The Lantern Age

Electricity was invented long back but still there are places on this earth where people don’t have access to this wonder. And people live happily there. When people don’t know about something they don’t feel the need, and sometimes if they feel they just take it as a figment of their own imagination. After giving some thoughts to it they just ignore it. But these needs somehow are felt and some great men convert these imaginations into reality. Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday and a lot of geniuses gave us this boon and it is like bread and butter for us today. We feel its need and if it isn’t there we get upset to the core. When it wasn’t, people lived with candles, lantern, lamp, chiragh, mashaal etc. But once it penetrated into our life it became a necessity without which we cannot live at all.
My town got electricity long before my father was born. But we feel its absence more than its presence. In twenty four hours of the day we get it for not more than ten hours. Sometimes I think what if electricity wouldn’t have been invented? Wouldn’t we have been happy with lamp and lantern?
In summer, fan is needed the most. Without light one can survive but without fan? Life becomes so difficult. But then again I think, didn’t people live a century back without these amenities of life? One answer people always give is, there was less population, mud houses, buildings were not so dense, and there were spaces all around. But see today, even the villages are crowded. But was life so easy, that people never felt the need? Then why people invented electricity, fans, refrigerators, air-conditioners?
I remember, in the evening we use to clean our lanterns and lamps with a piece of cloth and light it with a matchstick before it gets dark. There was always the danger of power going away leaving all in dark. And it used to be so dark that the children will get scared and start making noise. The teenagers will scare people out and the elders as usual will either do something to see the world again or scold the younger.
There use to be torches in everyone’s hand finding their way on the road. Till today there is no light on the road and people use torches with a good focusing lens. In the past the biggest concern before buying a torch was the focusing ability of the lenses.
People also use to go on changing the brand of their batteries as not a single brand use to last long. And once the battery gets finished they used to put them in their radios. People always try to conserve energy in whatever ways they can. But was that an energy concern or was it just to save money?