Grandfather's Paradox !

We recently had a small hurricane at my place. It was actually an aftereffect of Hurricane Ike after it devastated southern Texas. I was alone in my house that day and was lazing around seeing the fierce wind blowing at never seen before speeds & trees ,houses etc offering stiff resistance to it. Things seemed to be going just fine until the power went off. Power has gone out at times during my tenure in US but it had invariably come back within the next couple of minutes. I waited for about half an hour without much benefit, there seemed to be some serious problem this time around.

That's when I realised how much over dependent I had become on power off late. I tried using my laptop which was happy to run on battery, but then there was no internet as the modem was shut down. We don't have an UPS culture in US and so the place is not as power cut proof as some our Indian cities have come to be. I soon realised that the stove will also not turn on cos though the stove itself works on gas, the igniting system works on electricity. The washroom was still good as water was available, but I was not too sure how long that would have lasted. Worse, we don't use too many buckets in American washrooms to stock up some water. So the good old Indian trick failed miserably. But another problem was that washrooms were not designed in such a fashion as to allow any natural lighting into it, so even during the day , absence of power would mean that we would need to use a candle or any other emergency lighting.

With no internet, there was no avenue for any news to flow in. The TV won't work and there was no radio at home. I dug out an old torchlight and found that we lacked batteries at home. Not to mention lack of candles. :) Finally I got the torchlight working with some tweaking around with my camera batteries. That was the time when I remembered an old lesson given by my Grandfather. He used to live in a very remote village in Kerala. Everytime we used to visit him, the only thing he was very particular about was batteries, those big ones made by Eveready. And yep, boxes & boxes of it. The main reason was that he believed in being not too overdependent on the come-go electricity in villages. And the only 2 devices he used were an awefully long Eveready torch & a Philips radio which too was quite naturally, battery operated.

His world was pretty much independant along with these 2 devices. The torch meant that he was free to move around anywhere around the village at any time of the night & the radio meant that he was in touch with what's happening around him.

And there I was, supposedly living in the most developed & powerful of the countries in the world, rendered absolutely helpless with a small gush of wind.