Over the years, the power utilities have become more and more adept at euphemising their nomenclature to be less menacing. From the more menacing power cuts to the more palatable load shedding to the politically-correct load management, it has been an exercise in semantic gymnastics. It is akin to renaming pizza as ‘Italian flatbread indulgence’ to sound fancy. But it is still just plain old pizza. It’s like putting sunglasses on a potato—different name, same spud. Oscillating between these names has the same effect though – in the end you are stuck in a dark house. It is like the difference between being thrown from the 15th and 16th floor of I-Towers – they both kill you.
There was even a time when they used blackout if my memory serves me well. They beat a hasty retreat because over the years affixing the word ‘black’ to describe anything negative is sacrilegious. Describe anything using black and the very next day a sea of black people will demonstrate and accuse your establishment of spewing racist innuendo. I believe there’s a committee specifically assigned to craft names that are PR-compliant and that could somewhat band-aid the no-power moments. But the consumers cannot be fooled anymore. We can now smell through such trickery and deception. Power cuts can feel like the power utility’s way of enforcing mandatory breaks. Imagine the electricity going out just as you're trying to microwave leftovers—it's as if the power utility is whispering, ‘Maybe today’s the day you learn to cook.’ Yes, they are now forcing us to have a digital detox. But we don’t want a digital detox. Candlelit dinners?
