Night comes in like a disease in New Delhi. As darkness falls stray dogs dodge blaring traffic and a bear dances for its supper in a stinking alleyway. Then the lights go out.
Yes, the ninth biggest city in the world has just had its tenth power cut of the day.
And now the UK has followed suit…
In Delhi, they say the lights go out because the ‘golden office block’ in Guargon is draining all the electricity. Only it and the Mercedes Benz decal suspended high above the city still fizz against air so polluted it chokes out the moon and the stars.
Twenty million of us, beggars and businessmen, travellers and tramps, the gullible and the gurus, scurry like cockroaches around the dark.
And now thousands of households in the UK are being paid a couple of quid to do exactly the same thing, sit in the freezing cold in the dark for an hour to save the nation.
So, when will Brits begin burning old tyres in streets for warmth too?
We think it will never happen – but is it really such an outrageous question?
After all, woefully unreliable figures say there are 1.77 million homeless people in India, 0.15% of the country’s total population.
In the UK figures are about as useful, the collation of facts about the homeless are very difficult to find because of the way it is recorded by the Office of Statistics.
The most recent annual count showed 8,239 rough sleepers were spotted on London’s streets between April 2021 and March 2022.
#POWEER #ELECTRIC #POWERCUTS #BLACKOUTS #DELHI