SWITCHING OFF

             Lights, fan, AC etc., left on in an unoccupied room is sheer wastage of electricity, for which you are paying. It is not free. Lights are kept on in passages, courtyards or outdoors, but those are for safety purpose. It does not take any prolonged effort to put off a light; just a flick of the switch does the trick, compared to the effort of lighting a kerosene lamp or a candle just a few decades ago. Even the government exhorts everyone not to waste electricity, as whatever saved can light up another’s home.

But some people, when on tour or holidaying, and staying in a hotel, “forget” to switch off the lights, fan etc when going out. Whatever their thinking, the hotel was the sufferer, so hotels started to install a master switch outside every room which would cut-off electricity to that room. The hotel staff had to go to each floor to do this. Personnel were involved, and some rooms could be left out.

Very soon, manufacturers invented a switch which was installed inside the room and the room key had a long tag which when pushed into a slot of the switch started the electricity flow to the room. When going out, as you took out the key from the slot, the electricity was cut off and the room went dark. Brilliant. The “switching off” was now automatic and onus shifted to the customer. It is still in practice even in top star hotels.

courtesy - Dreamstime.com

 The magnetic card replacing the key & tag is more or less the same thing, just fancier.  Brass key & tag handling can last for thirty to fifty years whereas the magnetic card can get frayed in only about two years, needing frequent replacement. But that is the price you pay to look modernised.

courtesy - Freepik

The Railways went a step further. They put the fans and lights on two different circuits. The light circuit does not get any juice till it is lighting up time in the evening, and it is cut off in the morning. No wastage. Fans get electricity full time, but not in winters. The guard controls it, so no hassles.

In offices or factories, employees are supposed to switch off lights in their rooms, so are conscious of doing it; while lights of common work areas are taken care of  by chaprasis or other cleaning staff.

The difference in case of hotels and offices is that – in hotels the customer is paying so the methods are subtle and non-jarring. In offices the employee is being paid so can be surmonised/ scrutinized into doing this activity.

Time spent in hotels, trains or workplaces is a miniscule portion of our life. We spend most of our life in our homes, where the switching off is our own burden. The habit has to be in-grown within ourselves. One cannot have somebody nagging you to do the needful, or somebody going around switching off things in un-occupied rooms.

In my case I went around the house switching off things and asking others why they don’t do it on their own. Surprisingly everyone claimed that they were never in that room for hours and they did not leave anything on. Whenever I took a round after say half-an-hour I would find several lights and couple of fans in full swing with no one there and everyone swearing attendance elsewhere.

Some of my friends who face the same problem have done intense research and say that despite science & technology progressing by leaps and bounds; it is possible that the spirits are interfering and the flow of electricity now is such that switches “switch on” on their own after a time lapse. Anything is possible in the present AI era. These spirits may be helping in increasing revenue to pay for electricity generation. With more and more people going in for Solar panels to generate their own electricity for their homes, revenues may be getting decreased. That’s a 440 Volt idea no doubt.

Things have reached a stage of surrealness, with me starting to believe in spirits and the like.

It seems extraordinary that the people who devised ways and means of “switching off” in Hotels, Trains, Offices, Workshops etc have failed utterly in their own houses due to spirits who want to remain “Switched on”.

Meanwhile I am on the look-out for an exorcist to clean up the atmosphere. If the problem is spirit based as thought of earlier, it could be the solution. An appeal to all and sundry - Please send references of exorcists in your knowledge !