Yesterday, the power supply was cut from 9 AM to 6 PM in several parts of town. I'm not going to launch into a diatribe against the BESCOM at this point, richly though they may deserve it. Instead, I'd like to send special aah fooeys from the darkness to the Times Of India, who, in their headline about this power outage show exactly which sections of the great unwashed masses they actually give a fuck about: 'Black Sunday for traders, shoppers'.

That's right. On a sunday when ordinary people with no special desire to buy or sell anything were all inconvenienced on their day off, the Times' wizened little heart bleeds for the merchants and those unheeding victims of consumerism who could not make use of what the Times' correspondant calls 'peak shopping hours before Diwali'. This observation even deserves an actual exclamation point, something not deemed fit for rapes, murders and other normal activities. That's right, see it right there: 'Lights out during peak shopping hours before Diwali!' Oh horrors, I think I have the vapours! Hesu cripes, babalooey. Is it time we declared war on Diwali?

The article goes into great detail over the travails of honest merchants who could not exploit our new, shining India, where every mother is a godess and no child is left to starve, and its enthusiasm for shopping. Here's just one of 4 quotes from these good gents: ' “It kills our Diwali business. So much has been spent on decorating the road, and a power cut is disappointing. We opened shops at 10.30 am and waited till 6.30 pm before power resumed,” said Sunit Gulrajani, who owns a camera shop. '

Aww, man. Cry me a fucking river, Gul.

Only at the very end of this disgusting little front-page upchucking do the good folk at ToI choose to notice that people outside the buy-and-sell cycle might have been impacted:

Capt M B S Gopal, a resident of Indiranagar, said: “Without power, we cannot pump water from the underground tank in our house and a power cut like this affects life on a Sunday that should see us relaxing.”

Gosh. Thanks for giving the little people a voice, ToI! Thanks for showing that in between toning down soft-porn photo shoots of starlets for family entertainment in the Bangalore Times supplements and listing the names of each Page Three Impersonality pictured in your society pages you still have your fingers on the pulse of the common man. You know, that little fellow with the funny jacket RK Laxman still finds to doodle about in your cartoon section.