Enforced Earth Hour?

"Earth Hour is a worldwide event organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and held on the last Saturday of March annually, encouraging households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour to raise awareness about the need to take action on climate changes. The event, conceived by WWF and Leo Burnett, first took place in 2007, when 2.2 million residents of Sydney participated by turning off all non-essential lights. Following Sydney's lead, many other cities around the world adopted the event in 2008. Earth Hour 2012 took place on 31 March 2012 from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., at participants' local time." - (Ref: Wikipedia)

In most parts of India "Earth Hour" is enforced by the Government every day during most parts of the year. If it is summer or the months leading up to summer, compulsory load shedding (as it is called) is implemented for 6-12 hours depending on whether you are in urban or rural area.  During rainy season, electricity is turned off in most parts of the country to avoid accidents due to uprooted poles, snapped cables and others. During winter electricity is turned off for maintenance works. So common  is the power cut or load shedding as it is called that jokes abound and even essential services like watering the field is scheduled to suit the power availability rather than the need of the crop.   Those, who do participate are the ones who live in urban areas, buffered by inverters, generators guzzling more electricity in a day than would the their rural and small town counterparts in a month. To  the average Indian, accustomed to managing without electricity for essential as well as non- essential activities almost everyday or night, "Earth Hour" organized all over the World has no meaning.

Even after six and a half decades of independence Indian is unable to meet the progressively increasing needs of its population with reference to electricity. Instead of electrifying the villages and getting them used to a comfort which cannot be sustained it would have been better to leave them to their natural resources and life styles. What is the use of proudly stating that "every village is electrified to enjoy power cuts". Even the enforced "Earth Hour" does not make the average Indians realize that they are responsible for this "powerless" state and only if they consume electricity intelligently can they have power supply without cuts!

Courting Courts

During my adolescence, I devoured the books by Erle Stanley Gardener's featuring Perry Mason. Perry Mason the suave criminal lawyer assisted ably by the elegant Della Street and the dependable detective Paul Drake opened a the whole world of Court and lawyers to me. I started to dream of becoming a lawyer when I grew up. This ambition was fueled by other masterpieces of English Literature like Harper Lee's "To kill a Mockingbird", Michael Connelly's series of books on lawyers, more recently the novels of John Grisham and others. The vivid imagery of the spacious courts where brilliant, handsome lawyers waged a verbal battle to protect the poor and downtrodden filled me with awe. I always felt that it was a zone of no-corruption where Lady Justice with her eyes blind folded held a fair and just reign to help the poor and downtrodden.

After sixty years of staying out of courts, I was very excited when an opportunity came to attend the court. The night before the hearing, I could hardly sleep with vivid visualisation of our lawyer engaging in witty repartee with the opposing lawyer and the judge.  The first shock I got was on beholding the dirty dingy buildings in which the court was located. There was a revolting all pervading  smell of a mixture of urine, unwashed bodies and the walls were abstract painted with red paan stains so ubiquitous in all public buildings of India. After seeing that the  lift doors had to be pried open to release the tortured souls trapped therein, I decided to go up the stairs to the third floor where the case was to be held.The staircase as well as the corridors were dark, with neither ventilation nor light. The whole place was squalid with absolutely no effort to maintain the physical structure with even a modicum of cleanliness and hygiene. The halls, where the cases were heard, were poky little rooms hardly worthy of the title "hall" They were like large drawing rooms that you would see in an upper class family in urban areas.

The lawyers who bustled about the court corridors were a far caricature of lawyers so famed in our literature and cinema. The torture they had to undergo with their black robes and tight white collar in the Indian summer heat was sufficient for us to say "Poor souls." They do not have to go to Milton's Hell  after their death - they are already in it in the Indian courts. The rush of the people, with anxiety writ large on their faces on one side and brazen men with a don't care attitude on the other side provided a palette of the human cosmos populating the courts.

After spending six hours in the overcrowded hall, there were no arguments to enable me to judge the brilliance or otherwise of the lawyers' wit since the judge just pronounced, "The case is adjourned to June 26th"  at the end of the day.

Why does no one talk about the physical conditions of the Indian courts?  How can justice be meted out under such horrible working conditions? Why the arcane dressing code for the lawyers not suited to our climatic conditions?

In Praise of Sleeping Late

“Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” is an axiom that I grew up hearing almost everyday. My father always went to bed by 9.15pm after hearing the English news on AIR and got up at the crack of dawn. Poor man struggled with a variety of health problems before he went into his early eternal sleep, was never really wealthy though he was wise. Not only my father but many of my friends and their parents believed in this adage but did not really benefit. I am a night bird and this saying bugged me all my life. First as a school child, as a college girl and later as a mother and a working woman. I did get up early though I could never manage to go to bed early with the diverse household tasks that had to be completed before I retired to bed.

Now that my children are grown up and flown away from the nest and I have been superannuated, I decided that I would go to bed late and get up late. The first morning that I snuggled deeper into the bed, my husband came and touched my forehead and asked very solicitously “Are you having fever?”  After two or three days of conditioning him I was comfortably lost in the limbo of half sleep- half wakefulness when the phone rang shrilly. My husband did pick it up but later when I returned the call, my aunt  said,” What is this Suguna, sleeping late like that? Don’t you know that it is inauspicious for a woman to be in bed after sunrise?”   On top of it all the self-help gurus from Robin Sharma to Shiv Khera advocate getting up early as an antidote to all the ills of the world. I found myself making excuses for getting up late while talking to my former Principal .It was finally my daughter who made me realize that I had no reason to feel guilty about getting up late if I felt like it. I realized that the societal inhibitions, taboos and customs were mainly responsible for my guilt feelings.

The wise saying was meant for a time when there was no electricity and people depended upon natural sunlight. In this day and age of technological advances it has no meaning for night owls like me. I am able to get as much done in the calmness and disturbance free nights as another person at dawn. There are studies to show that the urban Indians manage with less sleep because they go to bed later and later due to various reasons like commuting, work pressure, socializing and others. So it is perfecting justifiable to sleep late as long as it does not affect others.

Hurrah! I now sleep late with a clear conscience and find that I am more productive.