Power cuts in the night

When it's night, not so deep, though, .. 7 o'clock - 9 o'clock that is, houses and streets are lit by electric tube-lights, bulbs, lamps and the like.

People are awake, and that's why they want the lights to be on.

And if there happens to be a power cut, as it happens not-so-infrequently these days in Bangalore, the lights go off.

So what do people do then? They light candles, kerosene lamps, battery-operated lamps, and backup generators. When people know that a power cut may happen, they prepare for it, so that they can get back to their work.

The larger picture is that the Sun doesn't shine all the time, and even when it does, it isn't everywhere we want. That's why we need artificial lighting in the first place.

When the Sun cuts off its power, we use our backups - the power grid, the tube-lights etc and do our work. And when our backups fail, we fall back to our secondary backups - candles, generators etc and do our work. When our secondary backups fail, we fall back to our tertiary backups - torches, cell phone flashlights etc, and do our work.

What happens all these backups fail? We open our eyes wide open and try to suck in any little piece of light that happens to stray around, and try to do our work.

And this is where the most interesting point is.

As long as we can feed our eyes enough light, we can get work done. If you want a lean-and-mean system, just do the minimum that gets the work done. The Sun is free anyway, and we don't need to worry about it, but the backups that we maintain come at a big cost. What's the point in spraying light all around in the street when there's nobody looking? What's the point spraying room full of light when the eyes in the room are not looking everywhere, every time? A lot of our backups are wasteful, and I believe that sooner or later, there will be widespread measures to contain this waste - at all levels.

I see a future where the night, even the urban night - would be dark - like a dark forest. There would be lights, of course, but just-in-time and just-the-minimum that will enable people to comfortably see. And, oh yes, everyone would have devices on their eyes that will magnify the tiny pieces of stray light - probably, something of a contact-lens that doubles up as a night vision device - or worse yet, people getting born with genetically modified eyes that can see in the night.. like a wild animal, you know..