What a powerful act by a love-struck electrician in a village can teach India

Love has its own intrinsic power - or, in this case, the potential to turn off the power supply. Till four months ago, for residents of Ganeshpur village in Bihar's Purnia district, power outages were more a regular part of everyday life than anomalies bringing darkness. As is standard operating procedure fatalism for most Indians, the villagers, too, took the inconvenience of being in darkness for 2-3 hours every evening on their chins.

What raised their sweat-wet eyebrows, however, was that none of the neighbouring villages faced the same problem of powerlessness. So, earlier this year in May, acting upon a hunch, a group of Ganeshpur's residents gathered at the local school to find the resident electrician meeting his girlfriend in the dark after turning the village power supply off every evening.

Since May, Ganeshpur no longer faces power cuts. Also, after tonsuring the errant electrician and delivering him the Game of Thrones-style punishment of a 'Walk of Shame', and bringing the chhupa romance to light, the pair of electric lines-cross'd lovers were married off by the village elders. More than four months after that incident came to light, might we ask: do many of India's problems - power outages included - happen not so much because of incompetence or corruption, but because of someone's 'strategic missions'?