Load Shedding

I live in Mumbai. Which implicitly suggests that i am accustomed to the luxury of an uninterrupted supply of electricity, even in summer. Which is quite something, considering the plight of our less fortunate neighbours on the other side of the expressway, who i'm sure will testify that they get the raw end of the stick where power is concerned.

It's 3:30a.m. on the 27th of April.
It's bloody hot, and the residents of Mumbai have responded in full force by turning on their air conditioners to beat the heat. And that is a LOT of air conditioners we're talking about.
But suddenly, at this ungodly hour, they all go off! So does the one just above my head.
Now under normal circumstances, it would take more than a single alarm clock, and maybe some amount of coaxing as well, to rouse me out of my deep, deep slumber.
But the sudden and unnatural absense of that din of electric devices woke me up like nothing else.

I opened my eyes, but it was quite useless. The ample amount of outside light that usually filters into my bedroom was absent, and i was evidently quite blind without it.In the darkness, i heard the other residents of my house emerging from their beds to investigate this rather peculiar occurence. Among them was my grandmother, visting from Pune, who was quite comfortable with the idea and was saying something about how this kind of thing happened all the time back home. My mother in the meanwhile had checked outside all the windows and informed me that the entire locality had a blackout.

I of course, was busy considering the consequences of such a disaster.
What if i had to check my E-mail?
What if i suddenly had a flash of inspiration and needed to put down my thoughts in a blog post?? Oh and just imagine if the cricket match was still on and there were 10 runs to win off 4 balls!
I was glad the match had finished by 1130.
I thanked my stars that i had a cell phone and that if anyone needed to contact me, they could.
But what if someone arrived at the door? The doorbell wouldn't work without electricity.
Sure, it was an unearthly hour, but still.
And what about the coke in the fridge! It would get warm in no time. My nightly trips to the kitchen for swigs of pesticide-laden chilled aerated waters would have to be suspended. Or i could use ice! It would be some time before all the ice in the freezer melted. But then who was going to look for a glass!. And the whole point was in sipping directly from the bottle.

For what seemed like an eternity, i pondered over what people did before the invention of electricity. I concluded that they must have been a tremendously bored lot.
It was around the time that i started considering the cost of a medium sized generator, that the machine near my head groaned and rather reluctantly resumed its drone.

At 3:32a.m. the electricity returned. And life was normal once again.