Cave darkness revisited

The stupendous debacle of mechanised power in a way wrote an ode to the Stone Age! In that darkness of the pit, the hearts of the Italians must have beat in unison. Couldn't they have thought of making up for the missed White Night by a bonfire. But how could they have lighted it? Either by match stick or by a glint of stones. The latter is a fitting alternative, because the kind of darkness that engulfed Italian life was an imagery of our pre-historic ancestry. Then match stick was out of the question as the gun powder hadn't come about. In the environmentally dark but inwardly philosophical mood they could make the best use of their waiting time by singing carols to mankind's common past. That we were all at the same level of scientific emptiness in the hoary past and that despite the current stark contrasts between the North and the South in technological acquisitions there can be mechanical glitches to put us back on the same level have dawned on us afresh.

Speaking of the mundane, our power managers, like the self-styled governance buffs who never tire of citing crime figures of New York to justify their utterly failed rule of law, could have a vicarious thrill in the massive power breakdown in Italy and Geneva followed by that in New York, Ontario, London, Sweden and Denmark -- all in a matter of six weeks or so. Vicarious perhaps, but just. In fact, it would be an act of self-deceit if they indulged in that prevarication. For, if such modern, state-of-the-art power infrastructures in Europe and America can go kaput along their grid-lines with bowling effects what safeguard our dilapidated power network has to stick it out against accidents that are massive as well as beyond easy repair.

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The moral of the latest series of electricity blackouts in Europe is: the unionist theory of power-sharing may not always work to precision. Dependence on imported power has its flip-side. The contracts may have to be rewritten.