Ernest Dempsey - Pakistan on the whole and its small towns and suburban or rural parts particularly suffer from extreme power crisis in summer each year. This has been the case for the past several years. People in small towns, like Hangu, see their life activities coming virtually to a halt due to power cuts expanding over as much as 16 to 20 hours daily. With sleep interrupted constantly and work all disturbed, the Hanguwaals (as they are called) wonder what it was like living before the advent of electric power. To the experienced eyes of the ‘outgoing’ generation, now in their 70s and 80s, things have got too better over the decades—too much comfort with electric power so as to interfere with their potential to work; like drawing water, for example. But this is not so long a matter of history to be forgotten even by those in their 30s now.The Generation X of Hangu grew up in houses with hand-dug wells from which water was drawn with a bucket and a rope, usually mechanically by means of a wooden frame serving as the pulley. In those days, not everyone could afford a borehole as the water source for the house and people had the will to draw water for household use, drinking and cooking especially, regardless of whether or not they had tap water available. In those days—the 80s and 90s and right through the mod 2000s—availability of household water hadn’t been a notable problem for Hanguwaals except in excessively dry seasons, which were rare. But after the serious power crisis started afflicting Pakistan’s towns and suburban settlements, many middle-class houses found themselves running for drinking water whenever the power crisis touched the bottom. People started realizing that they had unnecessarily opted out of the older wheel-drawn system by choosing to replace them with boreholes which are useless when you don’t have power available at home.
This is particularly the case with families who, over the years, got money to remodel their old houses or just construct a new one wherein the wheel-drawing system of water was considered a hell of old, time-wasting, and energy-consuming (manual effort, of course) business. Instead, it was the hip hit-the-button option that had irresistible appeal: it saved effort and it was no doubt a status symbol. Some people did have the brains, though, to dig a well and install both an electric motor on it as well as the traditional wooden wheel for mechanically drawing water. Thus, their foresight saved them the trouble and anxiety the faddists are facing today. Soon as power is resorted, for a brief while, the latter rush for running the electric motor for collecting drinking water and storing as much of the water from the bore as they can in order to use it for bathing and cleaning during the hours when the power is out and the summer heat is in.
It was left to severe power crisis in the country to remind Hanguwaals, and like ones, that tradition needs to be given its due value in times when life is being transformed by urbanization and the lifestyle in cities and soap operas has already become the way to go. Where power leaves you powerless and thirsty, tradition keeps you sated. It’s the lesson we are learning the hard way.
