotel for a meal (cost, about 40 cents). Finished it off with a sweet from a nearby stand that looked something like a crystallized snowflaked. By the time I returned to my hotel 25 minutes later, power was restored.

The funny thing is, power outages barely even affect me anymore. On the list of daily nuisances of India, they’re probably the least nuisance-like, well after monsoon flooding, sewage smells, noise pollution, squat toilets… you just learn to flow with such a trifling inconvenience.

Posted on July 28th, 2005 by Lee
Filed under: Uncategorized