"Load-shedding. I hate it."

Talking about words one needs to know in order to take part in the everyday chit-chat here... One of them, as mentioned in the last posting, is bandh. I almost wrote: "If it is quiet on the banda front, one must talk about something else". But that is an oxymoron. In December so far there has been an amazing five days without a single bandh. Check out the banda-site for details.

But, when one gets tired to talk about bandas, which has just happened to me over Christmas, having spent a good deal of it reading papers with news about bandas and more bandas, then one must focus attention on the next major annoyance: load-shedding.

A bandh may give you at least the pleasure of a day off spent in decadence, but with load-shedding, there is absolutely nothing good about it. Maybe young lovers make the only exception, having a chance to hold hands in darkness provided privacy and not having to fear about getting arrested on the grounds of public indecency.

But for the rest of us, loadshedding is nothing but pain that keeps getting worse as the winter carries on. Every night the rolling blackouts disturb the day-to-day-business of every single one of us in Kathmandu (and elsewhere in Nepal - if they have electricity in the first place).

The politicians promised an easy winter, load-shedding not exceeding ten hours a week. But can you trust politicians? Every time I have to print a new power-cut schedule for my area, with a few extra hours added to it every time, I grow more certain over the answer.

But then, it may be unreasonable, although tempting, to blame the politicians for it not raining and therefore the hydro-electricity production running low, and the imported electricity running as dry as the rivers, India having lifted the prices to a level of unbearable.

From ten hours a week, merely making it a bit romantic with stories told of Yak and Yeti in the candle-light, the loadshedding has steadily risen to twelve, then fourteen, shaking the last bit of romanticism off, leaving us not a single day a week without a black-out. Then twenty-eight hours. Today 48, and later this week, apparently as soon as the Nepal Electricity Authority gets their time-tables sorted out, it will be a stinking 56 hours a week, resulting in eight hours a day for every household, divided to two four-hour slots, generally one in the morning, one in the evening. For once I hope the bureaucrats are slow and inefficient.

Each one of the seven zones Kathmandu has been divided into suffers their own black-out at a given time. One could, if they for some strange reason desired, thus travel through a pitch-dark city all night long: From Patan to Bakhtapur at 18.00, from Bhaktapur to Baneswor at 22.00, to Thapatali at 02:00 and so on. If I needed to make some extra money, I would become a candle-seller and do excatly that.

Currently, however, I am not facing such a scenario and instead am planning to spend a pile of elephant pictured notes to buy an invertor. I have a strong feeling that I will soon be tired with the small talk about the devils of load-shedding, but even more with living it. January will roll a painful 14 hours of load-shedding per day upon us.

To the bottom of the last load-shedding timetable spreadsheet I received into my email someone had in small print added a text saying:  "Load-shedding. I hate it". Who ever it was, I cannot but agree, and I suspect the rest of the Kathmandu would back us on that.