I think it is very, very difficult to comprehend some things. Like the absence of something which has been ubiquitous in your life. The intellectual idea isn't hard to grasp, and you can even deduce other consequences from the idea, but gaining a visceral (for lack of a better word.. maybe intuitive?) understanding is far more difficult. I came to this belief when I was a teenager and had just gotten into watching foreign films. I watched a film called Hour of the Wolf by Ingmar Bergman. I was watching Bergman films because I expected (from pop culture references) them to be crazy, abstract, unpredictable, and impossible to grasp. They're really nothing like that, of course, but I mention it so you'll understand my mindset.
Instead of being treated to lingering shots of cigarettes, portraits of tired old women, and eggs breaking on chickens, I was actually treated with some insight. It was entirely unexpected, and I imagine that it was not even intentional on the part of Bergman (though if it was, bravo to him!), but I had a very profound realization of what life must have been like before the introduction of electric lights. The main character can't sleep, and huddles around the light of a candle - a positively claustrophobic little area. Now, I had been in circumstances of dark before. I was a Boy Scout and had been away from ubiquitous lighting before. But it was always with the knowledge that I could reach for a flashlight or lantern. I never had to consider that without those things, if I were afraid of what might lie in the dark, I would be forced to simply endure it and wait for dawn - hours away!
I am sure that I only tasted an inkling of what the subjective experience of people in that situation is. But that experience sticks with me decades later. It helped me realize that simply 'knowing' something intellectually can still starve one of the full picture. It helped me realize how profoundly different a life can be with only small changes to environment. It also was one of the big things (along with the humor in The Seventh Seal which doubled me over and which I did not expect) that drove me to become an avid fan of film. The supra-lingual things that a skillfully made film can communicate never cease to amaze me.
You might be interested in the works of Marshall McLuhan, specifically The Medium is the Message.
>McLuhan understood "medium" in a broad sense. He identified the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."[6]
I would love for our societies to give us opportunities to re-live deeply different situations such as this. Once our neighborhood electricity node went down, usually it's just one building cut for 10-20 min, this time we knew it would be longer. Lucky for us we had candles, but even then, my toilets had no place to put a candle on, so I could barely pee while holding that burning thing in one hand. Far less scary than being left in the wild in the dark but still.
ps: I ended up picking a book and reading it by candlelight on my desk. I felt sucked into a 17th century reality. Also, the warmth, short decay and liveliness of a flame creates a very special ambiance.
Out of curiosity (unless it wasn't a western-style toilet), why didn't you just sit on the toilet to pee? When I get out of bed because of a need to pee, and I don't want to turn on the lights because of how it could affect my drowsiness, and thereby my ability to immediately fall back asleep, this is what I do.
Some people have extremely poor night vision, but for most people a single candle in a small to mid sized room provides plenty of light to get around. With some effort you can even read by a single candle. Further, on a clear night you can probably walk around with just starlight.
So, generally night time was less dark than you might think. Though, in comparison city's often have enough light pollution that it never really get's 'dark'.
> It helped me realize that simply 'knowing' something intellectually can still starve one of the full picture
Exactly, but this is a common issue for many things. Most historical movies/books are completely wrong about what they want to portray because they cannot grasp the reality of "being there" at the time they take place - merely putting 21st century actors in older clothes on stage but missing how every single everyday life detail was actually different and how it should influence their perception of the reality around them.
> Most historical movies/books are completely wrong about what they want to portray
I think that's wrong: I think quite a lot are exactly right about what they want to portray; which is a particular vision emerging from the creators perception of the subject matter that speaks to the present audience.
India has the resources to provide electricity to every village. The problem is that politicians have created a system where there is little or no incentive to do so.
Electricity is a heavily regulated sector. Power producers cannot charge a fair price for electricity, instead they are required to comply with a complex pricing structure that forces them to give electricity free to some people, and below cost price to many others and recover the loss from a very small percentage of their customers who pay several times the fair market price.
Villagers are one of the categories of people who get electricity free (or subsidized, in some states). This is why nobody wants to bear the expense of running power lines to the villages.
Rampant Corruption, Gross Negligence, Terrible planning,....
you name a dysfunction and the Indian Electricity distribution system has it.
A sample statistic - a while back there was a study on Transmission & Distribution losses in the Power grid.
US - 6-7% T&D Loss
India - 25-30% (conservative)
Just think about that - 30% of power generated in India NEVER reaches the intended consumer. A lot of it gets lost due to poor connectors, some of it is stolen, some of it is "diverted" by cronies of the officials.
I was in India for 5 weeks last year, it's extremely common for the Hotels to just completely lose power, and have someone run off to start a generator (ie. 2-3 times a day)
The fall semester of my senior year of college was spent on a three-month wilderness course. This was done in the southwestern United States. Over 90-plus days we slept outside, carrying all our supplies. The course was split into four sections, and, as an example of the break from normal amenities, only between sections was there a chance for a shower.
