The Blackout

Hmm it was rather heartening this blackout. I had and still have a sly smile playing on my lips since yesterday. It all started at work where the lights just went off and we closed shop. Strangely the atmosphere was rather cheerful – well at least I was – it reminded me of home albeit with one key difference. At home, i.e. Karachi life goes on. Here, in Toronto life comes to an abrupt halt. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the modern West that depends so much on technology, it doesn’t know what to do without it.

So, why the smile? Well for starters, because I liked looking out from the balcony at night and seeing the city in it’s natural unadulterated-by-technology form. The stars were more visible too. But more importantly, it took me back to Karachi. Yes, we may be backward in terms of, well pretty much a lot of things, but we cope when there’s a blackout. And we do it pretty well. We can make tea, heat dinner, take showers, go out, and pretty much do everything apart from being snug in the air conditioning. Here, you can literally do nothing except sleep or sit around. Going out would entail going down eleven flights of stairs which wouldn’t be so bad if the stairwell wasn’t pitch dark to the point of being scary, plus blackouts provide mischief makers the ideal opportunity to do their thing. Couldn’t eat anything because of course the stove is electric! No tea, no coffee because kettles are electric! The phone line played games of hide and seek, going dead and coming alive every few hours, i.e. no communication. The radio provided some solace, telling us we’d have to bear this for some more time. Quite honestly, if it wasn’t for my headache – triggered by the non-consumption of tea of course – I’d say I had a jolly good time in the blackout…this was how the world was pre-electricity, the fact that we cant handle a mere blackout goes to show how unnatural our lives have become, how much we rely on technology, how man-made our lives, our world is.

I saw an A&E movie the other day called Selling the Future. Its almost as if this blackout was the manifestation of everything that movie seemed to warn about. Neil Postman, a sociologist who has written extensively about how media affects our lives amongst other things, said that as we go madly in the pursuit of technology we must remember that it’s a Faustian bargain we strike with technology “it giveth and it taketh back but not in equal measure”. Indeed. Technology has taken too much away from us, and given us the illusion of comfort and ease. The one thing I realised due to this blackout was that as much as Pakistanis complain about how backward we are and how we’re not as technologically advanced as the others, at least we can live through blackouts, at least we can deal with these things, at least we can live in the natural setting without our lives becoming completely crippled.