45 Minutes

It is a Saturday afternoon. Due to load-shedding*, there is no electric power in your home in Ulhasnagar. It is early April, and it is getting hotter and hotter. You sweat and sweat, and look often and again at the electric fan above you, just hoping it will start whrilling again. It is five minutes past two o'clock in the afternoon. You were woken up from your slumber as the fan stopped whrilling at exactly thirty minutes past six in the morning. And it suddenly become hot, and you woke up. Since then you are in state of discomfort, but you manage to survive, all thanks to wonderful hand fan which does not need electricity to operate, and keeps you cool and composed. In frustration you call the local MSEB Office, to find out when power will return, as it should have by 2:00 p.m. The phone is picked up, and instead of `Hello', the man says `Bola'. You inform ask, or rather plead with him that it is few minutes 2:00 p.m. and why there is no sign of power. You are informed `Ho Sahib, we got a new order today. Extra 45 minutes of load shedding from today, power will go half an hour early and will return 15 minutes late'. You just sigh and hang up. No point in shooting the messenger. So instead of 7 hours load-shedding, it will now be 7 hours and 45 minutes.

[The above is a true story. Whoever has said that fact is stranger than fiction, owes me a cup of coffee. He was dead right]

A suggestion for MSEB: Kindly distribute hand-fans [see the one pictured above], along with our monthly electric bills. Since you cannot generate enough electricity to meet the demand, the hand-fans will keep the people cool, and maybe smiling. MSEB can, of course, generate extra income by putting on advertisement on the hand-fans.

And yes, all efforts will be made by our Government to keep the Mumbai city free from power cuts.

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* = the deliberate shutdown of electric power in a part or parts of a power-distribution system, generally to prevent the failure of the entire system when the demand strains the capacity of the system.