The forgotten fun in *power-cuts* !

Memoirs
*19th May, 2011


At precisely 9:47 PM today ... here in Grenoble while we chit-chatted and filled in the drab & dreary tax forms and while my friend Akash went about some equally burning business ... there was a power-cut !
Yes you read it right ! A POWER-CUT :)
I had longed for this moment from the time Soumen da had told me of his experience when the power of his building had failed a couple of years back.... I wanted to see and hear how the French people who rarely experience this omnipresent Indian phenomenon, behaved when this happened. And voila ! It was my chance today ... and I had my share of fun observations :D

It took me sometime to soak in the feeling of the power-cut. It was utter disbelief at first ... which turned to confusion ... then all possible explanations that might explain what just happened with my (on-a-ventilator-) laptop suddenly shutting down and beeps sounding all over .... I thought it might be the fuse in my apartment alone ... But one peek out of the window made things very clear.
It indeed was THE thing. In a matter of seconds people in the residential complex across my house were out in their balconies ... equally baffled ! It was a matter of discussion and with the generic love of *discussion* that the French are born with ... they discussed it with their neighbors ! Adjoining my building there are a row of old houses and in one of them there lives an old couple whom I get to see often doing li'l things in their balcony :) They were out too ... and granny was having quite an animated discussion with her neighbor in the floor beneath theirs! Another thing I noticed was even here people have inverters (some foresight I must say for an event that *might* randomly occur biennially !!! )
Anyway, with speculations as to how long this might take to be fixed (even the main door was blocked ... the code stopped working !) ... we waited till my phone beeped (on its charger) and the power came back to life ... in 10 minutes flat ! What a pity ... that is not even time enough to find the *denner* for a chain-chain game that we played during power-cuts back at the National Library in total darkness during the summer vacations after dinner!!!

Pity pity ... the loss of the simple pleasures of life when opportunity comes knocking through the power plugs !