By Syed Munawar Ali
There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a neighborhood when the electricity dies. It is not a peaceful silence. It is the sound of surrender. The whir of the ceiling fan, that futile mechanical prayer against the heat, stutters and stops. The refrigerator’s low hum vanishes, leaving only the buzz of a single persistent fly. And then, almost immediately, the walls begin to exhale their stored heat, turning homes from shelters into ovens. For millions across the country, this is not an occasional inconvenience. It is the metronome of daily life, a cycle of blackouts that has returned with a vengeance, and it is breaking something far more fragile than a fuse.
The official explanations are the same ones we have memorized over the decades. A gap between generation and demand. An antiquated grid that buckles under its own weight. Line losses and the ghost of unpaid kilowatts. These are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They are the language of engineers, not the language of a mother trying to soothe a feverish child at two in the morning, or the shopkeeper watching his stock of dairy curdle in the dark. What the statistics miss is the sheer indignity of it. In this unrelenting heat, the absence of a fan is not merely discomfort; it is a slow, physical erosion of patience and health. The elderly lie awake counting breaths. Students, who have already lost so much to disrupted schooling, stare at blank laptop screens, their homework a hostage to a promised hour of light that never comes.
And yet, the cruelty is unevenly distributed, as it always is. Those with generators and backup batteries barely notice the stumble. It is the cramped single-room dwelling, the small clinic in a peri-urban colony, the roadside stall selling cold drinks – these are the places where load shedding extracts its heaviest toll. Small businesses are not just losing hours; they are losing futures. A tailor cannot sew. A welder cannot weld. A family’s fragile step up from poverty is undone not by a flood or a famine, but by a scheduled, predictable failing of the system. This is not a natural disaster; it is a failure of nerve and investment.
The government will point to new power plants and promises of renewable energy. Solar panels glint from the rooftops of the wealthy, an individual solution to a collective problem. But that is the tragedy. We are being asked to privatize the grid, to each build our own tiny lifeboat, while the public ship drifts. The answer is not more isolated generators humming behind compound walls. It is a political and administrative will that treats reliable electricity not as a luxury, nor as a favor to be doled out in rotating chunks, but as a fundamental right as essential as clean water.
This is a national challenge stripped of its slogans. It requires honesty about theft, certainly, but also about the decades of underinvestment in transmission. It requires admitting that the climate is now a co-conspirator, making every summer hotter and every failure more dangerous. Until we treat the grid as the living, breathing circulatory system of the nation that it is, we will remain a people sitting in the dark, listening to that terrible silence, and waiting for a dawn that we have not yet earned.
(The writer is a senior journalist, currently working as a media coordinator with a private organization. He is a political commentator and observer of geopolitics. he can be reached at editorial@metro-morning.com)
