No more Earth Hours please!

On Saturday 28th March, a billion people living in 80 countries switched off their lights in an attempt to brighten Earth’s green future. It was for the first time that there was a heavy overdose of such earth-friendly information whenever and wherever you turned your noble head.



From the first dose and celebrity quotes (most of whom are in the colourful pages only for their Gucci's,Armani's to tease and belittle us poor people everyday) in the morning papers to each and every website in the world that wanted to increase its hits in the afternoon and yes, back to the media again who voraciously lapped up the whole event live in the late evening... (Though i must admit that after a long time there were some fantastic visuals on-air).


But then, i sat wondering in the dark whether any of this is relevant in today’s context. The more my candle melted away, the more I came to the conclusion that this was one giant and collective but futile effort in India’s context.

It’s shameful, at least for me to think that many like me can assume to display such Utopian behaviour especially when the Indian government itself admits that leave alone power cuts, there is no power in more than 71,000 villages and 2.43 crore below poverty line (BPL) households in India!

For many like me, a candlelight dinner is not a romantic engagement filled with Mozart’s tunes, surrounded by the aroma of budding red roses, a lavish four-course dinner followed by fresh and tantalizingly succulent strawberries dipped in dark rich Belgium chocolate. It is in fact a bitter, dark reality that millions profusely sweat and face every morning, every afternoon and every night. In this darkness, the candle with all of its limited light only reminds one of the many thousand crores of aam aadmi’s hard earned money gone wrongfully down the drain.



However no more emotional rhetorics from me on this. Here, let me throw across one or two facts for your kind understanding-



1. The all India energy shortage in March 2008 was way over 11 percent while peak shortage in the horrendously sunny months of May and June was around 16 percent. And going by the empirical data provided in govt websites, in 2007 the installed power generation capacity of India stood at 138,252 MWH while the per capita power consumption stood at 612 KWH. In short even after 51 years the classic case of hide and seek with the many millions (both people and their money) continues unabated.


2. And yes, just in case you think that the sorry state of affairs is never going to end, the government begs to differ. The Government of India has an ambitious (or can i dare say over-ambitious) mission of POWER FOR ALL by 2012. Now there is a logic in this too. You see, escapist tendencies have always been an integral part of the Indian people's DNA and we Indians have always had a certain fondness for fables. So the government carries it well forward with the latest edition of the modern day Panchtantra...



But, the truth is that reality still bites. It never ceases to amaze me that just how gullible the Indian Political League think we are..



And so, at the risk of being called a pessimist i would like to welcome you to the dark abyss of reality of an average Indian. In a world where 1 minute into a power cut the generators are puffing and grunting incessantly for hours, and the inverters start their countdown there are millions who get up and light a candle simply because they don't have any electricity at home. My dear friends, welcome to one of the many ironies of the modern capitalist world.


And just in case you’ve ever crossed some part of any old town, Agra, Kanpur, Aligarh, Ajmer... why even Delhi and Mumbai you’re bound to come across a gigantic sweater. A gigantic sweater???? Ya, a massive knitted undertaking of wires of the main electric tower undertaken by each and every household of a locality to get some units of electricity for free. An illegal connection popularly know as the ‘langar’ (not to be confused with the gurudwara prasad).



You see, in the land of 'jugaad' its not just the government which does dacoity, there are small time crooks within all of us too.


The question is not whether to have illegal electricity connections or not, the real question is that till when will India suffer the ignominy of a bleak and dark future, till when the only impediment in way of development of many will the interest of few, till when will we keep SILENT or worse celebrate something as non-existent as an Earth Hour while America and Britain cant decide on any decent CFC emission norms?


With this resolve in mind I am not against celebrating Earth Hour, day or Month. I too believe that it is high time we learnt not to take nature and beauty for granted. But i cannot play a part which i cannot believe in... i cannot and will not stand by the belief that ignorance is bliss.


I have hence decided that in future no thanks to any more Earth Hours.