After that course, my spring semester was spent in Indonesia, in a part considered third world. Despite being in the tropics, there was no air conditioning. A shower meant pouring a hand bucket of cold water over myself.
I could go on about the comforts given up during this year, one which I consider among my fondest. And I’ll admit there was an adjustment upon returning to standard American living afterward.
Truth is, as great as that year was, and as distinct as it was from my usual American-style living, I can’t imagine what the people described in the article experience. As much as I enjoyed my time, I knew the conveniences I’d sacrificed were only temporarily absent. On top of that, the health risks these people have no choice but to accept are above and beyond what I physically risked.
Worst, I think, is that these people probably have little reason for hope.
It’s all so unfathomable to me—their circumstances, the slow rate of improvements, the amazing ways people endure under immense hardship.
Interesting post, reminds me of a book that I read recently on similar topic - "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope" (http://amzn.com/0061730335)
Does the relative progress of China in the last 20 years illustrate how these are mostly problems of governance? Culture? Both? Something else? (Serious question.)
Progress requires change. Change requires handling tradeoffs between different sections of society with often competing perceptions and interests. Both nuclear power and hydro-electric power have had activist opposition to development because of fears of risks. These fears in a democratic society lead to a tendency towards sticking with the safe path, until the alternatives are better proven. As an example 13% of energy in India comes from renewables, only 1% from nuclear.
It is simply a lack of economic growth. China has had high economic growth rates, usually over 8% a year, since 1979, when it liberalized its economy.
India liberalized its economy in 1992 during a crisis of payments. Since then it has had modest growth rates, around 6%. Many reforms are heavily constrained by its democratic government.
I would say culture plays a bigger role, we have excess food grains rotting in government warehouses yet lot of Indians die due to starvation. We simply do not care about our fellow Indians.
This isn't an issue of who cares for who. I don't think any country is going to vary that much in who cares for others. China is the place where a 2 year old girl was run over and no one stopped to help.
In the article, it talks about how they do everything by hand, literally by hand, not using any tools.
Why don't they use livestock for their work? It seems ... inefficient. Other countries didn't have electricity for a long, long time; but they still had machines and assistance through livestock and others, what makes this place different?
That 300 million people in Indianwithout electricity is surprising to me. I thought it would be a lot less. The village in Bangladesh where my dad grew up got electricity in the 1990's, and a paved road sometime around then too.
Bangladesh is probably more crowded than India, but still much smaller in terms of number of people :-).
All villages in India don't lack electricity. 83.3 crore people live in villages in India [1]. That is 833 million, so 65% of people in villages have electricity. But I'm sure that they live without 24 hours of electricity a day.
That said, the electricity problem in India is ridiculous; a few years ago, many cities in my home state of Tamil Nadu, long considered one of the more prosperous states had power cuts ranging from 2-10 hours per day. The government had simply eaten up the money meant to buy spare parts for generators, among other reasons. I'm sure villages saw just 2 hours of power per day. The worst part about this is that Tamil Nadu has a coal-powered, a hydro-electric, and a nuclear power plant.
Then there are some states that are downright poor, I'd guess most of the 300 million in this article live in those states. Bad politicians, lack of education, the resultant naxalism etc. combine to keep them poor.
Even in major cities like Bangalore, all office buildings, hotels and the like have their own UPS and generators, it's not unusual for them to kick in 2-3 times per day due to grid outages.
You dont even have to talk an Indian Villager, people living in metro cities also experience 2-6 hours of power cuts.
When I moved from Mumbai which has 24 hrs of electricity to Pune with 3 hours of power cuts ever day, couple of years back. The first thing that came to my mind when I was sitting in the dark was that "so this is how it feels to live in a third world country"
Instead of being treated to lingering shots of cigarettes, portraits of tired old women, and eggs breaking on chickens, I was actually treated with some insight. It was entirely unexpected, and I imagine that it was not even intentional on the part of Bergman (though if it was, bravo to him!), but I had a very profound realization of what life must have been like before the introduction of electric lights. The main character can't sleep, and huddles around the light of a candle - a positively claustrophobic little area. Now, I had been in circumstances of dark before. I was a Boy Scout and had been away from ubiquitous lighting before. But it was always with the knowledge that I could reach for a flashlight or lantern. I never had to consider that without those things, if I were afraid of what might lie in the dark, I would be forced to simply endure it and wait for dawn - hours away!
I am sure that I only tasted an inkling of what the subjective experience of people in that situation is. But that experience sticks with me decades later. It helped me realize that simply 'knowing' something intellectually can still starve one of the full picture. It helped me realize how profoundly different a life can be with only small changes to environment. It also was one of the big things (along with the humor in The Seventh Seal which doubled me over and which I did not expect) that drove me to become an avid fan of film. The supra-lingual things that a skillfully made film can communicate never cease to amaze me.