I had a lunchtime conversation with colleagues about the differences between “Tier1,” “Tier 2,” and “Tier 3” cities in India. Tier 1 cities include Delhi, Mumbai, etc. Tier 3 are the more remote and least developed. One colleague said that where he grew up in Uttar Pradesh, there would be power outages for 8 hours a day, and people pumped water from wells. To this day, they said, there are power outages in these regions that go on for hours. People generally knew in advance when there would not be power, and so they planned their activities accordingly, and their homes had lanterns that were independent of the power sources.
We in Vasant Vihar are well-removed from this. We don’t experience hours of power outages. Our lovely apartment also has an automatic gas-driven generator, that kicks in within 5 seconds of a power outage and all of our appliances return to functioning.
Even in 5 seconds, you will lose internet connectivity, and our Vonage phone which is VoIP and depends on internet access will also disconnect. This can be frustrating if you are on an international conference call (as a result, I prefer to take important calls from the office, even if they are at 9:00 pm in India which corresponds to 11:30 am in NY.) The kids have been in the middle of video games during a power blip, and lost their scores….But we really, really need to keep some perspective. We are living a very privileged life here. I remember way back to our planning stages for this Indian adventure, and I didn’t know what to expect or prepare for….Concrete floors? Drawing water from wells? No home-based internet access? It has been far more comfortable than we could have imagined, and we should definitely take the glitches in our stride…which we do (for the most part!)
No comments:
Post a Comment