It was one
of those breathless and still evenings. The two of us, me and my friend
Barkatullah, a homoeopath of our village, were sitting by the pond at my
village home. The guard light of our home was on. All of a sudden the light
went off. It is not uncommon. This is a regular phenomenon and therefore does
not call for any special reaction. We in Bangladesh are quite used to it. The
villagers have taken it upon their stride and do not usually complain unless
their effort at irrigating the land is frequently stopped because of power
outages. My friend who is not given to talking a lot sighed and said, “dili
kaan? Aar jodi dili to nili kaan?” (Why did you give? And if you gave, why
did you take it away?). I am aware of my friend Barkat’s philosophical flare. I
knew what he meant and kept quiet wearing a smile on my face that could not be
seen in the pitch darkness of the night.

Philosophy
apart, I think it would not have been impossible if someone seriously tried to
address the issue of the growing demand for electricity, the failure to supply
it and do something to effect change. I am a firm believer in the fact that it
was not because we did not have a way out of the ‘power’ impasse but because of
the fact that successive governments did not want to address the issue that we
have been thrown in to an insufferable situation today. They opted for a convenient
way of looking away from the problem that would mean their confronting the
rampant corruption that they were beneficiary of. The aggravating journey
towards a point of no return was done wilfully.

As far back
as in 1993 I had a meeting with a very senior official in the energy ministry.
After the business discussions, I had asked him about the reason why at around
6/6.30 in the evening there was a half an hour power cut. I was then living in
Uttara. So my specific query was about that area. He was a friend and confided
that if his reading was right, within a couple of years power outages would not
be confined to one or two localities, they would spread all over and eventually
the entire nation would drown in darkness. When I asked him about the reason he
told me that it was simply because no action was taken in terms of repairing,
servicing or overhauling any of the power installations despite innumerable
‘notes’ of warning given by the people in charge. Now the problem has
compounded manifold because of growth in demand and, I am told, illegal
connections being obtained at domestic and commercial levels.

There was a
time when 3000 mega watt of electricity would have been good enough. But we
produced 2500. Then we reached the 3000 mark when the demand rose to 4000.
Today with an output of nearly 6000 mega watt we are still short of the optimum
of 6700 mw. I hope the people at the helm of affairs would attend to redress
the problem by snapping all the illegal connections, the reason for the
so-called ‘system loss’, and do the needful to add to adequate power
generation. These are the most important and immediate responsibilities for the
government.

Permit me,
at this juncture, to enlarge on the philosophy that my friend’s grief contained
in his words, ‘why did you give? And if you gave why did you take it away?’
This bit of my piece may sound very frivolous in the context of a problem that
we have been confronted with and do not seem to have a routine answer at the
moment but who wants to be always cowed down by problems that we do not know
how to circumvent? So let us let go of our concerns, our sense of relevance,
and our seriousness for the moment and indulge in something that would seem
almost absurd. Let us surrender to the pleasures of life that the immortal
Samuel Becket or Eugene Ionesco’s theatre of the absurd brings us. For, life
indeed is a collection of compounded absurdity.

My friend
Barkat’s words took me to a journey to the past. I lived most of my childhood,
leading, up to my adolescence in the small towns of what was known as East
Pakistan then. In those days, temperature used to be measured in Fahrenheit. It
was not unusual to have temperatures measuring up to 100 and above very often
in the summer. There was just one fan in our parent’s bedroom. We suffered
through the summer turning and tossing on the bed at night. My eldest sister,
who was much older than I, used to fan us with a hand fan once in a while. We
suffered and ‘suffered’ not. I am not sure if we suffered because we never
complained or talked about it. It seemed natural that summers would be like
this. My father loved the English poets of the romantic period and when heat
used to be almost suffocating he used to recite the famous lines of P. B.
Shelley, “If winter (read summer) comes can spring (read monsoon) be far
behind?”

I thought
that perhaps summers during our younger days were in no way as oppressive as
now until I read the other day in a Bangla daily that some of our hottest days
were in 1956, 1960 and 1993. The question that seems relevant now is why some
conditions that seemed natural only about a few decades ago seem unnatural now?
I suppose the answer to that lies in the reflection that my friend made that
evening back by the pond in my village, ‘if you gave why did you take it away?’
Is it that we took too much for granted?

I remember,
years back, when Pakistan International Airlines had started a number of
domestic flights to connect cities in the East and the West Pakistan, the
Newsweek magazine had commented ‘Pakistanis have started flying before they
have learnt to walk in their shoes.’ Is it the ‘shoe & plane’ syndrome that
made our lives unbearable in this heat? Is it the increasing unplanned growth
of our cities causing the shortage of electricity, gas and water, the
thickening of the stone jungles as opposed to growth of natural vegetation,
increase of atmospheric pollution, and most importantly; the overall declining
quality of life that are ‘more’ the reasons for our misery?

May be we
should pause to think and redress the situation slightly differently. How?
Well, let me talk about that later!