With collections made from fines over the last fifteen months, all the Panchs of the Mahto toli purchased a panchlight at this year’s Ramanavami fair. The village has eight Panchayats in all, each caste has its own assembly and each Panchayat owns a common rug, a sheet, a carpet and a Petromax, which is also known as panchlait in the rural idiom. Immediately after buying the panchlight, the headmen decided, while still at the fair, that the surplus ten rupees should be invested in articles for devotional offerings, as it was inauspicious to inaugurate a mechanical object without religious rituals. Even in the times of the Angrez Bahadur (British) they always made sacrificial offerings before initiating the construction of a bridge. The headmen returned to the village while it was still broad daylight; the Panchayat Chhadidar walking upfront with the panchlight box on his head, followed by the chief, the deewan, and the other headmen. While they were still at the outskirts of the village, Futangi Jha of the Brahmin toli made an undesired enquiry – “How much did you pay for this lantern, Mahto?” “…Can’t you see, it is panchlight! The people of Brahmin toli have an exaggerated sense of self-importance. They would call a wick an electric bulb, if it happens to be their own, and will call others’ panchlait a lantern!” The whole toli – young and old, women and men, quit work and came rushing, “Come on, let us go, our panchlight has come, it has!”

– Translated version of an extract from Phanishwar Nath Renu’s famous Hindi short story, Panchlight. An audio rendering of this literary masterpiece is also available.

As newspaper headlines screamed about the power blackout – which affected North and East India on July 30^th and 31^st, 2012 – and news channel anchors grew shrill over the outage, recalling the humanistic optimism of a humble petromax’s arrival in Renu’s narrative could be a sobering thought. The blackouts on two successive days provided another grand occasion for the media to lose something which it loves losing (and perhaps thrives on losing) – a sense of proportion. In a country which has thousands of villages without electricity poles (and are hopeful about power connection by the end of the century), and thousands of small towns and villages that are lucky to have even eight hours a day of power supply (“generator clubs” and “inverter households/economies” aren’t unusual for the more privileged), the media would let you believe that two days of inconvenience was a calamity to be registered in the boldest of letters. The media owes a debt of gratitude to power grid engineers for gifting them a headline bonanza in a silly season (after the post-dated viewership/readership cheque of Season 2 of Lokpal fasting had bounced).

Apart from powerful headlines about powerlessness, you had the ritual of people crawling out of the woodwork to make a point or two. So you had statistics rolling out about India’s power production and distribution, the panel discussions and articles about power reforms and of course, the great “infrastructural development and growth story debate” (The Hindu with all its restraint making the most catchy comment on the governance failure at the “power and public policy centre”, with an edit which was imaginatively titled Delhi Is Powerless, August 1, 2012).

The international press perhaps gauged the scale of the “disaster” with the waves (“ripples” being too modest to make a statement, and understatement is a strict “no no”) it was making in the Indian news media (a euphemism for anything published or broadcast from Delhi). So here are some powerfully terrorising snippets from what foreign papers were saying on India’s black day:

The New York Times: “India staggered by Power Blackout, All the Making of a Disaster Movie on Blackout Tuesday.”

(“India Staggered” – Really? Most of India is staggered that way everyday, doesn’t hope to be “not staggered” the next day.)

The Guardian: “To leave one in 20 people on the globe’s surface without electricity, that lifeblood of modern society, in hairdryer heat of an Indian summer is unfortunate. To do it again to one in 12 of the world’s population a day later is an unpardonable carelessness”.

(Carelessness? What about “power starved” millions who lie beyond the “caring” parental pretentions of the Nanny State throughout their lives. Was last Monday or Tuesday any different? The “Guardian” couldn’t be bothered to find out.)

The Washington Post: “The crisis sharpened fears about India’s failure to invest in the infrastructure needed to support its rapidly growing economy, in sharp contrast to neighbouring China.”

(So it took a two-day shocker to fear that India is power-deficit. Well, revelations have to be made of some revealing stuff. For most of India, it’s a lived reality and everyday affairs are not fearsome revelations.)

The Wall Street Journal: “For a nation that sees itself as an emerging global power, the event was a huge embarrassment.”

Having lived in a number of small towns where 20 day outages were brought to an end by the dimly-lit electric bulbs and cheered by thunderous applause and competitive whistling of neighbours (with no mention in the mass media, no embarrassment for India’s growth story), it’s difficult for me to comprehend the apocalyptic response to the current “blackout crisis”. These places are still around, and their power situation refuses to be anything but grim. What has changed is that these places have an altered market scene, which is now taking a dip in the consumerist boom and is littered with showrooms of branded products that run on generators. And in the evenings, as you pass through the bright lights and petrol fumes of the market places with the dark town in the background, you could be forgiven for thinking that these shops appear like UFOs floating in dark horizons.

India has very simple expressions for electricity disconnections, more realistic than the sense of calamity that a “black out” gives. In eastern UP and Bihar, it’s called “line cut gaya” (even if that’s for hours and sometimes for days), in Western India “power” replaces “line” and in many North Indian states “light” or “batti” stands for electricity. And for much of rural India, awaiting an electric pole, it means nothing. “Growth”, for all the enigma and the divisive debates that the word carries, doesn’t have an unilinear news value in India. That should be the real shocker for “growth fundamentalists” carrying a metro prism. The shocks of outages extend too little to register. Hope there is that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. And yes, in the end, Renu’s panchlight was lit.

Image Source [http://www.flickr.com/photos/breveglieri/4094537165/]