Power cuts creep up on you. In UP it has never been so bad. Mumbai had made me forget what power cuts were like, but thanks to Akhileshji my memory has been refreshed. To tell you to the truth, power outages are not my real problem. In fact these outages have led me to conclude that the world isn't divided among people who have electricity and people who don't: air conditioning divides us as a human race.

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The thesis though incredibly original sounding isn't as original as I thought. I seem to have unconsciously stolen it from a book I had stolen 10 years ago. The thesis comes from a book Moth Smoke by the American-educated Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid. I stole the book from a woman writer who was kind enough to offer me her couch one night when I had nowhere to go. Before leaving the next morning I scanned the bookshelf and picked it up. As is the case with all stolen books, the decision had already been made for me — it wasn't I choosing the book but the other way round. In the book an economics professor outlines his social theory. The world, he says, is divided into two: air-conditioned and non air-conditioned. The theory works perfectly for me. I witness the division in my parents' house every time there is a power outage — and they are quite frequent — and we leave one world and come to the other. We don't exactly sweat it out during a power outage. Come to think of it, we are better off than most people suffering the terrible electricity crisis. There is an inverter in place, which can keep one fan in one room going for eight to nine hours. Yet there is a strong sense of not being in the same world anymore.

Heat as a concept vanishes from the mind under the influence of an air-conditioner. Our reason would have us believe that from the rear the AC ejects jets of hot air but instinctively we know that such a thing isn't possible. It is only when we go out and actually stand behind the AC, by which time we are no longer in the air-conditioned world, do we realise our mistake. With such fundamental alterations in perception and understanding it should not come as a surprise that an AC also makes us confuse cold air for oxygen. With the AC, life moves to a different orbit with completely different set of expectations and moral values. An AC makes us feel like a successful family. We can relate better to people on TV who as we all know live in an air-conditioned world. There is a permanency in an air-conditioned room, a deep sense of extreme control over the surroundings, an absolute victory over nature. It is my belief that people feel more self-confident in air-conditioned spaces than in open spaces. Air conditioning also generates copious amounts of sympathy for people existing in non air-conditioned spaces. An air-conditioned room is like a space shuttle: once you're in it, it is impossible to imagine life outside it.

Over the last one week, ever since I landed in Ghaziabad, I have been shuttling between the two worlds like an astronaut lost in space. My parents, who treat the AC as a luxury they can own but not exactly afford, find my situation funny. They don't understand because they have not lived enough in the air conditioned world to get addicted to it to the point of confusing it for love.