It started sometime early in the afternoon when the power at my hotel suddenly went out and the generators kicked in. I remember power outages to be pretty common in Lahore so didn’t pay much attention to it. Went to meet my relatives and the power was unavailable there as well. Went to meet my brother at my auntie’s house across the city, power was still down. It was only when I got a call from one of my guys in Islamabad that I realized that the blackout wasn’t limited to Lahore.
A number of places, from Islamabad to Karachi were down and it was believed to be a country-wide blackout. Suddenly, there was a torrent of rumours and conspiracy theories about a coup d’état and that Pres Musharraf had been overthrown. Some people were absolutely sure the US had invaded us. The rest of the talk was even sillier.
Are we really such a bored people that we have to let our imaginations run wild at the slightest event that is out of the ordinary? Or is there another reason for this? Why can’t we ever take things at face value? If we have to imagine, why can’t it be something positive and constructive?
It was just around sunset that the power returned, though not in its full glory, and we turned on the TV to read about the country-wide outage. It was believed to be due to a circuit overload though this could not be confirmed straight away. The full circuit was restored within an hour and everything has been normal ever since.
I was worried about my servers being rebooted, but thankfully, the backup power was enough to keep them up till the main power was restored.